The biggest luxury I ever had was a half-acre garden, featuring
an enormous fortress of a compost bin protected by a chicken-
wire shell specially designed to repel varmints. Take that,
raccoons.  Not that it worked. No self-respecting raccoon—or
opossum, for that matter—is going to be put off by anything less
than the maximum-security precautions of a federal penitentiary.
Most nights, we could hear scrabbling.  "What if they storm the
house?" my husband, a light sleeper, asked.  "They don't want
our jewelry, they want our garbage," I reassured him. "It's far
more valuable."  This is true, by the way. When you compost, you
feel like Merlin, performing some powerful alchemy to
miraculously turn garbage into gold. You don't even need a
garden to do it; it works just fine under the kitchen sink. It
is in fact so easy that even the raccoons could compost, if they
cared to earn an honest living.  Above: Step one: why shouldn't
garbage look pretty? The Brushed Stainless-Steel Compost Pail
($29.95 from Williams-Sono