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!

Wet Compost pile

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.

Composting Update

It is almost 6 months since we started composting at home and it seems to have stuck and become part of a regular routine Though we haven't yet used the compost yet, the recycling is going on. The leave-it-pot is almost full, but the level keeps going down when more thing gets further composted. Except for nasty smell in between that you have to get used to, it has been pretty smooth sailing after the initial bumps. We did think of stopping it for a while when the spirit was pretty low, but finally kept doing it. May be we need one more leave-it-pot(or some container) to make the composting easier. Now old and new waste gets mixed up in the leave-it-pot which makes it difficult to get some compost out. If you have two of them, you could let one compost completely before dumping new stuff.

Overall, well worth doing it, not very difficult to make it a habit, surely worth a try!

Composting with Dailydump Kambha

Seeing waste and reducing it or avoiding it at the source is an important step in leading a lean and sustainable lifestyle. And composting enables you to get the natural cycle back in motion. It would have been impossible to think of composting at home(at source) in an urban setting till we found DailyDump.

We started using the dailydump composting bin, the kambha, roughly a month ago and it has been some work and work in progress! Urban settings are designed for a non-sustainable living, a plastic living of you will. Things originate at one place sourcing materials from all over, leaving a trail of waste and pollution on the way and gets dumped elsewhere like this video from Story of Stuff illustrates. So any solution to compost in an urban setting is not going to be easy, it is designed to create waste. The kitchen waste attracts flies and urbanites scorn at flies and it is an indication of something not clean and it will bring diseases. Nobody thinks of it as a natural cycle of bio-degrading the natural waste!

So the flies are around the place at work in converting the waste into compost, but we are trying to get at an optimal number of flies by using a bit of neem cake, chilly powder and spraying the lemon grass oil as well as stirring the pile! You may not be used to the natural smell that emanates from the pile before it becomes compost, so it takes a bit of getting used to it as well. And the maggots are not a pretty scene either. It turns out that cokroaches are not interested in waste - hmm.. they need brand new stuff! But in couple of weeks you do get the smell of compost in the bottom vessel, though not yet ready for the plants!

While the natural open compost pits would let air and light onto the pile, the urban guerrilla compost pile needs to be covered to ward off the flies and maggots. This kind of slows down the natural cycle, but this is a descent compromise solution. So stirring the pile becomes really important to provide good ventilation to get the compost cycle going. Dry leaves may not be so common thing in the urban setting where trees tend to waste precious square feet, so you could substitute it with newspaper despite the ink to give the pile some variety and to suck the wetness out. But we got some help from the sweepers who would supply some dry leaves once in a while. Imagine if the apartment was doing it for the inhabitants - they could have made some money out of it. But the square feets of land are expensive and they find lawns more attractive wherever you find some space!

We also bought a leave-it-pot where you can leave the semi ready compost to degenerate into compost fully. Dailydump delivered it at home, a painted one, which looks odd among our terracotta pots and khamba. In fact they send a person(INR 200 for a visit) to help us sort out issues. Now we moved everything to a corner of our terrace which would give it more ventillation but needs some cover when it rains. It makes the kitchen and work area pretty clean and the flies are pretty much contained as well. And the first dump of compost is getting ready in the leave-it-pot and should be ready in couple of weeks I guess!

But it is worth a shot if you are worried about urban waste(watch that video again), especially if you realize that it will be dumped elsewhere, not recycled or composted elsewhere.You immediately see a drastic reduction in the waste that was dumped outside earlier. You don't really need the plastic bag everyday to prevent the leechate from the degradable waste anymore and it doesn't need to go out every morning! It is no more messy as earlier which makes it easier to find reusable stuff in it. And think about the compost for the plants in a couple of months from now - it sounds definitely worth the trouble.

Composting at Home

Finally bought a composting equipment, Khamba, designed and manufactured by DailyDump for the needs of a home with 2-4 people. While we were planning to visit the nearest DailyDump dealer, Bimba the Art Hut, we found out that the online Garden supplier, GardenGiga, was selling it in their online shop. GardenGiga is a new venture who is aspiring to be a one-stop place for all your Garden accesories. They are not there yet, but they have plans to connect all kinds of suppliers to the consumers through their portal.

It was delivered home last weekend and we figured out the stuff by going through their manual and DailyDump website. The Khamba has 3 separate terracotta vessels stacked on top. The top two vessels can be interchanged once the top one fills up. The bottom one keeps the semi-compost after it has been cycled through the top and middle vessels.

We have placed the Khamba in our utility area so that we can dump things pretty easily to it and there is good ventilation in the area as well. But the lid seems to be a bit heavy for frequent use and being a terracotta one, it needs some careful handling. I guess some of the other varieties have a small lid in the center of the big one which makes it easy to open and put stuff inside. This is indeed one of the problems of shopping online for things that you are not very familiar with. The online vendors typically are middlement connecting the real vendors and the consumers and they may not have a shop where you can check things out. But it will be very useful for garden supplies that you need regularly to place an order online and get delivered home.

So we have started dumping kitchen waste into it, but we may need some supplies(dried leaves etc.) to get going fully. We are also wondering how the cockroaches around will find the new place where they can get stuff. The vessels don't fit very tightly(may be by design for ventilation) and the cockroaches could get in easily. But then the idea is to compost it naturally - so a bit of cockroaches and flies could help the composting go well!

It does look pretty doable at home with little bit of work and if you have a garden, it should be worth the trouble to get some compost recycling your kitc.