Yes, my kitchen garbage dug into the garden as compost grows also!! I have nice cucumbers growing from old cukes composted in last Fall & they taste great ... not bitter as I had expected! The potato peelings composted in the garden have produced a lot of good size 'taters but since they are growing everywhere (guess I miss some in the Fall when I dig them)I read that tomatoes & potatoes are NOT companion plants & it seems the tomatoe plants are not growing as tall for me as in the past. Think this Fall I will make sure NO potatoes are left in the ground where I grow the tomatoes again & see if it makes a difference. On the farm we had to cut potato 'eyes' to plant each Spring but guess the store bought potatoes have viable 'eyes' still in the peelings!

Definitely use it! I have several wire compost bins and when one is full I make a hollow in the top, line it with newspapers and fill it with dirt/compost mix. Then I run a line from the drip irrigation system for the plants. Tomatoes and squash grow really well, and the steady moisture makes the compost decompose quickly. The piles collapse to about 30% their height, I refill the bins with yard waste and kitchen waste, and we do it again. When the veggie/compost bins don't collapse much over a growing season, I open the bin ans sift out the finished compost for the main veggie beds. So far the piles are lasting about 3 years before they stop collapsing.

Hah! I keep it outdoors in a huge wire bin and I toss some manure and compost in it annually when I put it back in the bin in the fall from my pots. It freezes into a three foot high, three foot across soil bin and is just starting to thaw now. When I pot up my outdoor dock plants or window boxes, I'll fill the bottom of the huge pots with unfinished compost, a dead fish or two if I can find some, and cover that with my soil (maybe first throwing in a few plastic gallon jugs for space fillers if the pot is especially large), so the potting soil is freshened considerably from season to season---very much like the axe you describe.

When we lived in short-season New Hampshire we had one huge pile that got anything and everything organic, from huge volumes of leaves to twigs to garbage to clothes to whole corn stalks to rotten pears to whole walnuts to my sister's many poor gerbils. Come Spring, once the ground had thawed and dried and we were getting ready to turn under last Fall's cow manure, we'd take one pile and fork it over onto the other spot, starting a new pile. What didn't fork was compost, or close enough. That went right onto the garden. No picky metering it out or piling it up, it just got spread and used, and we then had a (new) pile that didn't get touched (except for the piling-on and for fishing worms) for a full 'nother year. No turning. No worrying about ridiculous green-brown ratios or weed seeds. No thermometers. Just a totally simple, low work, and effective pile. Everything eventually rotted down. We just spread it around and got on with the gardening. In a way there are no bare spots underground, and roots will grow, inter-mesh, and find the nutrition the plants need. What I'm trying to illustrate is there's no need to store anything. Holding it back until you're ready to plant something in a particular spot does nothing for you other than make extra work or cost extra money. All it is (ALL) is adding back organic material you're removing by growing food and grubs. No magic. Use it now, use it all, and there will be more next year.