If you are a beginning composter, forget whatever you have heard about composting requiring mysterious ratios of carbon to nitrogen. It does, but the average backyard gardener does not need to know them in order to recycle his or her relatively paltry kitchen, grass and garden leavings. Think of fresh grass clippings, the leftovers from your salad making, and garden garbage such as discarded cauliflower leaves and stems. It is easier to remember if you equate browns with dead and dry and greens with fresh and moist. Browns provide the energy or the food, if you will, for the organisms doing the composting.
Greens give the nitrogen necessary for protein formation.
You need roughly three to four times as many browns as greens. Either problem is easy to correct, simply by stirring in the obviously missing ingredient. So, for example, if your backyard begins to smell like the inside of a diaper pail, you need to balance out the overload of greens by mixing in something like sawdust or straw. The conventional advice is that you need to layer your heap, alternating greens and browns, with the coarsest of the browns forming the bottom layer. If you have sufficient quantities of the appropriate ingredients set aside, then by all means layer.