Composting Food Scraps: Simple Steps to Enrich Your Soil and Help the Planet

Composting returns resources to the earth—a gratitude practice for nature's bounty. Like recycling, but instead of a center, you use a backyard bin or tumbler to create garden fertilizer.

Typical households generate abundant food scraps. Rather than landfilling them, compost vegetable stalks, fruit rinds, apple cores, and coffee grounds (nitrogen-rich, adding heat to piles). Avoid bones, meat, dairy, fats, and oils—they decompose slowly, smell foul, and attract pests.

Benefits are substantial: free organic fertilizer saves water and garbage costs; nutrients release slowly over years, maximizing plant health; soil gains improved aeration and drainage. Even non-gardeners benefit—minimal time investment, nothing lost but scraps.

Special thanks to C. Forrest McDowell, PhD and Tricia Clark-McDowell for their guide Home Composting Made Easy (Cortesia Press).