The heat is on

Its been a chaotic few days...lots of green garbage, coconut shells, sugarcane bagasse etc. accumulating on our terrace and literally raising up a stink, but somehow we were just unable to spend time and put them to good use. The planning was all perfect - we now had enough dry leaves too to be able to create a layered compost heap. However, we have found that there's many a slip betwixt planning and execution. We had a  packed weekend where we were out of the home most of the time, visiting people, running other errands and also collecting garbage, which didn't leave us time to get the garbage into a compost heap. Monday morning dawned with the breeze bringing in the stench of rotting vegetables from the rooftop - now we had to get to action - there was no more postponing.

A friend, Shivram and his wife, Rujuta came over for tea on our invitation to them to come see our garden. Rujuta barely could stand up there for a few minutes and looking at her we sensed her discomfort and quickly came downstairs for some green tea and conversations. This made us realise that maybe we had just gotten too used to handling and being around rotting veggies, so the smell did not disturb us much; however, it wasn't fair nor hygienic to expose other people to it. We will be more sensitive in future.

Tuesday dawned really early (even before the sun's rays could kiss our bedroom window) and today we didn't lose any time. The composting heap was completed on priority with dry leaves, green veggie waste and a sprinkled layer of soil alternating till we got a 3 ft. high heap. While handling the green waste, we found a garlic clove and a few spring onions and so these were planted in our existing beds too - we wonder what will happen to the spring onions - will they sprout new leaves, will they grow into full onions? Another thing to wait and watch. We had also got a few mango crates - so we prepared one of them to be able to plant some root vegetables like radish and beetroot, which need more depth than our existing beds.

Our Amrit Mitti has progressed too. After seven days of preparing the Amrit Mitti heap, we checked it and found the humidity levels just perfect - not soggy, not dry, just moist. So we decided to skip the 'turning' step and go right ahead with 'greening'. We got a mix of seeds lying with us and in our kitchen - jowar, chillies, mustard, methi, saunf, kalonji, sprouted channa, immersed them in amrit pani for 8 hours and sprinkled them on the amrit mitti heap. We also uprooted a few 'subabool' plants that had taken root in some of our beds and planted them on the amrit mitti heap. We are hoping the heap turns green soon. After about 6 days, there are signs of things sprouting, however now we feel it is very scanty - maybe we will scatter a few more seeds in the next few days. We are even toying with the idea of making another round of Amrit Pani to use for sprinkling on all our beds.

We are also seeing overwhelming acts of generosity from people - some whom we know and some whom we don't, but are getting to. Divya gave us a lovely bougainvillea shrub, which has temporarily found a home in one of our buckets till we manage to find a drum big enough for it. Urmila posted our request for old drums etc. to her contacts to which Peter (the person behind the innovative drum circle sessions in Pune) responded. So last saturday saw us landing up eagerly for a round of drumming on african djembes with Peter and a few other first-time drummers like us. This was a unique experience and we thoroughly enjoyed it, not withstanding the swollen fingers we had at the end of the energetic session. After the session, Peter took us to his factory and gave us a nice and large drum which we may plant a tree in. Kaveritai, came home on sunday and gave us a few tips on growing things useful at home - how to plant, where to keep which plant etc. She also got along a sack full of compost from her yard. Geetha called us and told us about a nursery where we could get good vegetable seeds - we visited this the very next day and have got a few things to plant for this season.

Meanwhile, we were very pleased to see pictures of our garden and read our names in the newspaper and we enthusiastically shared this with family and friends. It really motivates us to work harder on our garden.

