Compost is ready!

After more than 8 months of collecting wet waste and preparing it for compost using daily dumps khamba and leave it pot, we have compost ready for use! We just need to sieve it and get it out. But since we have some vermicompost stock, we are holding off its use for later. One thing that we are unsure is about the quality of the compost and it appears there is no easy way to check it. Use of dry leaves were pretty low initially because we didn't have any plants then. But now we have abundant supply of leaves from our vegetable garden !

We have a khamba and two leave-it-pots, one of the leave-it-pots we leave it untouched for the waste to become compost and just use the other one to put fresh waste from the khamba. This seems to work very well. Otherwise you need to put the semi-compost in a bag and keep it for a while.

I guess this has become part of our daily chores and not something we have to do extra. While smell from the wastes after couple of days is still a challenge, thinking of the cause makes it something worthwhile to go through! Processing waste at the source is the best possible way to handle it for sure!

"Chase" the Cockroaches

I thought chasing the cockroaches was always a loosing battle, they always came back in larger numbers. May be they were better left alone considering them a necessary part of the ecosystem. But then they were getting stuck in our washing machine, microwave oven and bread toaster etc. etc. which was more than a nuisance. We are still not at that level of thinking to ignore these gadgets and let the cockroaches live a free life!

So we occasionally spray some pesticides to chase them away. But it was just a short term solution, they get back to the gadgets in no time. And it appeared that the pesticides were designed for re-fill after couple of months! The usual time for our pesticide spraying is when we go out of town which always delayed our early morning departures. After our daughter was born, we almost stopped using the pesticides.

Then a friend of us suggested an organic repellent(not a pesticide), Chase, which they claimed was very effective. It took some time for us to get hold of it because it was available only in the FoodWorld stores in town. It needs some preparation(like any natural concoction) before you apply it. You need to make a thick paste out of it using water and make small balls out of it and keep the balls at places where the cockroaches would hide(also near drains where they usually come and go out).

It didn't have an immediate effect unlike the toxic pesticides, cockroaches where roaming around still. But after a week, they started disappearing and the smaller ones came out running for their lives. After couple of weeks, they were hard to spot. In a month they just disappeared completely! According to the instructions on the cover, it was supposed to last for a month. So we stocked up for a 6 months, waiting for the first sight of cockroaches to apply it again. But even after 3 months there were no sign of any cockroaches except for one or two which lands up from somewhere and disappears later. But since we had some inventory, we used it again after around 6 months and gave it off to others. Most of them would say initially that it wasn't working because they are so used to the instant annihilation by the toxic pesticides instead of the slow effect of Chase.

This was indeed amazing ! It appears that you can make this yourself at home because all the ingredients are natural ones. I wasn't sure if any kind of repellents would be effective because we live in a flat where the cockroaches can easily enter inside from other flats. But this was way beyond our expectations and we are also really glad to get rid of the toxic pesticides that we have been using for a long time. Try this out and let us know of your experience.