No (monetary) cost fertilizer

Our garden lab next door is the best lab that I could have got since the soil there is of poor quality and I have to figure out ways to make it fertile. I already use urine occasionally and compost from the kitchen also helps. Once in a while, a generous neighbor provides us with sheep-shit. Even with all this, the soil still needs nurturing.

Whenever my aunt or grandmom is in town, I never lose a chance to ask them about new (or should I say old?) techniques to rejenuvate the earth. My aunt happily shared this simple method that involves using Neem, ಹೊಂಗೆ - Honge (Pongamia Pinnata), ಎಕ್ಕೆ - Ekke (Calotropis_procera) and cowdung buried under a thin layer of soil for about 3 to 4 months.
Neem is known to have medicinal properties, Honge is good manure and cowdung hastens the composting process. I am yet to figure out Ekke's purpose. As we were preparing the compost pit, my dad mentioned that Ekke is usually used in paddy fields also.

My 16-yr old cousin is in town for her holidays and I found her to be of great help in the garden as we implemented the above technique (pictures below). She has a close connection with the land as she spends most of her holidays on her grandmom's farm and the effect shows!

Neem and Honge from the trees outside our home

Ekke from the plant near our house

Ready for enrichment

adding honge

adding neem

ekke and cowdung slurry from the street

covering with soil 

I prepaid for her help by facilitating her introduction to the internet, google search and gmail. It was fascinating to see her wonder at her discoveries as she saw her school, created her email id and searched how to make neem oil, for a start. The fact that she studied in Kannada medium and was using the computer for the first time did not matter at all. It made me wonder if all we need to teach them is how to ask questions - Why, Who, How, What, When - and then give them freedom, space and the tools to find answers; and then they will take care of themselves!



Photographs by Varsha - she was using an SLR for the first time.

The elusive tea-like compost.. not anymore

After months of patience and trying to deal with maggots, I finally harvested tea-like compost from our kitchen waste using DailyDump.

I had started using DailyDump quite some time back, but had given up at the last step many times as I could not stand the sight of maggots, but over time, managed to convince myself that they are also doing their job. The thought of using 'home-made' compost for our plants kept me going as I finally transfered contents from the pots and sieved them using the crude sieve that dad made for me on my request. The remaining stuff after sieving has been kept away for aging and further decomposition.

One of the pots had rich, black, powdery compost at the bottom, but it also had too many maggots - more than what I could handle. So, had to bring in dad for disaster management. We picked up half the compost and threw away the remaining half to road side plants. Seemed ironical that the best compost also had the most number of maggots.

Here's the story in pictures.

1. Our handy little kitchen-waste bowl. Almost all our vegetable waste after cutting/peeling goes directly into DailyDump saving the need for a separate bin.

2. Before and after sieving.

3. Compost of different ages.

4. Packed and ready to be gifted to neighbors (possibly next adopters of Daily Dump)

Thanks to the handy tips from Deb and a whole lot of info, FAQ and trouble shooting help from Daily Dump, I finally cracked it! All said and done, the right procedure that suits our family can only come from our own experience.

With some chilli powder for the maggots, dry leaves and saw dust for the right moisture, vinegar for the ants and a mouse trap for the rat that eats away our earthworms, the next harvesting experience should be much better!