My neighbor's compost trick made me ditch my $80 bin

I was talking to Mrs. Chen over the fence last Saturday, she's been gardening here for like 30 years. I mentioned how my store bought compost bin keeps getting too wet and stinky, and she just laughed. She said she's never bought a bin, she just digs a hole in the corner of her garden about 2 feet deep, tosses in veggie scraps and leaves, and covers it with a board. That's it. Three months later she digs it up and it's perfect black soil. I tried it with a spot near my rhubarb patch, cost me zero dollars, and honestly it's way less gross than my plastic tumbler. Has anyone else skipped the fancy gear and gone full hole in the ground? How deep do you go?