Easy to do at home

If you or your co-op or condominium use a landscaping service, ask if the company is complying with New York City Local Law 40, which requires companies to use a permitted composting facility, with some exceptions. If your landscaper falls under the exceptions, consider working out a way for the company to maintain a compost pile on your property.

If you don’t use a landscaping service, consider composting yourself. Once the city’s leaf composting program resumes, do what you can to increase compliance with its regulations. Increased efficiency might keep composting from being cut next time budgets are tight.

Jodie Colon, the Bronx Green-Up compost educator at the New York Botanical Garden, describes different levels of composting. Overall, anything organic can be composted, she says, although some things like old natural-fiber clothes and paper have more value if they are reused or recycled. As Ms. Colon explains, composting requires an equal amount of “greens,” such as grass clippings, and “browns,” such as fallen leaves, and a shovel-full of soil now and then as a source of microbes, moisture and air.

These sunny days of fall are the best time to start an outdoor compost pile for grass and leaves. Both greens and browns are available in equal proportion. Garden plants, excluding vegetables, are the first and easiest level of composting.

If you want to compost food scraps as well, include only raw fruit and vegetable waste. Outdoors, use a closed compost bin, and bury the food scraps within the grass, leaves and soil. Indoors, use a speciallypurchased worm bin.

Occasionally, you might attend an event where all food scraps, and the paper plates and napkins, are collected for composting. Meat, dairy, cooked foods, breads and other similar scraps can be composted by industrial facilities. However, you should not try it that at home. That level of composting must be monitored for toxins and can attract pests that spread diseases.

Other organics are compostable, too, like naturalfiber fabrics, untreated straw mats, old wool blankets, etc. They might take longer to break down, or retain too much moisture, or add additional complications. Save these until you are a master.

This is part of the October 16, 2008 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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