This is a great and simple explanation of composting!

Composting was a normal part of life in my family. In addition to composting, my mother burried fish heads in the garden whenever someone brought home a fresh catch. After moving to the city, she frequently went to the fish market and collected the fish heads to take home. The garden sometimes smelled pretty bad but she sure had a bountiful crop. When she had extras to bury around her roses, the produced large, healthy blooms and the fish smell did not seep into them. Just the dirt smelled bad.

I am encouraging the manager of the Community Garden in our small town to add compost bins and teach the participants how wonderful that black gold can be for plants.

Live long and compost.

No composting bin, just dig a hole in my organic garden and bury the stuff. I use my dogs droppings in my rose garden, just drop and turn the earth with a shovel. My grandparents also never buried meat or dairy. Their reasoning was that it attracted animals. However, I still have to deal with racoons digging it up. I have deers, racoons, armadillos, rabbits and other varmints. O.K. here is how I managed to keep them away from my garden. It works, we use motion sensored Christmas decorations and Halloween decorations that sing and move. You know those funny ones, this is the only thing that works. The stupid things last forever. We use re-chargable batteries so we are sort of enviornmentally sensitive. But, believe it or not these things work. The animals haven't touched a thing since we installed the things. A side note, when working in my garden I get a kick out of the trees singing "Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas then singing You Better Watch Out, You Better Not Cry, Santa Claus is coming to town, Ho Ho Ho Merry Christmas!!!"
they sing every time I walk by.

In fact, I think one of the reasons that a lot of people don't start things like composting is the well-intentioned advice, such as this. It sounds short and easy to people who've already been doing it, but many people want to read no more than 10 sentences and spend no more than 20 minutes total per month on something new.

There are composters who want a convenient way to help their garden, and they learn a few basics and use their compost. There are composters who want to know more about composting, invest a few more minutes per week into making it, and work for consistently high-quality, fast-finishing compost. And then there are "recycling" composters. They just want to reduce the amount of garbage they throw out and perhaps help the soil. They might not even have any cultivated grass, flowers, vegetables, etc growing on their property; it might be all dirt and weeds. They might have no use for the finished compost and don't care if it takes years for it to finish.

Tell people that if they're interested in "recycling" style composting, here's what they can do: Pick a spot on the ground, get a container, or something like that. Dump in compostable materials. That's all.

No need for ratios, nutrients, additives, microbe levels, ventilation, stirring, moisture adjustments, temperature checks, or any of that stuff. You CAN do some or all of them, if you want the compost to finish faster, or you want it to fertilize your crops better, or whatever, but it's completely optional.

The only other thing that's probably very useful is to keep the smell down. As the guide says, you need more oxygen, more "browns," and/or less moisture if it smells bad. I threw down a layer of "browns" over "greens," or covered a compost hole with burlap, to reduce the bugs last year. This year I'm using a barrel that I got over the winter for kitchen scraps, and throwing yard waste into piles.

If you want to give nutrients to plants and don't care to wait for finished compost, you can just mix it straight into your soil as fertilizer or put it on the soil as mulch. Obviously this works better with some materials than others.

I would like to know how to make a large do-it-yourself vermicomposting (with earthworms) bin that will allow me to remove castings and liquid without removing worms. Any advice?

I've been putting my scraps in the blender and digging the mush directly in to the garden. I do this because I have no room in my tiny yard for a compost bin and I don't really want to buy or build one anyway. I save the scraps in a large plastic spinach container in the fridge so it doesn't smell, and then get to blending when the box is full. If you have a cheap blender like I do, you probably will have to chop up banana peels and the like before blending them. Be careful not to chop off your fingertip! Fingertips are not compostable. Lucky you if you have a fancy powerful blender! I do have a small container outside where I keep the weeds I've plucked. Sometimes if I don't feel like digging in the compost smoothie I just pour it in the weed bin. Otherwise I stir it around in the dirt until it is totally hidden in the dirt. The plants and the worms both seem very happy!

I agree with those who said not to sweat it. Compost can be as easy or as much work as you make it. I do use a commercial bin, which I got at a low price from my county offices in California. They also sell discounted worm bins, so check your own counties; they want to reduce land fill. Anyway, before that, I used a cylinder of fence wire about 4 feet across and 4 feet high and just dumped stuff in. It worked. I throw a shovelful of dirt or leaves on top of kitchen waste now and then. I don't include any perennial weeds or weeds with seeds or diseased plants. Grass clippings and leaves are spread on the ground under fruit trees. I also compost tea bags, coffee filters, paper towels, hair from haircuts, laundry lint. I'm not in the business of making tons of garden fertilizer, but just letting biodegradable stuff rot. I never turn my piles, measure temperatures, or worry about them. They eventually subside into nice brown stuff. I have a second bin, so when one gets pretty full, I can start on the next one and let bin 1 finish up. It takes months. Don't worry. Compost happens.