Composting

One of the many efforts which we can take is to make our own composting for our plants in the garden. There are a large no. of articles on the web which give a guideline about how to do it. Following those, I also got into making my own compost bucket. So I took a plastic bucket and started putting the daily organic waste in the bucket. This included banana skin, cauliflower remains, skin of peas, onion skins, leaves which I cut from other plants etc. and other kitchen waste which used to be thrown in the daily waste. The bucket looked like this -


After a couple of days I added some dry soil to this basket and added a little water to make the mixture a little moist. Then as days passed, I kept adding kitchen waste and water to the basket, occasionally mixing it to make the mixture homogeneous. After about a month, the process has led to a nice mixture of compost. Look at this -

I have used some of it now for my plants and hope it shows good results. I will surely put the results of this on this blog. But I urge all of you to try this at home and help reduce environment pollution. The kitchen waste which is deposited in dumping grounds and landfills gives rise to methane which is a very harmful greenhouse gas. If we spread this info to each and every house in our neighborhood, think of how much methane can be avoided. So spread the word fast and happy composting.

Rain water harvesting

I am aware that it has been a very long time since I posted on this blog. But the reason is that one of my friends who is in the US disheartened me in a big way. He is planning to put up a poultry farm in Hindustan. I just pricked him saying that livestock and poultry is a major contributor to global warming. And he replied saying that "though this is true, his not putting the farm will not stop global warming. Cars and a/c contribute a lot too, but are we going to quit using them? The biggest contributors are the huge huge factories, power plants and industries which are causing global warming and a change in those will start the reversing effect. Common man like you and me can't do much about it and should not worry about it. Don't get me started on this as I can go on and on forever." I was astounded. I had no argument. I had faced a counter-view for the first time and had no statistical data to prove myself at that moment. Also, I felt it was not worth putting the facts. But I had to be ready when I face this again. So I made some quick googles and found many many sites giving data which is evidence that transportation fuels are 15-20 % contributors to the green house gases. And this is a very big number, showing that we all can contribute to climate change in a big way.

So here I am with a fresh new post which has been pending since monsoon, and I had mentioned about the irony in my previous post. The irony was that it was raining heavily here in Mumbai, but there was water shortage and the municipal water supply was cut on the same day. All the daily washing had got stocked up and I could not digest the great irony. I decided to harvest the rain water. I tied a couple of buckets to my window and water started dropping in the buckets which was dripping off the sunroofs on the window.

And in just 5 minutes, both the buckets were full. I syphoned the water out into another bigger bucket and let the process to continue. And you would not believe that within a matter of 20 mins., I had harvested water enough for 1 full bucket load of washing. M was very thrilled and took up to wash the clothes. In another 20 mins, water was ready for washing the utensils and my mom took up the washing of utensils. The entire work got done in a matter of 1 hour and I was very very happy.

I started imagining if everyone of us does it daily in the monsoon, how much of water would be saved for days in summer when there is a shortage of water. Really, water is a very precious resource and it is the duty of every human being to save and conserve water. The way water conservation leads to slowing of global warming can be read here - http://www.weatherset.com/Explain/SlowGlobalWarming.html. I would like to request you all to suggest more ways of water conservation and your own experiences with it in the comments section below.