In our previous articles on compost, we emphasised the fact that it is always a win-win situation for any gardener to get an organic harvest, and that too with minimal expenditure of resources. Even for a home-based gardener, commercial purchases from seed stores, plant shops and nurseries can sometimes be an expensive buy, which can lead to a produce that is far more costly than that available in the market.

Those who are not willing to spend more on the concept of organic produce, begin to doubt and question their intentions while growing food at home. In such cases, demotivation starts creeping in. But what if I told you that not only can you easily prepare your compost easily at home but most importantly, with almost negligible associated cost, if any?

All that can be done at home makes gardening, usage of its by-products and even preparation of all those gardening supporting materials inclusive of fertilisers, composts and pesticides, all so interesting and rewarding at the same time. The only valuable resource needed is your time early on, while collecting raw materials for compost preparation and piling it up. Hardly half an hour would be enough every week to tweak your pile of compost being prepared. Let Mother Nature take it from there.

In our article on kitchen scrap compost, we provided you with an outline of how you can easily prepare compost at home with all your kitchen scraps. The concept of brown and green parts of compost, what items would be needed and used in the preparation, and finally, what measures, precautions and steps are needed to finally achieve the earthy-smelling fine compost for your plants were all discussed.

Preparing compost — which may be heavy on the wallet — can be easily done at home, that too at a neglegible cost

If you are part of a small, four- to five-member family or even less, then even collecting kitchen scraps can be a highly daunting and uphill task. The time required to collect enough ingredients to start the procedure also lengthens which results in the items being in different stages of decomposition and a stench that would not only irritate you but also your family and neighbours. The goal is not only to collect all the required kitchen scraps that make up all the nutritious elements of compost but also to do it timely. The collection should be done in such a manner that it takes less time and is inexpensive as well.

Other than collecting and using your own kitchen’s scraps, here are some of the very common, free or negligibly priced places where you can easily get the items required to prepare organic compost at home for your plants.

For the green part of the compost, items like potato peels can be picked up from the French fries stalls. Similarly, peels of other vegetables are available from fresh salad sellers, food sellers and restaurants. They readily give it away for free because it saves them the energy and expense of going and disposing of it themselves in nearby garbage-collector bins. Juice shops and ice depots selling milk-shakes, smoothies and fresh juices of fruits are a good option to get free peels and pulp residue after juicing various fruits for your compost. At the end of the day, a tired fruit or vegetable seller would find it more convenient to hand over the rotten fruits and vegetables to you rather than discarding them himself. Finally, roadside food kiosks selling bun-kebab, along with stalls and restaurants selling tea and other items for breakfast, can be a good resource to collect eggshells and used tea leaves. Tea leaves, in this case, need to be washed as they are prepared with milk to reduce chances of any fungal activity while preparing compost. Coffee café and bistros are more than happy to provide you with used coffee grounds too.

For the brown part of the compost, the items required are a little different, and you may need to visit places that are not directly related to food. For instance, you can get bags full of wood shavings from any local carpenter. Similarly, wood ash can be acquired from any wood-based roadside tandoor (clay oven) or even from hot chickpeas- and maize-selling carts.

Finally, the easiest of all items for the brown compost would be collecting dried and brown fallen leaves from around the trees growing in your vicinity. You may look for these dried leaves on the pavement or in a park. You may even contact the management of any nearby school, college, university, hotel or hospital while requesting that they hand over the dried leaves weekly or monthly in a bag provided by you. Your interpersonal skills, rather than your gardening ones, may come in handy. For starters, you may even lure them in with a bag of fresh, organic harvest from your garden!

Please send your queries and emails to doctree101@hotmail.com. The writer is a physician and a host for the YouTube channel ‘DocTree Gardening’ promoting organic kitchen gardening

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 6th, 2023