Composting for the Absolute Beginner: How to Improve Your Soil for Better Organic Gardening

by Dede Cummings

In this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about the various methods of composting and how to adapt them to your home and garden. With full-color photographs and easy-to-follow instructions, this will be an essential addition to every gardener’s library. Great compost is one of the most important secrets of successful organic gardening. Topics covered here What you can and can’t throw on your compost pile How to balance nitrogen and carbon in your pile for quick decomposition and rich compost Buying or building the best tools and containers Vermicomposting How to compost indoors Troubleshooting smelly compost, dry compost, and other problems How and when to apply the compost to your garden beds With growing concerns about the use of pesticides, herbicides, and GMOs in mainstream gardening practices, more and more families are turning to their backyards to grow their own food using methods they know are safe. The need for clear, straightforward instruction on organic gardening techniques has never been greater. With Composting for Absolute Beginners, readers will get the information they need to prepare their gardens for healthy, abundant crops.

192 pages, Spiral-bound

Published October 9, 2025

About the author

Dede Cummings is a writer, award-winning book designer, publisher, and former commentator for Vermont Public Radio. At Middlebury College, she was the recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Award and attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as an undergraduate fellow. In 1991, she received a fellowship to study with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. In 2013, she returned as a poetry contributor to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has been published in Mademoiselle, Connotation Press, MomEgg Review, Green Mountains Review, among others, and anthologized in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry and Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection. She was a Discover/The Nation poetry semi-finalist. In 2016, she was awarded a writer’s grant from the Vermont Studio Center. Her first poetry collection entitled To Look Out From was the winner of the 2016 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize and was published in 2017. Her second poetry collection, The Meeting Place, was published in 2020 by Salmon Poetry. Dede lives in Vermont, where she designs books and is the founder and publisher of www.greenwriterspress.com, a global press devoted to environmental activism, social justice, and sustainable publishing.

Dede lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, in a house built by her husband, Steve Carmichael. They have three children, Sam, Emma, and Joey. After Dede's most recent hospital stay and surgery for Crohn's disease in 2006, she began hiking the Long Trail (the length of Vermont) in one week sections, beginning to realize a long-term goal that had been put off due to illness.

Living With Crohn's & Colitis was her first published book. Her second book, "Cooking Well: IBS" came out October 25, 2011, and it is a description of IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), and a helpful guide with lifestyle tips and over 100 recipes. The author was first diagnosed with IBS in her 20s, and it is her hope that by reading these books, people will become educated and informed about how lifestyle and diet are key to maintaining health in today's world. Book Number Three in this series is The Living With Crohn's & Colitis Cookbook.

Dede has published organic and holistic lifestyle series for Skyhorse, including The Medicinal Gardening Handbook, The Organic Gardening Handbook, and The Good Living Guide to Beekeeping.