The Composting Story - Part 1

It has been a very long time since I posted here.  Oh well!  Life takes various twists and turns, sometimes real life intrudes into one's virtual presence.  Some of that is pleasant, other stuff not so welcome.  What I am going to talk about here is about some exciting times I have been having over the past few months.  

My hobbies keep changing with the season.  The flavour of the season around the end of last year was bird watching.  Suddenly, a trip to Goa added one more flavour.  No not feni, nor vindaloo.  It was this sudden craze for composting.  Have been thinking of it for a while and also been practising it in some rudimentary form till now.

This is how I used to do it before.  I used to mash up all the kitchen waste in a blender and add it to the wash water from my RO filter and water all my plants with the mix.  Though of late folks have been telling me that RO water is not good for the plants due to high salt content, I did not notice any deleterious effect on my plants at that time.

On a trip to Goa, I noticed my cousin using a khamba (which I had heard about vaguely earlier but not spared much of a thought to) and was really impressed.  So I decided to go hammer and tongs into home composting.

I live in an apartment complex on the third floor and have 3 balconies.  My front and side balconies have always had a lot of plants - mostly show plants and flowering (not that they flowered very profusely, but I did get some flowers off and on), some herbs and medicinal plants and tomatoes growing wild from the soil.  In fact this year I got almost a kilo of summer from these 'unplanted' plants.

Here is what my balcony looked like.

The entrance - front balcony

The entrance

More plants at the entrance

 

 Bone setter (also called hadjod) - used in Ayurveda to heal broken bones 

Bishops weed or Ajwain

 Tomatoes in my balcony

 Ripening tomatoes

Jasmine blooming in the side balcony

Hibuscus

Harvested tomatoes (grown from discarded seeds from the kitchen)

On a good day

So this is what my garden was like until I decided I wanted to grow more vegetables.  Anyway, the flowers I got were few and far between - one can't expect more on the 3rd floor of an apartment block.  The joy of getting occasional flowers or fruits, however, made me decide I was going to try my hand at organic vegetables.

......to be continued here