Friday, December 2, 2011

Composting diary - troubleshooting

Just as I was feeling smug about my trouble-free khamba debut, I ran into my first "trouble".  I had not checked on the bottom-most, empty (thus far) pot, since it was well empty, no?

With two pots filled with composting garbage, it was time for the semi-composted middle pot to move to the lower pot.  When I peered into it, it was far from empty - it was filled halfway with water, and there were maggots swimming merrily in the watery sludge - EWWWWWW!  The water was rain water, which I should have realised would have entered via the side openings when we had our monsoonic depression and heavy wind and rain last week.

Emergency action!  Take the pot down slosh it all out, clean well and sun!

That was yesterday.  So, today I went and refilled it (dry and clean) with a little sand at the bottom.  This is Unit C.  Moved the dry, semi-composted Unit A stuff into it and moved Unit B above it.  With all the rains, Unit B is more wet than I like - it will definitely breed more maggots, so I have added more dry leaf.  Let me see if this works.

Should add even more dry leaf tomorrow I think.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks Arati! The correction seems to be working. The trick I guess is to keep it dry...

    ReplyDelete
  2. ha ha ha, oops! Corrected. You should have read it earlier!

    ReplyDelete

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