Compost, of course.    Here at BRTG, we are trying to provide the nutrients needed by our voracious vegetables by composting both kitchen waste and the excess organic matter put out by the ornamental part of the garden.   We have not yet succeeded.   But one element of the plan that is working is the NatureMill Automatic Composter:

This small machine fits under a standard kitchen counter.  It uses very little power (a small blower forces extra oxygen into the composting chamber and an electric motor rotates the composting material every four hours).   Be sure to get the “Pro Edition,” which is sturdier and will last longer.   Be careful not to over-load.   The result speaks for itself:

Compost is pure poetry to a gardener, so I cannot resist leaving you with some Walt Whitman:

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person–yet behold!
. . .
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in
the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
. . .
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.