After the Halloween festivities have died down, instead of putting your pumpkins in your garbage can, Compost for Good urges you to give them a new life by dropping them off at a local composting facility.

When mixed with wood chips, sawdust, straw or other high carbon materials, pumpkins can be turned into beautiful, life-sustaining compost. Before donating your pumpkins, please remove candles or other non-organic material that cannot be composted.  Chopping or smashing them into small pieces would also help the microbes out, but is not necessary.  

Here’s when and where you can drop off your used pumpkins around the region this year: 

• Lake Placid: Placid Earth Composting at Shipman Youth Center – pumpkins can be placed in a bin outside the shipping container at the Shipman Youth Center (by the basketball courts), Nov 1-4
• Saranac Lake: Blue Line Compost at the Common Ground Community Garden (on Old Lake Colby Road) –  Nov 5th between 10am and 3pm 
• Jay: Little Farmhouse Flowers, 593 Stickney Bridge Rd – Nov 5-6 any time.
• Redford: River Valley Regeneratives, 36 Church St Redford – any day, any time. 
• Canton: LittleGrasse Farm, 309 Miner Street Road – 9AM until dark any day. Dropoff area will be clearly marked.
• Wintrhrop: Whitten Family Farm, 1101 County Rt. 49 – any day, any time
• Tupper Lake: The Hub, 320 Park Street – any day, any time

For more information about community-scale composting in your neighborhood, contact: [email protected] or visit adkaction.org/compost.