Some things that concern us these days, which we are trying to find a solution to is the extreme heat on our terrace and what it is doing to our plants. The pumpkins, especially, droop by 12 noon and do not recover till we water them in the evening.  Meanwhile Shivram had also raised another pertinent question - rather reminded us of our plans to put up a shade (about a week back), and wondered how come we hadn't done that yet. This made us realise that we were focusing on the 'urgent' at the cost of the 'Important'. We had tried putting up a temporary shade in the form of a jute sack spread on top of sticks held in place between four bottles tied together. However, the wind played spoilsport and brought the whole thing down within minutes. So now we are back to square one and wondering what else we can do. However, now we have deiced to focus on this as an 'Important' cum 'Urgent' item and de-prioritise other things till we get this done. We are thinking of looking for bamboo/ tall sticks that we can attach to our walls and tie wires at their top ends, to criss-cross over the vegetable beds. We could then put either jute sacks stitched together or old bedsheets over these to create some kind of shade from the direct sun. So we now begin to look for things that we may be able to get from people who now no longer have use for those items - like old torn bedsheets/ curtains, sticks/ bamboos/ pvc pipes to use as poles, wire, more buckets/ drums/ large containers for planting some fruit trees. We hope to be able to provide our plants some respite from the heat, in the next week.

Onions, spring onions and cucumbers maybe?

Yesterday was another magical day. Yes, it was Gudi Padwa and Ugadi, the Maharashtrian and Telugu New Year's day. But it was magical to us for more reasons than that.

 A day before, we had met Apoorva and while talking about plants and seeds she had mentioned that if you plant a seed you would get an onion, while if you planted an onion, you would get spring onions. That really opened our eyes, ears and minds...how come we hadn't thought of it that way...it was but logical that spring onions were the younger versions of full-grown onions and all along we had thought of spring onions as some exotic cousins of our onions. So today we decided to see for ourselves - the onion bulb we had planted a while back had sprouted a whole bunch of leaves and so we slowly us around the plant with our fingers and lo - tender spring onions beckoned us. We were overjoyed and decided to treat our family to salad made from the spring onions from our garden. We also plucked a few spinach leaves to go with them. Soon our salad was ready, embelished with semi-organic strawberries (ones in which fertilizer had been used but not pesticides) that our friend Mukul had got for us from Panchgani.

It was sheer coincidence that I decided to take a closer look at one of our newer plants that has come up on its own - this has been variously identified as lauki as well as cucumber by different people. So this plant had put forth a few flowers - tiny yellow pretty things. While taking a closer look at the flower, I realised that there was a slight bulge at the bottom of few of the flowers. This is what excited us. Having learnt recently about pumpkin/ gourd plants having separate male and female flowers as part of the same plant, this was like a demo happening on our rooftop. So now we wait to see if the female flowers will get pollinated and if a fruit will form. Hopefully we will get to know soon whether we are going to get laukis or cucumbers!

Amrit Mitti

First, a description of the pics ( I still haven't figured out how to insert pics at the appropriate places in the text... they all seem to bunch up at the beginning)...

The tub pic: Dry leaves soaking in Amrit Paani - a mix of sugarcane juice, dung and cow urine.

The other two pics: The same leaves piled up in a heap. This heap will turn into Amrit Mitti in 3 months. We covered the heap with straw and jute cloth, to keep it from drying up.

Amrit Mitti - very rich, nectar-like soil which makes plants happy! We learnt about this a couple of weeks ago at Vanwadi. Now it was time to make it at our home.

We immediately started collecting the stuff we needed. Sugarcane juice was easy. The cow dung and cow urine seemed like a big challenge at first. But then we met Preeti - all knowing denizen of Pune's traditional peth area. She took the extra effort to go hunting for a goshala, and got us the crucial ingredients.

The dry leaves we needed for this magically appeared in front of our home... huge heaps of dry leaves swept off the roads and dumped onto an empty plot. We greedily stuffed a few sackfuls. And not a day too soon, because the next day, someone put a lighted match to the heap and the whole thing went up in smoke. One man's gold is another man's garbage :-(

Then we needed a huge tub, 100 litres plus! Our big and small buckets put together wouldn't add up to that much. So first we went to juna bazaar, looking for used drums that we could buy on the cheap. We found good stuff, but somehow didn't feel like paying money for it (why didn't we? haven't figured out that one yet). Then we put out an alert among friends... and promptly heard from Divya, who offered to get a huge tub from one of her friends and lend it to us. Now this is becoming such a nice pattern.... almost like Aladin's lamp. We wish for something, and it appears.

