One of the best ways to inexpensively improve your garden is also the simplest: Composting.

Traditional composting can be done at very little cost and with just a bit of effort: Combine nitrogen-rich "green" materials (grass clippings and food scraps) and roughly twice as much carbon-rich "brown" such as dried leaves with water, and let it sit.Over time, this waste will decompose into a rich soil additive.Eileen East, a gardening enthusiast and Master Gardener with the Penn State Extension Office, has been composting for years.She also started a worm composting system several years ago, which allows her to compost additional foods more quickly.But for East, composting had its drawbacks. She couldn't compost meat or dairy, and the bulk of organic waste from a meal - bones and any leftovers that weren't suited for another meal - couldn't be put into a composting pile or worm system.This year, she's experimenting with a new composting system called bokashi. This fermentation system quickly breaks down food scraps, waste, even bones with little to no smell. It uses "good" microbes and bacteria and fermentation in an anaerobic (no oxygen or air) environment."It's like your stomach. It's a highly acidic, microbial-driven digestive system. It turns scraps into a product that is easily used by plants," she said."If you think about Japan, where this technique came from, they've been composting for centuries. They realized at one point that if you ferment the waste, you get rid of the odor and reduce the attraction to animals. It's ready to be buried in the garden, or even added to the compost heap if you'd rather do that."To get started with bokashi, you'll need a bucket with a lid and bokashi mix - a special blend of bran, typically wheat or rice bran, and microbes such as lactobacillus. Some companies also include additional ingredients, including probiotics, to reduce odor.Ideally, every bokashi system should include two buckets to allow one bucket to be filled and left to sit (with the lid sealed) for two to four weeks.Its high-acid environment works quickly to break down organic food scraps and waste, and within weeks the scraps are at a neutral acidity and can be put into the soil to age and finish decomposing.Because East was experimenting with bokashi over the winter, she buried the results of her first bokashi bucket in a large tub in her garage.This tub was set into a wheelbarrow and filled with two bags of potting soil. She plans to test the soil's nutrient content in the spring, once the scraps have aged and completed breaking down.At this point, the scraps from a chicken dinner, plenty of egg shells, and more have broken down into very little recognizable material - all she could find was a few of the larger chicken bones.She noted that while the Bokashi system has handled everything she's tried to compost so far, it's important not to add rotten food such as old meat.This can introduce "bad" microbes and bacteria, while the idea behind Bokashi is to allow the "good" microbes to flourish and ferment the food quickly and with no smell. "If I can do this in the winter in tubs, in the spring I'll have these tubs filled with the finished product," she said."It greatly reduced the amount of trash I've put out this winter. You're also not putting wet garbage into the landfill, which on its own is a good thing. A lot of people don't know what to do with leftover scraps."