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.