Lazy Composting

I am a proud composter. However, I have got to be the laziest composter in the universe. In fact, I'm pretty sure that my grandparents called what I do "putting the scraps out for the dogs." So if you are lazy and interested in composting, follow along.

I do not grow anything. I do not plant anything. I will never use my compost for anything. And I think many of you can relate. But here is why you should still compost:

• It's the obvious environmentally correct thing to do.
• And what more of you care about, it makes taking out the trash a much less horrible thing.

Seriously, your trash stinks because of your food scraps. Your trash has mystery liquid oozing out of it because of the food scraps. It's just bad all around.

We lived in our last house for about 5 years and composted there 3 or 4 of those. Here's what it looked like:

Now tell me that's not good fertile stuff! And a lot better than a bunch of bags of stinky trash. There were even pumpkins growing out of there in the fall. So I lied, I do grow things. I grow pumpkins.

There is a scientifically correct proportion of plant stuff (grass clippings, leaves, etc.) to food stuff that produces the most fertile soil and makes everything break up quickly. But since I don't use the soil, I don't care about that. At the house in the above picture, we didn't have any plant stuff to add (no trees or anything). So we would steal those big bags of yard clippings from people's curb and add to our compost. Seriously, we did. We would throw food scraps for a good layer, then every few months, add some from a stolen bag of yard clippings.

Now I throw it in the corner of our yard under a tree (the tree is on the other side of the fence). So the leaves just fall into the compost pile. Happy tree! We haven't even been here a year, so there's not a lot going on so far. I just pile up the food scraps while I cook. Then walk it to the pile and throw it in. That's it. I don't turn it, I don't do anything. These are the scraps from a sausage and cabbage meal.