Home made Compost

Talking about design to a group of 22-year-old students the other day, I was again reminded of how distant and unconnected we feel with materials. Objects matter more. What an object is made of, or the process or life of it, is not something we pay attention to. The fruit we see, the soil it grows from, not so much.

An engineer at a steel plant who is fascinated by the way steel melts, forms, flows, cools has some resonance with his buyer who can understand his love for steel. They both have some interest in the same material.

The 22-year-old shrugs and says, what use is home composting to me?

And rightly so.

For her, it seems a waste of time to learn. She does not garden, she is busy studying and most probably she lives in a hostel or PG.

This is the reason when I began Daily Dump I did not focus on gourmet compost to grow food but compost as the safer, greener way to live in a dense city.

I had gone for advice to senior agricultural scientists with the Daily Dump idea, and all of them had said it was not viable and the quality of compost would be inferior and useless.

I saw it differently...

To me throwing compost out was better for everyone than throwing mixed waste.

So initially we would not talk about using home produced compost in the garden, because we were worried the pundits would pooh-pooh the idea, and boy, we are no agriculturists.

I had designed a product called the Gamla composter with herbs growing around the composting central tower. One very passionate gardener said the heat from the composting tower in the center would stress the roots of the plants and was very shocked that I could put a product like that out as a gardening cum composting one. This was 13 years ago. So I stopped selling those.

I know now, that the waste volumes in the central cannot produce much heat. But I have yet to put that product back in the market.

It was around 10 years ago when we understood composting at home better, that we began to talk about using the compost in the garden to grow explicitly.

Gardening was also growing as a trend in our city. It was the new "cool" thing to do. We learnt there were so many organic ways to produce high quality enriched compost for serious gardeners.

We did not have the appetite for setting up a lab and investing in infrastructure to make large volumes of enriched organic compost. So we just collected compost from our community customers, handpicked out the plastic from the piles and then sieved to pack and sell to small home gardeners.

And in the process, we have found that...

1. Home made compost is better to throw out than mixed waste. If you eat, try and support composting or do composting. If you cannot begin with organic waste composting, at least begin with garden waste composting. See the impact of this here in this visual:

2. Making compost at home is growing as a global habit. The connection of compost to good soil and to carbon sequestering is changing the way we will continue to look at organic waste streams.

3. Home made compost if made with cocopeat as the carbon additive doubles up as potting mixture.

4. Home made compost is enriched by the addition of diverse kinds of waste. Like fish bones, fish waste, egg shells, banana peels, rock dust, ash, coffee grounds, tea leaves and leaves.

5. Home made leaf compost is excellent for lawns, it has few seeds that will sprout unexpectedly.

6. Home made compost tea is excellent for plants as liquid fertilizer.

7. Home made compost is enriched by addition of Panchgavya.

8. Home made compost is ideal for all indoor plants that are not edible.

9. Home made compost if created in lower temperatures may have seeds that will grow into surprise plants, like tomato, mango etc.

10. Home made compost is best used after 3 months from the date of harvest.

Most folks do not want to wait that long...

But mature homemade compost is really special for plants.

You can use it as soon as you harvest, but we do not recommend this for edible plants. For indoor plants this is fine.

So if you want to have compost to lab standards, home made compost is not for you. If you want to revitalize your soil, grow urban gardens, nourish your soil with organic matter, and make sure you stop throwing out mixed waste, then home composting is the way to go. You can do both you know!

Daily Dump helps customers close the loop of food to food.

Never tried composting at home? See how simple it is!

Poonam Bir Kasturi

Bangalore