I'm not going to repeat all we learned about soil, but here's what you need to remember: good soil is essential to plants and it's very fragile. I won't even mention how much of the earth's topsoil is being paved over for parking lots and shopping malls and gigantic houses with nary an edible plant in sight. For today, let's just worry about our own yards, gardens and P-Patch plots. Almost for sure, you need to add organic matter to your soil. Plants need air, food and water - just like humans. Organic matter in the soil allows the plant to get these things. It improves permeability and aeration, helps it hold water and nutrients.
Where can you get organic matter to add to your garden? Well, you can buy it at the local nursery. But be aware of where it came from. We can't just always take topsoil from one place and put it in another. We need to work on making more. An easy way to do that is to compost your kitchen scraps and garden waste. Mark made a simple food scraps digester, pictured below. You can find instructions for this on the Seattle Tilth website (or lots of other places if you do a Google search). We compost our garden clippings, etc. differently - this one is just for kitchen scraps. And if you eat a lot of vegetables, like you should, you'll have a lot of compostable kitchen scraps. Don't put them in your garbage can - they won't do the landfill any good at all.
There are other ways to do this. Cheryl tried a worm bin but the little worms died three separate times - they need mild temperatures. I think this buried digester will do the same thing, it will probably just take a bit longer. Do it your way, experiment with different methods, but compost, compost, compost.
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