Composting

Yeah, we compost.  We hear your snickers, your sneer that rates us home composters one step from midwestern militiamen building bomb shelters in their backyard.  Whatever.

Ok, so last year I built the ugliest compost pile known to man.  4 wood stakes and chicken wire.  I figured that if we dumped garden waste, leaves, and kitchen scraps into a pile, we'd magically have rich compost to use. 
Well, it didn't work out that way.  Over the winter I did some research and learned that compost is a little more complicated than that.  No much more, but a little.  Compost piles should have about 50% brown stuff like leaves and 50% green stuff like grass clippings, kitchen scraps, etc.  These things should be layered, watered, and stirred up weekly.  It also needs something to kick-start the process like manure.  Once you start getting days where it gets above 55 degrees, microbes start going to town on your compost.  In fact, they eventually can raise the internal temperature of the compost to 150 degrees!  They decompose all that organic matter and turn it into this rich, crumbly, nice-smelling stuff that you can use as potting soil, or add to the garden like fertilizer.
There's also 2 ways to compost...The way we were doing it is called the "add as you go method."  Basically, it's the lazy man's way.  As you get organic matter, you put it on the pile and hope for the best.  The other way is the "batch method."  It's where you layer your greens and browns, add some poop as accellerant, and let that batch cook, turning it and watering weekly.
Well, my parents had purchased a commercially made compost bin last year but had never set it up.  It sat in pieces in their backyard.  I asked them about it and Dad said that Mom wanted it and Mom said that Dad wanted it.  They eventually got into the same room and realized they'd miscommunicated.  Neither wanted it and their solution was to offer it to us.  So we set it up next to our existing compost pile, read up about how compost works, and mixed up a batch.  We're still doing add-as-you-go in the old pile, and the batch method in the new commercial bin, sort of...we put kitchen scraps into that bin.  I figure that in about 3 weeks my first batch will be ready to use.  The warmer it gets, the faster the composting.
Last year's compost pile did produce some compost.  It's nice, rich stuff, but it still has undecomposed plant roots in it.  Besides producing this rich organic soil, composting has one other benefit for us.  It reduces our outgoing amount of trash.  When you have a garden, you have waste...rotten vegetables, plants to uproot and toss, weeds, etc.  We also actually cook a good bit, and there's plenty of vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, and other waste from the kitchen.  Composting allows us to reduce the amount of trips we have to take to the dump.  The only real negative is the unattractive plastic milk jug on the counter with stinky scraps in it.  Angel doesn't complain about it, but I need to find a better container for inside the house.