With a crocus on every corner and buds just beginning to tinge, the time has come to think about gardening.

Specifically, what's going on what's growing.

With a little help from residents and businesses, the Lincoln County composting program hopes that that fertilizer will come from your neighbors.

The Lincoln County Commissioners, along with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection's Mark King and the Lincoln County Regional Planning Commission held a kick-off event Thursday, May 1 at Treats in Wiscasset.

The pilot composting program, which last year supplied residents with buckets to collect food scraps to be turned into compost at the Lincoln County Recycling Center, has expanded to include other sources of scraps, such as restaurants.

Stacy Linehan said in the nine years she's owned Treats, the food scraps have gone from pig pens to the compost pile.

“This is the best way to put (the food) back into the earth and not into a landfill,” she said. “It's a good way to impact the earth positively.”

King has been on board with the project since the beginning, he said.

As the project moves towards businesses, King said it will be important to get all employees to pitch in with scraps.

“If one person doesn't buy-in, then it won't work,” he said. “If you can get everyone to buy in, you're likely going to have a successful program.”

A healthy program will not only produce rich soil that can be a revenue source, King said; every peel, shell and scrap that winds up in a compost bucket is a piece of food that isn't in a landfill.

“About 40 percent of our waste stream is organics,” he said. “Those organics are full of nutrients that aren't being recycled locally.

“If you produce the food scrap locally, you should compost it locally.”

The buckets are still available at the Lincoln County Recycling Center in Wiscasset.