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...

Green Shoots!

Took stock of whats growing on our rooftop garden, this morning.

Mustard, Coriander, Tomato, Onion, Ambe-halad, pineapple, tomato (one marble sized fruit) and the unidentified plants are doing well. One of the unidentified ones is spinach-like... can't be sure even after tasting a leaf.

Some pudina (spearmint) that Vanaja had planted last week also seems to have taken root and survived.

And stuff that we did not plant - some gourd, some papaya, some more tomato and a radish-like plant, are all coming up on their own. This is thanks to all the seed-rich waste we've used.

Not much activity for the Methi, Safflower. The peppermint stalk that we'd planted also seems to drying up.

One issue we've debated a bit is... how much mulch is good? We're using straw (gifted to us by fruit sellers). One of the beds (Dhaniya-Safflower) has shown little activity... the shoots of Dhaniya are smaller than those of other stuff we planted at the same time. I wonder if its because the mulch layer was too thick (it cut off sunlight?) or if Dhaniya just takes more time to germinate. ???

Now our rooftop green garbage is also stacked in a more orderly fashion... I mean surrounded by low walls of granite rods thrown away by a marble-granite wallahs. And its covered by jute bags, so its not flying all over with the wind. I've also tied down the straw much with thin ropes. The wind is quite strong where we live.

This weekend, we're off to a 'All about Seed saving' workshop at Vanwadi near Karjat. I think its happening at the right time for us. Hmmm... a lot of things start happening at the right time. Automatically. Hmmm....

As we sow....

We had decided this morning that today it had to be done. For the past several days, we kept postponing the planting for some reason or the other - getting plastic sheet, weeding out bits of plastic/ polythene from the soil, getting seeds etc. As the day wore on, it seemed that we will face the same fate today as we were busy doing one chore or the other. However at 5p.m, I said, lets go to the terrace this moment and use the dusk hour to our advantage. So we both jumped up, dropped what each of us were doing and picked up the seed packets Shammi and Gloria had given us and bounded upstairs.

There again things started taking hold of us - we went from clearing the terrace to shifting one of the patches onto a wooden plank, rearranging its borders, watering the patches.....and suddenly we realised it was going to be dark soon and we still hadn't accomplished what we had come up for. Then Amma came upstairs to see if the planting was done....and that spurred us on. We finally took out our seeds and ....lo behold! we found that nature wasn't waiting for us - small green shoots had already started poking their heads out from some of the beds. Looks like our garbage is beginning to pay back.

Already feeling good, we then sowed seeds in 4 of the beds we had made. In the first bed went Methi and Mustard. In the second one went some unidentified seeds - it'll be fun to watch what comes out. In the third went a bulb of onion which had already sprouted a green shoot. The third bed also already had a pineapple head. In went some 'Mango Ginger' (also called Ambe-halad in Marathi) too to accompany the onion and pineapple. Finally the fourth bed received seeds of Safflower and Coriander.

We have now elevated one of the rectangular patches we had made earlier, onto an old wooden door that we had lying on our terrace. We want to use this bed for planting tree saplings- maybe papaya, jamun, mango, drumstick etc. So the wooden plank was to ensure that the roots don't damage the roof, as well as to give free way to the water to drain. (This bed was on the path of the drainpipes)

We are happy about what we have accomplished today. But, now the curiosity to see green shoots appear is very high. At least it will ensure we pay a visit to the terrace every day and water the patches regularly.

Another silver lining to the day was our third mushroom bag getting made, again, after many days of 'waiting in the wings'. So now we have stuff growing, that we are watching out for, both inside our home as well as on the rooftop. Has our 'Growing Journey' truly begun?