Background : I live in southern part of India. To start with i dont belong to a farming family or have any knowledge in gardening apart from growing a some vegetable and rose plants during my youth. But i was always passionate about having plants and knowing them. Of late i become aware of organic gardening / farming practices. My interest starting beaming again when i settled down in my own home . The details of which i will reveal in the following post.
I live in a 60X40 individual house. Where most of the space is constructed. Since i bought this house i have no control over the structure of this. Around the build up structure there is a patch of 2.5 feet soil , see the pic below.
From the above you can see that how small the available area for garden. But i was confident bcz people with much smaller area and apartment balcony's were able to grow something.
The second big problem is the sunlight , because of the tall buildings on both sides makes availability of sun light very minimal on both side patches. Only the south side patch receives sunlight all day. All the though about sunlight actually happened to me later. Currently i'm aware of the limitations.
Before we moved into this house there were lot of weeds in this patch. Also there was some flowering creepers in the fence above our small compound wall all around. When we moved in we removed the creepers on 3 sides apart front side. When we removed this plants and weeds i didnt throw them away , i made small pits in the mud patch and buried these organic matter. I was atleast aware that organic matter make good manure when compost. So these become the starting nutrients for my garden. We planted a drumstick tree in the south west corner before moved into the house.
I started with greens, tomatoes, chillies all around . The plants in the south patch showed good progress , east and west sides nothing much to say. But chiles started having fungal infection (i was not aware at that time it was fungal infection) , the leaves started curling and anybody can say they are sick. The didn't gave any harvest.
I started loosing hope. I tried a Broad beans (Avarai in Tamil) in the south east corner where there is always good sunlight and also i buried lot of organic matter in this spot earlier. Since its a climber, we put a simple structure for it to grow. To my amaze it was growing healthy , i put the same seed in the north west corner of the patch as well. There was a wire fence on my compound wall. This plant used that to grow.
Both the places the beans had a great growth, but no beans . I started worrying . My grand mother told me , still its not season. Imm, we waited. They started flowering . Curiosity grow within. In a months time there were lot of flower and beans everywhere. In a short time it started pouring beans in our house. Also started pests and infections in beans.
I never wanted to use chemical pesticides, so i bought some thing called 'PanchaVakya' the organic magic produced from cow based ingredients (more about this later) . It really worked well, the pests and diseases were kept in bay. But the chillies didnt improved may be because of other problems which i was not able to figure out.
After couple of months of harvest , the produce started coming down. The plant was aging , time to remove. Removed the plant. Now a few feet from the broad bean corner towards west we planted rib gourd . This too was a creeper. A little improved over head structure was placed for this plant. Within a month it started flowering. Within 2 months we started getting vegetables.
The plant really started growing well , covered an area of about 4' X 6' . The vegetable from flower to full growth take atmost 6-7 days. After that i becomes hard. So need to be cooked during this stage. We make a side dish for our breakfast with this vegetable. This is cooked as a curry for lunch as well. So we consumed a lot of this during that period. Of course we distributed this to our neighbors as well. During the same time i planted a bottle guard on the west side patch . This patch gets sunlight for about 3-4 hours . This plant as well is a creeper , i made a over head structure for this as well with a small metal frame and wires.
The plant was growing very well , green and thick . But no flower or vegetable for several months. Then it started flowering . We were happy. But the vegetable didnt really grow , while they were very small , a small brown dot will appear , within days the whole vegetable will become dark brown and die out. Not even a single vegetable was produced in several months. I tried 'PanchaKavya' on this. But didnt worked. I was really not aware what this was.
So far only 2 vegetables were really successful in several months. The drumstick tree (Moringa oleifera) in the south west corner started producing large number of vegetables. We make a lot of recipes using the vegetable , leaves and flower of this tree. But there is always a problem everybody fear about having this tree at home. Seasonally the tree will attract hairy caterpillar moth . People fear when in contact with human skin , it produces rashes and irritation. People used to make a flame in a stick and burn these moth in trees. We actually found a much simpler solution to this. Just pouring soap solution on this kills them instantly.
More to come.
I live in a 60X40 individual house. Where most of the space is constructed. Since i bought this house i have no control over the structure of this. Around the build up structure there is a patch of 2.5 feet soil , see the pic below.
The second big problem is the sunlight , because of the tall buildings on both sides makes availability of sun light very minimal on both side patches. Only the south side patch receives sunlight all day. All the though about sunlight actually happened to me later. Currently i'm aware of the limitations.
Before we moved into this house there were lot of weeds in this patch. Also there was some flowering creepers in the fence above our small compound wall all around. When we moved in we removed the creepers on 3 sides apart front side. When we removed this plants and weeds i didnt throw them away , i made small pits in the mud patch and buried these organic matter. I was atleast aware that organic matter make good manure when compost. So these become the starting nutrients for my garden. We planted a drumstick tree in the south west corner before moved into the house.
I started with greens, tomatoes, chillies all around . The plants in the south patch showed good progress , east and west sides nothing much to say. But chiles started having fungal infection (i was not aware at that time it was fungal infection) , the leaves started curling and anybody can say they are sick. The didn't gave any harvest.
I started loosing hope. I tried a Broad beans (Avarai in Tamil) in the south east corner where there is always good sunlight and also i buried lot of organic matter in this spot earlier. Since its a climber, we put a simple structure for it to grow. To my amaze it was growing healthy , i put the same seed in the north west corner of the patch as well. There was a wire fence on my compound wall. This plant used that to grow.
I never wanted to use chemical pesticides, so i bought some thing called 'PanchaVakya' the organic magic produced from cow based ingredients (more about this later) . It really worked well, the pests and diseases were kept in bay. But the chillies didnt improved may be because of other problems which i was not able to figure out.
After couple of months of harvest , the produce started coming down. The plant was aging , time to remove. Removed the plant. Now a few feet from the broad bean corner towards west we planted rib gourd . This too was a creeper. A little improved over head structure was placed for this plant. Within a month it started flowering. Within 2 months we started getting vegetables.
The plant was growing very well , green and thick . But no flower or vegetable for several months. Then it started flowering . We were happy. But the vegetable didnt really grow , while they were very small , a small brown dot will appear , within days the whole vegetable will become dark brown and die out. Not even a single vegetable was produced in several months. I tried 'PanchaKavya' on this. But didnt worked. I was really not aware what this was.
So far only 2 vegetables were really successful in several months. The drumstick tree (Moringa oleifera) in the south west corner started producing large number of vegetables. We make a lot of recipes using the vegetable , leaves and flower of this tree. But there is always a problem everybody fear about having this tree at home. Seasonally the tree will attract hairy caterpillar moth . People fear when in contact with human skin , it produces rashes and irritation. People used to make a flame in a stick and burn these moth in trees. We actually found a much simpler solution to this. Just pouring soap solution on this kills them instantly.
More to come.
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