Composting for Beginners: A Book Series on Backyard Farming Composting by Kim Pezza
Book: Backyard Farming: Composting | Author: Kim Pezza | ISBN: 978-1-57826-587-9 | Hatherleigh Press, 2015
So I picked up this book about composting. And honestly, I wasn’t expecting to get this into it.
Backyard Farming: Composting by Kim Pezza is part of the Backyard Farming series from Hatherleigh Press. These are practical, no-nonsense guides for people who want to actually do things with their hands and their dirt. And I’m going to walk through the whole book in a series of posts, because there’s a lot of good stuff in here that deserves a proper breakdown.
Who Is Kim Pezza?
Kim Pezza grew up in the Finger Lakes region of New York. She’s not someone who read about farming on the internet and decided to write a book. She grew up raising pigs, poultry, game birds, rabbits, and goats. She’s got hands-on experience with herbs and vegetables too. So when she talks about composting, she’s talking from years of actually doing it.
That matters. There’s a big difference between theory and practice when it comes to anything involving dirt, worms, and rotting food scraps.
Why Composting Matters
Here’s the thing about composting that most people don’t think about: roughly 30% of what you throw in the trash could be composted instead. That’s almost a third of your household waste that doesn’t need to sit in a landfill for decades.
When organic waste ends up in a landfill, it breaks down without oxygen and produces methane. That’s bad. When you compost it properly, you get rich soil instead. That’s good. Pretty simple math.
And the soil you get from composting is incredible for gardens, houseplants, or even just improving your yard. You’re turning banana peels and coffee grounds into something that actually feeds plants. It’s free fertilizer that you make from stuff you were going to throw away anyway.
What This Book Covers
Pezza covers a lot of ground in this book. Here’s what we’ll be going through in this series:
- The history of composting. People have been doing this for thousands of years. It’s not a trend.
- What composting actually is. The science behind how organic matter breaks down.
- Setting up your system. Different approaches for different spaces and needs.
- Vermicomposting. That’s composting with red worms. It sounds weird, but it works really well, especially for small spaces.
- What to compost and what to skip. This is where a lot of beginners mess up.
- Carbon and nitrogen ratios. The “browns and greens” balance that makes everything work.
- The composting process and its stages. What’s actually happening in your pile over time.
- Using your finished compost. How to know when it’s ready and what to do with it.
- Troubleshooting. Because things will go wrong, and that’s fine.
Composting Is for Everyone
One thing Pezza makes clear early on is that composting isn’t just for people with big backyards. You can compost in an apartment. You can compost on a balcony. Vermicomposting bins fit under a kitchen sink.
And here’s something that surprises a lot of people: a proper compost pile shouldn’t smell bad. If you’re doing it right, it smells like fresh soil from a woodlot. Clean, earthy, natural. If your compost smells like garbage, something is off, and there’s a fix for it.
That “composting is gross” idea keeps a lot of people from trying it. It’s not gross. It’s just decomposition done on purpose.
What’s Coming Next
I’m going to work through this book chapter by chapter. Each post will cover a specific topic, break down what Pezza says, and add some context where it helps. By the end of the series, you should have a solid understanding of how composting works and how to start doing it yourself.
Whether you’ve got a big yard or a studio apartment, there’s a composting method that works for your situation. Pezza makes that case convincingly, and I think you’ll agree once we get into it.
Let’s start with where this whole thing began.