One of the best ways to spend just under $40 on amazon or ebay is to pop for a compost tumbler. I opted for the double compartment one shown below.
Get yourself a plastic bucket with a lid or save big mayo jars from Costco. Start saving all your kitchen waste–coffee grounds, tea bags, egg shells, peels, skins, rinds, tops, cores–all the vegetative/organic trimmings. Add that stuff every couple of days so it moves out of the house. Bonus good stuff is banana peels, sweet potato skins, mango skins and mushrooms.
Once a week take a toilet paper or paper towel cardboard core and soak it wet. Then cut it up and add it to the kitchen stuff.
Other good stuff to add is hair (pet hair especially), laundry room lint (cotton & natural fibers).
You will also need to add some dirt in with the kitchen scraps–this will be supercharged soil. I recycle my potted dirt from indoor grows. You can also use that really cheap $3 topsoil from Lowes if you have to.
Start off using one side. Fill that up over a period of a couple of months adding some soil, cardboard and the house scraps. Keep it moist/wet and tumble it every few days. When that first chamber is full to the support bar going through the unit, stop using the first chamber & start on the 2nd one. Leave the contents in chamber 1 for one month while working on chamber 2. Keep watering the first chamber.
After the month of working on chamber 2 it’s time to harvest the compost from chamber 1
The compost should be rich & dark with NO SMELL if it broke down properly. Ideally it should not attract flies. A good indication that a soil additive may be too “hot” with nasty stuff is that you open it up and every fly in your block is now in your yard.
One thing I found useful in getting bulky stuff to break down (like melon rinds or corn cobs) was to add a 1/2 a teaspoon of septic tank treatment to the composting water every 2 weeks. Friendly Enzymes.
The finished compost can be added to beds and pots to feed existing plants or used to compliment the starting mix for a new grow.
Being in Tucson I don’t have a grass yard with all that to process..YMMV. limit any animal manure to small amounts from herbivores and chickens, horses ,steers. Don’t compost meat, fish or manure of meat eaters.