Composting ...

Composting has been a project that has worked very well without much

effort for the past 2 years. After the initial hiccups, things went smoothly with an occasional bump in the ride. And it is a very satisfying one as well because you don't throw any organic waste outside except for the coconut shells and husks. And all the compost is used up by the flower plants in our terrace garden.

Our compost setup is in a corner of our terrace, with one Khamba and two leave-it-pots. The initial processing happens in the khamba and from the bottom vessel it goes into one of the leave-it-pots. Once a leave-it-pot gets full, we leave it to compost till the other one also gets full. By that time, the first one would be ready for compost - so you can either use it or leave it in a jute bag for later use. While we tried sieving the compost to get a fine powder, it is not really worth the effort if you are using it for your own plants. Since the leave-it-pots are large enough, you can pick the things that are not yet composted by hand and put it back. Also the compost without sieving gives you compost and mulch for the plants. And it reduces unnecessary processing for a very natural cycle.

But there were some niggles - the maggots were percieved to be a problem, but we got over it quickly. Though they still get out of the bin at times, that doesn't bother us anymore. And the not-so-done not-so-fresh waste does smell when you stir it. Wet piles make you work a bit, initially we bought sawdust to make it dry, but now with plenty of compost and dry leaves, it is easily managed. You could cover it with a plastic sheet, but not really worth the trouble, it is part and parcel of natural composting.

Our latest issue has been red ants - while we left it as it is, it was time to get the compost out and they weren't going away. We tried placing cut lemons, turmeric powder etc., but nothing really worked. But one fine morning they shifted base to the other leave-it-pot for us to harvest the compost! So for most of the problems, the head-in-the-sand approach works very well.

The ease of getting it done is that you can easily leave it to nature if you have enough vessels - I would highly recommend a kambha and 2 leave-it-pots. Many of the problems that you face in a small composting setup is due the smallnes and the restricted environment - in a large setup many of the problems just vanish. Wet piles gets balanced off, maggots just go underneath. You(and nature) have space to work with which overcomes many of the problems. If you have a garden around, the dry leaves and compost complement each other very well. So keep at it, don't worry too much about it, it'll get done finally!