Home Made Dhoop Cones

“The Earth is the only mother we all have in common-she needs love, care, and respect. Stop abusing mother Earth”

The bug of refuse reduces, recycles, and reduces bit me long age. My room, my balcony, and my puppet workstation are more or else like a garbage collecting place wherein one can find right from plastic biscuit wrappers, covers, caps, and nozzles, to plastic bottles, carton boxes to old rags, and so on for my puppet making. To this now add up used flowers, fruit peels, vegetable peels, and green leafy vegetables, and the list adds up. What do they have to do with puppet building? Anything like organic puppets with flowers and fruits?? Sounds good!! Hopefully, maybe that day would also be not far away.

Well, this was during one of the puppet's shows on World Earth Day 6 years ago, a little child asked my Puppet-the main character Challamma-, “Hey Chellamma. Are you practicing all the 4Rs you want us to follow?” This was a kind of slap given to me. I was not fully practicing, but was using cloth bags and using waste materials for my puppet-making. Still, I felt I need to explore and reduce waste or recycle it. The thought of recycling did recycle in my mind. After many days of observations, I noticed that as a householder I am contributing a lot of domestic kitchen waste like flowers and fruits in the garbage adding to the landfill. Here my journey to explore started. One was using them and turning them into compost. I did start with it. Initially, I was feeling happy that now I am less abusing mother Earth.

I live in an apartment with poor natural light. Lack of knowledge of home gardening made me unsuccessful in maintaining the plants in my pots. Nevertheless, I gave the ready mix of good homemade compost for the apartment gardening committee to use it. Felt like doing a good job! Now, the compost buckets were getting filled up and I needed to re-transfer into a bigger tub or barrel or so for compost curing. This is becoming difficult though but still, I m doing it. What is the BlogSpot on Homemade Dhoop Cones all about??

Then, it was during a Sri Lanka trip I met a wonderful woman whom I fondly call as Muddu Krishna. She is into homemade making things right from KumKum (Red Vermillion powder used in India for Pooja and also for applying as Sindhoor on the forehead), Turmeric powder from raw turmeric roots, face moisturizing creams, and so on. I got to know that she also does Dhoop cones. She then suggested me watch a couple videos on YouTube and think of going on. Well, there is where I made my start. I browsed most of the agarbatti (incense sticks) making videos that talk about the use of Charcoal and other chemicals for igniting and binding. The quest started in making organic and no charcoal and no chemicals or less of the chemicals only if necessary. I initially started with flowers used for pooja. Collected, dried, and blended them into a fine powder mix. With some guidance from my mother who said this was practiced even by my grandmother for special occasions, I started adding two more ingredients like Jatamasi and gugilam or gugal.

Then, I started making conical-shaped cones called Dhoop Cones. Still not to that perfection kind. I started adding some frankincense - an aromatic gum resin to act as a binder. This is how I started with. Then explored making it with lemon peels and orange peels. Then started collecting all the vegetable peels, onion and garlic skin peels, and stuff. Started drying them on my balcony. Turning them into different varieties of dhoop cones. They are now in demand as they are acting as good mosquito and insect repellents. The space is small but still, I would like to go with it as it is giving me good results and feeling happy that I am not adding domestic kitchen waste to the garbage bin. I am now bringing awareness to stop abusing mother Earth by teaching to do homemade Dhoop cones with minimum things. Earlier I did one-to-one teaching of the same. Thanks to the Covid Pandemic in a way that I could conduct some online teachings of the same and continue to do the same till the situation returns to normal. My neighbors are now learning the same and have joined with me in this campaign of “clean drive Stop abusing mother Earth”