Holistic Gardening: Composting kitchen scraps (uncooked)

Home Composting (Aerobic)

Materials required:

· A perforated container.

· Brown matter(carbon): Dried leaves, unbleached, uncoloured, unlaminated cardboard pieces, saw dust, cocopeat, dry soil, sand, peanut shells, rice husk etc.

· Green matter(nitrogen): Fresh veggie peels and fruit peels (except strong acidic peels like citrus, lemon, chillies, onions, garlic and ginger)

· Whatever the peel other than the above, chop it finely and thoroughly before adding it to the compost. Eggshells are to be crushed before adding them to the compost. Coffee grounds, tea powder works well with composting. You may also add hair and nails.

· Never add meat, bones, dairy products and heavily coated paper. You may add white papers but not printed papers as it may contain lead.

· If you are not able to get brown matter, you may get some soft coconut fiber, tear them to tiny chunks and put them in a mixer grinder to make it a fine powder. This can be added to the compost.

· Maintain moisture of the compost and do check it regularly...every day.

· Optional Materials Required:

o Ash (Adding ash to compost enrich the quality of the compost, maintains alkalinity. Bakeries are good sources of ash.

o Charcoal: Acts like sponge absorbing extra moisture also has the ability to store nutrients and release them slowly when added to the soil. Iron wallas are good source of charcoals.

o Sour buttermilk: Improves and increases the microbial activity. You may sprinkle butter milk to increase the rate of composting.

· Procedure:

o Put a layer of carbon/brown matter (oddly shaped twigs,coconut fibre,etc. To form the bottom most layer of the container).

o To the wet kitchen waste (that is drained of all excess water), add half its volume of ‘browns’. Mix well and make sure that the resulting mater is moist and not soggy.

o Add this to the container and cover with thin layer of browns and leave it alone. This layer prevents files from sitting on the pile.

o Repeat the step 2 and 3 every day.

o Stir the pile as often as you can to allow a lot of air.

o When the first container gets full, prepare another container and follow the same procedure.

o Keep stirring the compost pile in the first container throughout the process. The pile will become hot in its initial phase.

o By the time the second container becomes full, it is possible that the first pile cools down and the contents look dark and half composted. Partly composted matter is not messy to handle and can be transferred into a plastic or a jute sack for further composting making the container available for a fresh batch. Or, if you have more containers to spare, keep using newer ones to start the process and retain the compost in the bin until all of it is completely done.

o Sieve the contents and add the big pieces that need to break down further to a next batch of waste for composting.