More than a dozen San Franciscans gather with workshop leaders in the garden on this early Saturday morning, creating a classroom setting amidst the natural landscape and chirping birds. The workshop attendees are from different generations, and some are already composting at home. Others don't know anything at all about the subject. The untraditional classroom-style setting and the helpful workshop leaders promote a welcoming and unique ambiance in which to learn.

Garden For the Environment (GFE), located on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Lawton in San Francisco, offers different gardening workshops in its one-acre garden, which is sponsored by the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council and the city's Department of the Environment. One of the free workshops they offer is urban composting, which takes place once a month. They offer tips on how to make composting work in any living situation, because in an urban setting like San Francisco, living spaces come in all sizes. There is one hour of lecture, and the remaining hour is for hands-on experience with compost piles.

Composting consists of gathering organic wastes and burying them under piles of soil so that the wastes can naturally decompose. Six essential ingredients are recommended: greens, browns, moisture, volume, oxygen, and micro/macro decomposers. Examples of greens are coffee grounds and fruit or vegetable trimmings, which should make up 50 to 60 percent of the pile because these materials produce the moisture needed. Examples of browns are fallen leaves or twigs. All these ingredients can be collected in a simple Rubbermaid bin, but a cubic yard or a five square foot container is ideal because more volume generates more heat. Compost piles can reach between 130 to 150 degrees Fahrenheit in three weeks, and should stay at this temperature for ten days.

The finished compost in the garden is dark brown or black, crumbles in your hand, and has an earthy smell. Homemade compost can take up to two or three months to finish, depending on maintenance and outside factors such as weather.

The advantage of people composting on their own is that they can have their own rich fertilizer to use for growing flowers or fruits and vegetables. Also, according to the garden's website, San Francisco hauls away a five foot high football field amount of trash daily, and by composting, that amount can be reduced.

Thirty-five-year-old Corinne Law took the Gardening and Composting Educator Training Program through GFE and now teaches the workshops.

"Using waste as a resource, that's what composting is," Law explains simply.

Forty-five-year-old Angela Lee heard about the workshops through a friend. She has lived in San Francisco since she was a child, and started caring more about the city's landscape after noticing how much the environment has changed since the days of her childhood.

"We have to give back to the earth," Lee says.

Another visitor, twenty-three-year-old Barbara Jefferson, is a student at San Francisco City College, and heard about the urban composting workshops through a posting at her school. She's taking a nutrition class this semester, which sparked the interest in being more self-sustainable, and she plans to start a composting program at her school.

"Not composting is like robbing nature of its own life," Jefferson says.

With Mayor Gavin Newsom's proposed bill on mandatory composting for San Francisco to achieve the city's goal of 75percent landfill diversion by 2010, these free workshops can give people a head start for what lies ahead.

Law hopes that these classes are only the beginning of people's learning process and that they inspire them to start composting. This garden may still be a secret to some city dwellers, but it has already planted seeds of knowledge in many people.