This being the start of a new year, I ought to be making resolutions. I haven't, though my husband seems to think there are a number of things I could do differently/better. Sensibly, when challenged, he refrained from listing them.

'Just carry on being as gorgeous and lovely as you are,' he said vaguely. I was holding a shovel at the time which, I'm sure, had nothing to do with this climbdown. The fact that my nose was damp, my face was dirty and my clothes were smeared with compost means his eye test is long overdue. That, or I'm married to Shrek.

Anyway, as it happens, I am turning over a new leaf. Or, to be specific, rather a lot of old leaves. And rotten vegetables. And soggy cardboard. And mouldy teabags. New Year's Day saw me in my wellies forking through a small and now-only-slightly-smelly mound of mostly unidentifiable brown stuff, shouting enthusiastically, 'Come and look at all these worms,' to my less-than-riveted family.

This new and unlikely interest has come about as a result of taking part in a composting trial with York Rotters, a volunteer group supported by City of York Council that gives on-going support to people taking up composting. Keely Mellor, who runs the group, contacted me after I'd written a column about recycling in September and asked if I'd like to take part. I said yes, took possession of a compost bin, kitchen caddy and garden bucket, and began collecting my carrot peelings.

I was four days into my experiment, virtuously chucking kitchen waste into the bin, before I sat down and read the instructions properly. It was then that I discovered I was supposed to have taken the basic first step of putting a layer of woody herbaceous material at the bottom for aeration and drainage. Damn. This meant gardening, a job we put off to about twice a year when we pay our friendly dreadlocked gardener Phil to do it.

My daughter and I got out hoe and secateurs and attacked our two tiny triangles of lawn and one unkempt flowerbed with a vengeance. A couple of productive hours later she'd forgotten all about Cartoon Network and I felt relaxed and glowy. Equally importantly, the garden looked much improved and the bin had been properly fed.

But it wasn't plain sailing. As decomposition set in, the bin become stinky and every time I unzipped the lid a swarm of flies rose up and buzzed me, so that I was reduced to flipping the lid up at arm's length with a long stick, all the while keeping my mouth tightly closed.

After the wasps began invading it as well, I put in a panicked call to Keely, who arrived with fellow rotter John Cossham and a pair of rubber gloves. John tipped out the foul-smelling and by now rather slimy contents and told me it had got too compacted and wet, which had lead to an overgrowth of anaerobic bacteria.

He instructed me not to water it - I had been gaily sprinkling the contents with a watering can - but to add scrunched up damp cardboard instead, which would provide sufficient moisture and give the heap structure.

As to the flies, it had been a bad year for them, he said. Wrapping fruit in newspaper or torn out Yellow Pages would help, but it wouldn't get rid of them. 'Think of it this way. It's turning apple cores into blue-tit food,' he added philosophically.

'So you're not going to take it away?' I asked hopefully.

'No. It's your heap. You've got to assume responsibility for it. It'll be fine,' he replied genially, forking it all back in and feeding it twists of torn-up cereal boxes. A few days later I added a top layer of damp leaves and retired it behind the garden shed, since it was almost full anyway, and decided to start again from scratch.

I'm happy to report that compost bin number two - we have the lightweight ones designed for back yards and small gardens - has settled down well and is behaving in an exemplary fashion. But best of all, we halved our rubbish output at a stroke, putting out one bin bag a week instead of our usual two.

Like all the participants in the trial, I have kept a record of how often I've emptied my kitchen caddy and garden bucket so that Keely can calculate how much waste I've composted. This came to an incredible 172kg which, multiplied to give an estimate for a year, comes to 517 kg, saving over half a tonne of methane-producing organic waste from ending up in landfill and contributing to global warming.

Bin number one has miraculously rotted down to less than a third of its volume and will, in a few more months, be ready to spread on the garden. Which, I have resolved, to take in hand personally. I'm even planning to grow organic vegetables and the daughter wants to help.

Did I say I wasn't going to make any resolutions? Forget dieting, I'll be digging. Here's to a rotten new year. In the best possible sense.

Updated: 16:20 Friday, January 06, 2006