Composting ..... and a blissful afternoon

It had been a long long time since we worked with our compost. These days we do all our composting activities in the terrace .... yah! we have that luxury now! It really seems a luxury to me as we don't need to keep watch of the line of ants or maggots scrawling inside our living room, and mugs full of leaches coming out of the bin along with the stinking smell (specially when it rains heavily) ..... we had to tackle all these when we had our bins in the balcony adjacent of the living area in our earlier apartment. We even got a beehive once inside the composter :)

These bees made their hive inside a composting pot .... are not they very cute?

Now after a reasonably long experience of composting, we follow the mantra "let it be.....". That has became much easier after we shifted the whole system to the terrace. The maggots are creating waves of life (literally) inside the bin ..... let it be! The ants have chosen the cozy, cool interior of the big earthen composter as their maternity home ..... let it be! Rodents are visiting every night .... fine! The mix is not so balanced as the weather is very humid .... okay .... let it be! ... all of these are perfectly natural!  life has became so simple when we just accept it ... as it is!



Okay .... as it was raining madly in Bangalore this year for last couple of months we got no chance to empty our earthen khamba where the compost spent its last days of maturity. It was full to the rim. So when all the possible storage for our kitchen wastes were full and are waiting to go to there final resting place we had to act fast! Luckily the rain god listen to us and we got a beautiful sunny day .... nice and warm. We went to the terrace and emptied the pot on floor.

OMG ..... there were hundreds thousands lakhs and lakhs of ants running in every directions with their precious eggs in mouth which looks exactly like puffed rice. These ants are nice little creatures and the nice thing about them is that they never bite .... well, almost.

We realized that they need a little time to settle down and move their babies to some other safe place .... so decided to left them alone and come back in the afternoon for the final compost collection. The weather was very humid for a couple of months and the bin left untouched for a considerable period of time ... so the composts were all in chunks and wet but well matured. We spread them nicely on a sheet of plastic to dry out a bit.

We came back in the afternoon ... it was a beautiful day with lots of sunshine and that really helped the pile to be perfectly ready for sieving. For the ants .... almost half of them were gone, a good number of them were moving around frantically ....still undecided! And a few of them were trying to hide themselves under the cooler part of the compost .... as much as they can! That reminds me of the old nice "Tale of the three fishes" from Panchatantra!
Oh .... there was another guest .... she was "Shreemati Kakkeshwar kuchkuche".... the lady "dondobayas" who visits the birdbath almost everyday for a leisure lunch and a quick after-bath (will tell that story some other time).

Now the lady crow was busy eating .... mostly the ant-eggs and the dried maggots ..... indeed very protein rich food! After all she is a new mother nanny of three very demanding new-born koel babies! poor girl!

Back to the compost ..... now the job was to crumble the chunks by hand and break them as much as possible and sieve.

well! This is not a "must to do" step .... you can use the compost as it is but this step gives me a sense of fulfillment! As it was a huge pile it took almost two hours to finish everything. Though it was little messy with all the ants crawling in every directions but the fresh earthy smell of that black gold were giving back lots of positive energy. The neat look of the pile after sieving gives a feeling of accomplishment.  At the end of the day we got around 13-14 kg of fine compost and two pot full of half composted materiel that could not stand the sieve test.

 They went back to the big earthen pot again along with the freshly added kitchen wastes to aid in quick composting.

We came down covered with dust ....... a hot shower followed by Sanjit's special "Balawant Singh ka chaye" (special mashala milk tea) were all that was needed then ........