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On a recent visit to an acquaintance's place, the topic of organic refuse arose. They are without a tucked-away spot to establish a composting system in their yard, and their municipal service doesn't provide curbside service. They had tried fermentation composting, but with a new baby, I suspect they'll have more than enough to do aside from caring for a bin of breaking down organic matter.

However, since they are familiar to interring their fermented food waste, it got me thinking on how minimal-input and high-impact in-ground composting can be for those lacking space for a bigger setup. The technique is the straightforward practice of putting your biodegradable materials – such as fruit and vegetable waste, yard trimmings, lawn cuttings, leaves, etc – into a ditch close to where you intend to grow your crops in the future. Over the coming months, this material will slowly decompose, enriching the earth and amending its quality, conditioning it to support the next season's vegetables. No additional work is necessary from you to utilize this ancient approach.

The technique is easy of depositing your waste into a ditch by where you aim to grow your crops.

One may employ this technique in a somewhat shallow trench, although some advice suggest excavating to 60cm prior to placing the waste and filling in the trough. Opting for a less deep trench, consider placing a tarp over it with a heavy cloth and securing it securely to prevent your garden area from being excavated by animals that frequent your yard.

Another benefit of pit composting is that you don't need to worry about hitting the correct ratio of wet and dry ingredients. For those who have tended to a stagnant or dormant compost heap knows, it can be tricky to get that balance right, but the trench method is more lenient. It is best to incorporate a combination of nitrogen-rich material and carbon-rich material as you would in a conventional heap, but you can be less precise about the proportions.

As a relatively dedicated practitioner of minimal disturbance cultivation, I recoil from the prospect of digging a trench next to my vegetable plots, but I believe it's feasible to remove a reasonable quantity of dirt without entirely disrupting the soil layers. I would think about trench composting when overhauling a perennial bed or doing extensive removal of invasive plants, since both require me to work the earth in any case. On occasions when I have to excavate, I'm diligent to put the dirt back from where it was unearthed to the best of my ability and avoid moving soil when it is saturated.

Pit composting is really worth considering if you're constructing elevated garden beds in your plot, since you can incorporate a base of compostable material before adding your soil – with no digging needed.