Back in the mid 1970's, my grandmother used to put coffee grinds, eggshells, and burnt pipe tobacco she had collected around the base of the plants in the yard and say it was "for the ecology". This is now something that I've started doing as well.
One of the key tenants of organic farming is that healthy soil leads to healthy plants without the need for chemical fertilizers and one of the simplest ways to get healthy soil is by the addition of organic matter to the soil. I've seen various numbers floating around the internet that 25 - 30% of what ends up in landfills is either yard waste or table waste which means most us are already throwing out what we need to make our gardens healthy and we had for free in the first place.
While many people maintain a separate compost heap, here are a couple of things I've simply been adding to the garden during the down season to "compost in place" which both enriches the soil and decreases the amount of what we are throwing in the garbage.
We've started keeping a bowl next to the sink and putting in all the clean vegetable scraps leftover from the preparation of the meal, used coffee grinds and washed egg shells. Every few days this simply gets dumped into the garden and rots away. Normally you should avoid meat, grease or anything else that will attract animals, but I've recently read about
All Food Recycling Compost Kit with Bokashi
which ferments the waste and apparently is great for the garden without some of the efforts of composting. Check out this
link on youtube.com for details DIY bokashi and the rest of the Podchef videos there while you are at it.
The hardest part about raking the leaves in the fall was bagging them up. Now I simply rake them into a pile, load them into the wheelbarrow, dump them in the garden and bury them. They are gone by the spring. Grass clippings are eaten up just as quickly.
At the end of the season, I used to pull out all the dying plants in the garden and bag them up with the fall leaves. Now these simply get pulled out by the roots and tossed on the pile. Some people will argue that this propagates whatever plant diseases you might have had the season before, so be sure to include only healthy plants.
A bale of straw from the garden center is only about $8.00, but many people will buy these as a Halloween decoration and simply throw it out after Thanksgiving and you can pick them up for free. Spread this on top of the garden and allow it to rot away under the snow. I'm also planning on using straw as a natural mulch during the summer to keep the weeds down which also has the secondary benefit of supplementing the soil.
A layer of straw mixed with snow covers the garden:
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