If you want to make compost but you think your lifestyle or location rules it out, this may be good news for you: I have made compost in everything from a Christmas popcorn tin to the entire surface of a 40' x 50' garden.

The former instance may have been a miracle, since nothing I've read about proper composting can account for it. I simply started putting my kitchen scraps into the big popcorn tin, along with the soil from a small houseplant that had died. I didn't punch holes in the tin or do anything else to aerate the contents except to turn the can upside down a couple times in a row, now and then. When I cleaned out my refrigerator and found an untouched bunch of deteriorating celery at the back, I put it in the tin. I put whole banana peels, apple cores and questionable carrots into the tin. Each time I opened it to make another deposit, I did so quickly, my face turned away. I didn't really want to see or smell the disgusting mess that I was pretty sure was developing inside it.

As spring approached, I started to think about planting something in a container on the balcony connected to my apartment. The gardening fever was upon me, but I had no way to go immediately and get some packaged soil. I thought about my popcorn tin and began to reconsider the prospect of looking at its contents. Torn between revulsion and the need to plant something, I found myself leaning toward the latter. I put on rubber gloves (even though I had no intention of touching whatever was inside) and pulled off the lid.

I could hardly believe what I saw. Instead of a moldy, stinky, slimy imitation of The Blob, my tin was full of beautiful, healthy compost that smelled like the soil I would have paid for if I could have gotten to a store. The tomato seeds I planted in it that day grew lush and beautiful and fruitful. I had disobeyed nearly every rule for healthy compost, and gotten by with it.

At the other end of the size spectrum, is the matter of the garden area that came with the house I later bought. Located in a small village in upstate New York, it received the largesse of all the bagged leaves picked up by the local Public Works people in the autumn. (One phone call, and they were only too happy to haul it to my place instead of their usual dump sites several miles away.) I emptied many of the bags to spread over the entire garden area, mainly as a mulch to keep down the weeds that were otherwise sure to get ahead of me in the spring before

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