The leaves, straw and pine needles are all on the brown side, so the only green is your kitchen scraps. Each time you add those, cover with some of the browns. And look for more greens. A bag or two of neighbor's grass clippings if you can get them, for example.

Pine needles are slow to decompose and might be better as mulch.

To help the leaves get going, rather than bagging in the fall, make a pile or use a wire fence corral and let them be out in the weather. By spring they are starting to decompose, and then you can add them to the compost with greens.

Also, leaves will make on their own that way (leaf mold), but it takes longer. If you have space, just leave a leaf pile to its own devices for 2 years and you'll find fluffy compost underneath.

Fertilizer will act like a green due to its nitrogen content and will speed up composting of browns. Careful you don't use too much. If you have lawn fert (29-3-3 for example) that's just as good and less likely to overload your soil with P and K. But used sparingly the triple 10 is probably OK too.

If you know where your municipal compost/leaf dump is, if there is one, you can get most of your needs met there. I don't know if most towns have them or not though. If not try to collect some leaves in fall from yours or others trees. I think city peeps put them on the curb. If any people you know work in foodservice and would save veg/fruit scraps, that's a gold mine right there. Even if a supermarket would save scraps from their produce packaging. I get most of my scraps from my family and the municipal waste dump. No manure is in it but leaves, wood chips and sawdust. Coffee grounds left over from your family or a coffee shop nice enough to give you spent grounds. Sawdust from a woodworkers shop. The fall leaves are the bulk of my compost though. You can get a cheap electric weedwacker and a clean new garbage can and shred the leaves before adding to the compost. Use mostly browns like the fall leaves to add to veg scraps and high nitrogen things. I hope some of this helps.

I don't want to insult anyones intelligence, but maybe you don't already know this, sorry if you do, but I'll just add that oils and fats shouldn't be in the pile, also meats, and bones. The meat and bones will of course rot but cause pests. I think if you bury meats etc under soil that's fine.

Thanks toxcrusadr and poaky. I'm sure that my neighbors won't mind me giving them a hand in raking their cut grass and carting some of it away. Good for neighborly relations, right? :o)
Thanks to the advice I received on this site last year, I omitted meat, oils, cheese and bones from my compost pile. Following their suggestions, though, I did include these in the kitchen scraps I dug into the soil (about 24" deep) during the winter; I believe they referred to it as field composting. ( I may be wrong about the name.) Am planning to plant some perennials right over them this summer.
BTW, I'm raking together some Cyprus mulch I applied last year around some shrubs. I haven't been greatly impressed; it seemed to shed water as opposed to letting it through to the soil and has become a hard "mat" around the plants. Can I assume that this is definitely not something you'd add to the compost pile, nor dig into a new planting bed for perennials, shrubs or trees? Any suggestions for how it could be beneficially used?
gary

If you don't like the way a mulch performs, dilute it with something you like better and keep using it. That's what I'd do. Cypress is very rot resistant, which is why they like it for commercial landscaping - set it and forget it. So composting is out. Tilling any kind of wood into the soil is likely to deplete nitrogen.

Maybe you can find some mulch you like better and layer it over the cypress or mix them together.