Lauren Seiple has been composting her entire life. While growing up in New Jersey, her family had a pile in the back yard surrounded by chicken wire. She remembers going out and turning that pile as a kid.

Even though she now lives in an apartment, she continues to compost, but now she has the help of worms, something called vermicomposting.

Ms. Seiple works for the Pennsylvania Resources Council, one of the state's oldest environmental organizations, as the agency's environmental education coordinator for the composting program. She sees composting as an important tool for home recycling.

"The benefits you get personally, especially if you are a gardener, are just healthier plants and vegetables," she said. "Composting is essential because it keeps waste out of our landfills."

She says that if everyone recycled we would reduce the amount of material senselessly buried by 50 percent. "When you add compost to that equation, you'd be diverting about 75 percent of our waste from landfills."

The PRC offers classes in composting and vermicomposting and participants get a compost bin after completing the class.

Ms. Seiple offers a few tips to turn organic waste into a valuable resource. After obtaining a bin, which wards off rodents, fill it with the right mix of materials. "The most important thing to remember is that you are trying to create a balance between carbon and nitrogen; you want to remember greens and browns."

Greens are the source of nitrogen and the browns provide the carbon.

Examples of greens include kitchen scraps, fruit and vegetable peelings, eggshells, coffee grounds, manure from farm animals, fresh garden waste and more.

For browns, gardeners can use fallen leaves, sawdust, paper and the like.

To get the fastest compost, these ingredients should be mixed at a ration of one to one by volume with a little more browns added for good measure.

"When you're adding greens to your pile, you want to cover them with browns and that reduces any odor problems."

There are certain things that shouldn't be included in the compost pile. By excluding pet waste, meat and dairy products, oils and fats, composters will discourage animals from being interested in the pile and it also will help avoid odors. Never add weeds that have gone to seed or invasive plants for obvious reasons.

Every compost pile is different, and each one will decompose a little differently. Getting the balance just right is what Ms. Seiple teaches in her classes. "Figuring that out is the art of efficient composting."

And the most important part of composting, she says, is to keep the pile moving and perpetually moist. Turning the pile will move material that's breaking down fast on the bottom and incorporate it with the waste that hasn't decomposed. By mixing things up, the pile will be ready sooner.

"The organisms that compost -- the bacteria, the fungi, the mold, the invertebrates, protozoan -- are speeding up this natural process of decaying with your help," Ms. Seiple says.

And the pile should be kept at the consistency of a wet sponge. As long as it doesn't get too wet and the new material is covered with browns, the pile won't have an unpleasant odor.

"Generally, compost smells earthy," Ms. Seiple says. "You can actually tell when it's done if it has no odor to it."

Ms. Seiple wants students of composting to receive many things.

"I hope they are introduced to a natural process that happens that they might not be aware of, that they realize there's an easy way to impact their environment by having this process happen and diverting the waste. And I hope they get out of it a really easy way to create their own fertilizer."

Lars Hundley, who owns Clean Air Gardening, an online retailer of environmentally friendly lawn and garden products and sells 10 different compost bins, says that the decomposition process just happens.

"There's a million different ways to compost. In fact, you can compost without a bin at all. You can throw things into a pile and eventually it will break down, because basically everything rots."

Nov. 18, CCI Center, South Side; 6:30-8:15 p.m. Includes a training session and one Earth Machine composting bin. $40 for singles, $50 for a couple.
Jan. 13, Sewickley Public Library; 2:30-3:30 p.m., hosted by the Village Garden Club. Includes a training session and one Earth Machine composting bin. $40 for singles, $50 for a couple.

Nov. 19, CCI Center, South Side; 6:30-8:15 p.m. Includes a training session, one worm bin, and a 1/2 pound of worms. $45 for singles, $55 for a couple.