With the watermelon season on and with Murugan's local Watermelon mandi across the street, we had lots of watermelon skin to dispose of. It turned out to be the most watery pile we have seen in our compost bins! The prescribed means of handling it is by using sawdust (or red soil) - but we didn't have easy access to it. Added lots of dry leaves initially, but it wasn't much of help, then tried some existing semi-compost to the pile, but there was no sign of the pile drying up. Then it looked like we have to suspend putting new things into the khamba. Finally dumped the whole thing into the semi compost pile in the leave-it-pot. It took couple of days of stirring to dry up, but finally it did.
A wet pile of waste is one of the most challenging tasks for composting at home. That's when you need to think very deeply why you are doing this at all. And you also realize that your smelling instincts are very much in tact, which isn't a good thing in this case though! But you get used to it over a period of time as well. This is indeed one of the reasons why many community composting efforts fail - they are bound to trouble someone in the community and everyone hates bad smell even for a short duration of time.
When the sawdust arrived, Murugan's mandi was closed for the year! Our watermelon wines didn't last for long either in the hot climate. We also bought a new leave-it-pot as a buffer - new waste would go into just one of them and the old one would remain undisturbed on its way to compost.
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