Monday, October 22, 2012

Composting in an apartment

We are not here to persuade others, we are here to live our truths.

Just live the way you want to.  Others can think, do or say what they want, but in the end, you had your freedom.  You chose your path.  Nothing else really matters.

I'm learning this lesson, even if I haven't fully embraced it as of yet.

I live in an apartment in Pune, a nice community.  I have started experimenting with growing greens and other vegetables purchased from the supermarket.  I bought some soil and pots the other day and started planting different plants - beet root, cilantro, amaranth, curry leaves and sweet potato.

The amaranth and the curry leaves had no roots attached, I was hoping that if I put them into a bowl of water, that maybe they would grow some??  I was hoping.  They have been sitting in this bowl of water for a few days now, but mostly they are just shriveling or getting a bit soggy .. on some of the lower leaves.  I know it was a bit of a stretch! But I wanted to see if it would work.

Also yesterday I was cutting up a pomegranate  it was looking a little past its date, it still tasted fine, but I decided that maybe I could try to feed it to the birds.

Right after I set it outside on my balcony, I saw this really cool black bird, I haven't seen before, it had a bit of crest on it's head, sooo cute!  I have no idea what it was.  I got really excited that maybe my pomegranate had brought him around.  I know that typically people put out grains and seeds or nectar for birds, but when I'm at the farm, I always see birds pecking away at all sorts of fruits on the trees.

Anyway, I was disappointed to see today that my whole plate of pomegranate seeds were still lying on the balcony, it didn't look so much like any thing had really touched it.  I guess in the future I will need to be more diligent about watching it, to see if anything would come!

I've also started doing my best to not throw plastic away or plastic bags, this includes no using plastic as linings in my trash cans.  The main challenge is how dirty the compost bucket gets, and a little fruit fly dilemma, but its not really enough for me to want to change my habits, even as I have my brother and sister in laws living at home :). Even though, they seem pretty cool with all of my crazy experiments.

My solution for fruit flies, is keeping my compost bucket on the porch, and open to the air.  Let the flies have at it! As long as they aren't inundating my kitchen, I'm totally cool.  Plus, the Indian sun, is great at drying stuff out, so it really helps dry out any kind of fruits or anything wet in the compost bucket, which normally might pick up a bit of a smell.

We are pretty lucky in my building, they do pick up trash and they pick up compost separately.

Actually our building is doing a lot to be a little more 'sustainable' I guess you could say.  They recycle all of their water.  They use solar heating for the showers, we are always have hot water ps.  The engineering on that one was really well thought out!  Especially since we have 10 floors and 3 families per floor.  That's a lot of hot water for showers available!

We also have a decent amount of green space which is nice- gardens between the buildings along with trees and grass, which is impressive because underneath the terraces is the garage for the whole complex.

There is no central heat or AC, not really different from the rest of India, but I find it a good thing because then people can save electricity by either having individual units for whatever room they are in, or they can have more energy efficient systems, such as 'breeze air'.  A technology from Australia which my mother in law uses.  I'm not exactly sure how it works, but it's much more efficient and it easily cools the whole house.

The need for any kind of heat in this place, is pretty much zero.

So I've also been experimenting with placing all of my green leafy (dry compost) compost just directly in my potted plants.  I have a few potted plants, which came from my mother in law.  A few of them I recognize, but my recognizing plant abilities is pretty limited to one region of the world, unincluding house varieties.  That region is the middle of the Uinta Basin in Utah.  Lol, which those plants, I would be very surprised to see them anywhere else.  Mostly it consists of desert shrubs.

The one thing that looks promising, in my little experimental plantings is actually the cilantro.  In the beginning it was looking pretty sad, and the biggest stalk was all the way leaned over on the side of the pot.

Yesterday I noticed that it had actually perked up a bit!  That it was no longer leaning on the side but actually had lifted itself up!  It was pretty incredible.  Even if I have one success story from my little experiments. I could be happy with that!

I have also let my passion fruit seeds aside in a little bowl of water to ferment a bit.  I am just guessing that that is what needed to be done with them.  Because I know with tomato seeds, that's what you have to do.  The passion fruit seeds now have a little layer of mold on top, so now I'm wondering if that means they should be ready or if I should mix them up a bit and see if the seeds have dis-attached to the fruit? :) I will check it out later, and let you know how it all worked out!


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