Composting is a foundation for your garden.

Almost anything organic can be composted but to mitigate visits by foraging animals or to minimize unpleasant odors a gardener has to be careful.

I'll write more on this subject and develop some international links which I am sure you will find useful for your backyard farm composting effort. Personally, I believe that everything that is not poisonous and is organic should be composted.

Visit again in a week or so and I should have some great inforomation on composting for just about anywhere in the world.

In the interim here is an excerpt from an article which shows that not everything needs to be composted before going into the garden.

From Mother Earth News..."In most regions just a half-inch of fresh clippings each spring—that’s about six 5-gallon buckets per 100 square feet—mixed into the soil, or a 1- to 2-inch layer used as a surface mulch, will provide all the nutrients most crops need for a full season of growth." Full article at http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic- ... spx?page=2

I used this technique last summer to produce a bumper crop of peas. Below are the peas in the spring mulched with grass clippings.