The rest happened in copybook fashion. Mix everything in the right proportion, let it ferment for 3 days, add lots of water, soak dry leaves for a day, then pile up alternate layers of soaked leaves and soil - 2 foot high. It was fun making the pile ... so many familiar and new faces turned up to help us make it. There was the all-organic-Shammi and green-thumb-Sonali. Kuldip and Varsha and Shubhada and Manish were new folks we met. So many heads put together had to come up with new ideas. Those coconuts you see in the picture, and the wooden stakes standing erect - thats our solution for keeping the heap from collapsing and spreading sideways.

Funnily, the smell of dung had vanished, and the amrit mitti heap now smelt of wet forest floor! Like amrit?

It doesn't end here. This heap of leaves will need attention intermittently... some turning, some watering, some planting of a mixed handful of seeds. More later...

Organic shift: Veggies sprout on home rooftops; FTII has a patch too

Organic shift: Veggies sprout on home rooftops; FTII has a patch too

read more...

Friends, Food and Fun

Now, interesting things keep happening, almost on a daily basis. Yesterday, we invited a bunch of friends and people we wanted to get to know better to our home for a gardening cum bread-soup-salad dinner. Anita, who lives nearby, arrived first with 2 bagfuls of compost from her home - it was in a half-decomposed state and seemed to have enough heat in it to show that the composting process was very much on. We thought this would be able to act as a starter for composting on our beds. So we immediately spread it on two of our newly made beds which were to still receive any soil. Kalpana, another person whom we had met a while back, brought a lot of enthusiasm. It was she who suggested that we turn the new beds, in order to mix the dry and wet items well, in order to prevent rotting and maggots (which were beginning to happen). There were 2 sacks of hard clay lying around too, which we had brought the previous week from a road building site near the river. Gurvindar and Ajit set about breaking the big lumps into powdery soil and this went into the beds too.

Meanwhile, the sun had set. But that did not lessen our enthusiasm as by then more people had arrived eager to contribute. Shammi brought a handful of sticks to build supports for the tomato plants. Ranjani and Sunayana were curious about why we had done some things in a certain way. Archana got into the activity, inspite of being dressed in the best of clothes. 4 of the new beds were turned nicely - on 2 of them the turning was done along with the paddy husks we had used as mulch, while on 2 others Shammi decided to turn the mulch into the rest of the garbage too. Here again are things we can now observe to see if this makes any difference.

However, there are so many factors involved in the growth of any plant, that unless performed under controlled conditions, it is very difficult to figure out what exactly has caused the difference between 2 beds or 2 plants. Anyways, we are just experimenting and having fun at this stage and not really trying to perfect a particular technique or document everything exactly.

By now it was getting dark and difficult to see much. So we quickly watered all the beds and then headed downstairs to prepare for dinner. In the house, again a flurry of activities began and composed themselves with different people taking charge of different things. Guru and Vanaja began folding the bread doughs (which had already risen once) for their second rising, while Kalpana and Ajit got involved with questions and exclamations. Shammi, initially wished to stay away from the food preparation, which was understandable, considering that is what he does all the time in the FTII mess as well as in our workshops. However, a little later he was seen with a couple of others around him enthusiastically cutting vegetables, suggesting garnishings, preparing the salads and in general interacting with people on, what else, but food (his favourite topic :-)). While chopping the celery and the raddish, he also suggested we plant a portion of the base and see if a plant grows from this. We now have 2 more items to observe and look forward to in our garden.

Ajit happily took on the task of chopping carrots for the soup, fuelled, of course, by fresh watermelon, iced herbal tea and some roasted munchies supplied promptly by Shirish. Anita and Vanaja, had in the meanwhile started blanching the tomatoes for the soup and the carrots went into a colander and got steamed on top of the vessel with the tomatoes. This 2-level cooking was a great fuel and time saver. Soon, the veggies for the soup were blended and the soup tasting and adjusting process began. In went some celery and mint leaves, some jaggery, salt and pepper. More tasting followed. It was nice but, something more was needed. Shammi, the expert, was called in and he suggested coconut milk. Lo and behold, the soup was transformed to a different level. In the meantime, Guru had taken care of the bread-baking and 3 very different shaped and sized breads were ready.

