stealth composting

It's pretty common for couples to hide things from each other--credit card statements, shopping sprees, dirty laundry, even illicit affairs. In my attempts to lessen my family's impact on the environment, I try to get away with something a little more basic: adding coffee grounds, egg shells, and those biodegradable salad containers from Whole Foods to the compost machine in our backyard.
Why do I have to secretly gather the brown ends of lettuce, peels from apples I turned into applesauce, and used tea bags, and then sneak this collection of biodegradable trash outside when my husband's not home? Why can't I take dead flowers from vases and the now scrunched-faced Jack-o-lantern from the front entrance to our house and openly place these unwanted items into the black plastic compost machine in the corner of our yard in full view? Because my husband says the machine is nearly full, and that new additions will not turn into compost. He states then we open the machine next spring after a long, cold winter (of course, it could be 52 degrees in January like it was last winter), instead of finding a pile of rich dirt to enhance my vegetable garden, we will find trash. He has told me repeatedly that the little tops of string beans that I tried to sneak into the compost several times will not degrade into their basic components in the next 6 months. The smelly onion peels will still be just that--smelly and a bit rotten, but not part of a lovely mix of healthy, sustainable earth, ready to sprout vegetables in my 2008 garden. He has begged me not to add any more apple cores (chopped up a bit, so they degrade a little quicker) or broccoli stems to the compost machine until the current contents fully degrade next year.
I am the early riser in this family, though, and he is still asleep. I could throw my sweater on over my pajamas and run into the backyard with this morning's coffee grounds. I could throw in a mushy banana from the fruit bowl that no one wants to eat. Even the extra noodles that our daughter's sitter left cooked but untouched in the pot on the stove last night could go right into the compost machine. Shhh....