I would recommend composting for my own personal reasons. The most important one for me is that I recycle what comes out from my garden and give it back to the soil again. So the cut grass, the fallen leaves, dried stems, to me giving them back to the soil is a perfect way to rotate and what is close to life. Composting seems a concentrated and intelligent way to do that.
I did mulch , i.e. piled the dried leaves almost all over the cultivated ground. I was new to mulching and seen some beneficial effects of it, also I wanted to find a way to hold moisture in the hot summer. With the coming of the monsoon and a change in my own mental state, I find that I want to clean up the mulch. I read somewhere that rotting leaves ( in the summer, the leaves are usually dry but not really rotting as much as now) cause fungal infections in plants . I have not yet been able to handle the insect damage to plants. Anyways, I dont need to hold water in the next few months and the mulch is getting cleared out in pieces. I find that yes, the soil in the uncovered patches are softer and look richer. Nice.
I found this nice video of easy composting here –
My experience has been great. I did a 4 feet high cylindrical composting bin with plastic mesh. Easy to maintain. I found initially to my amazement that all the garden waste that goes into it shrinks to half its size in a couple of days. Right now, the same bin has soaked in most of my garden leavings ( dont like this word – waste. what waster? ) for the last 6 months. Its amazing. Also, it is a place where I have had couple of mango saplings and Papaya seeds sprout and grow into plants ! Amazing, I was thrilled with the mango seeds that I had put in the bin via my kitchen collections, come up! To me to have seeds in the compost bin sprout is a thrill, but it may not be for others. One disadvantage that I do not know how to overcome is that there does not seem to be a way to collect the compost from the bottom! So mine is a sort of permanent compost sink !
My latest venture is to order for a plastic compost bin – yeah, plastic 😦 – from a local vendor. Waiting for it to arrive. Apparently it uses composting bacteria and also has an opening at the bottom to bring out the compost.
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