We all then sat down to relish what we had cooked and everything just vanished in minutes. Our neighbour, Bakul and her mom generously supplied us with some fresh home-made awla juice. Archana too had brought some solar-cooked kheer. In all, it had become a community cooking, eating and interacting session. Though we do have some misgivings that we could not really have deeper conversations with many of the people who came, it was a good first get-together at our home, which we had been meaning to do for quite some time. We hope to now strengthen some of these friendships through more one-on-one meetings.

Our first harvest...and many more seeds to sow

Last few days have been rewarding every time we went up to our terrace. We saw steady growth of our plants. We also managed to identify some of the plants that were growing - thanks to the lady who collects garbage in our building. She seemed happy to see our garden and the fact that we were reusing garbage to generate edible stuff. She happily identified the red pumpkin, the bottle gourd, the tiny leaves of the carrot and even a watermelon plant, all of which seem to have come up on their own from the kitchen waste. Carrot, probably was the only one planted by us, though we hadn't known when planting, that the seeds where those of the carrot. She also readily offered to give us the 'wet' garbage that she collects and segregates from our building. We had been thinking of asking her to do this, for a while now. But we hadn't done it, thinking, it might be a complex affair, especially if people did not segregate their waste properly; and wondering if the lady collecting the garbage would think it trouble to do the extra bit. However, we were happy to see how this also has happened very naturally and organically, just as everything else so far.

We had also started wondering when would be the right time to harvest the amaranth leaves for a 'saag'. And then yesterday we went up to find some of the amaranth plants sprouting flowers...so nature had given us an indication - if w wanted to eat the leaves, we will have to harvest now, else wait for the plant to reproduce and get seeds/ 'rajgira' grains. We needed no further convincing and we got our first bunch of green leaves to eat. Along with it, we also noticed some of the spinach leaves, which seemed ready to eat. A 15 minute job of plucking the leaves and the ingredients for our lunch were ready. Amma (Vanaja's mom, Sukeshini) then skillfully turned out a lovely 'keerai kootu' with the amaranth leaves and moong dal with the least spices (salt, green chillies, jeera) so as to bring out the true taste of the saag. The Palak was transformed into a beautiful salad along with some corn and beetroot. Needless to say, it was a yummy lunch, more so since half the stuff came out of our terrace as a result of the energy we put in all these days.

Last weekend, we attended the seed saving and home-gardening workshop at Van Vadi and came back so much richer....all the lovely people we met and interacted with, hearing people's experiences with farming especially in the city on their terraces and the success and happiness they have derived from it, all the knowledge about different plants and their behaviour/lifecycle etc., the pictures of the 'exotic' varieties of vegetables grown by Deepika (red & double-colored bhindi, white brinjal, purple tomatoes, black chillies etc.), the struggle against the GM-invasion, propogation thru' seed-saving, need for a community to work with each other and share knowledge, saplings, seeds and other resources.....and not to forget all the lovely 'exotic' seeds we got from Deepika and from Bua's family at Van Vadi.

We are now determined to start making Amrit Mitti. We will start looking for cow dung and cow urine to kickstart the amrit paani. In the meanwhile we will collect dry leaves for the amrit mitti. We have now paused our collections of 'green garbage' and coconut shells, which we had started using to make the border for our newer beds as they were natural, light and available in plenty (as against granite pieces). However, we are now noticing that some of our beds have too much 'green' waste as against dry waste, thus rotting and attracting maggots. Deepika and Preeti's words come handy here - "the proportion of wet and dry waste has to be right in order to ensure good composting and to prevent rotting". This being the season when most trees are shedding their foliage, it seems like the right time to amass this 'dry leaf' wealth, so we can provide them in the right form to our plants at the right time.

We are swamped with all the things we need to do in our garden and need to now seriously allocate time everyday to planning, collecting materials and doing. It is now time to also sit and plan some time-lines, if we need to be able to use this monsoon effectively for planting. No wonder, farmers are always so busy...