Growing food for my table

I'm a happy gardener these days. All the hard work in the vegetable garden has paid off and my table is loaded with the fruits and vegetables we grew. Which is a real relief when I read in the papers about the spiraling prices.

We usually grow a lot of veggies during the monsoon season but this year was a strange one. The Monsoons hit us before time and continued battering the city and elsewhere almost non-stop for close to 2 months. And, I don't think we saw bright sunshine until August. So unusual! I've never seen anything like it in all the years that I've been farming.
Now, I love the monsoon season with a passion. But such a strange season got us a bit worried because all the vegetable seeds we had sown at the start of the monsoons either got washed away or the little seedlings just rotted away. Only the really tough local varieties survived (just about. And that's a great reason to grow local, heirloom varieties if you can find them)

The beans were the first to yield and they did so abundantly. With a whole-hearted largesse that makes you glad for such simple, easy-to-grow vegetables.
I don't know why more people don't grow them in the city. What you see here is the yield on a single day from just 2 plants! And that too, at the start of the harvest before the plants came into their full yielding potential.

And the peppers were full of green berries too. Don't you love the way those pepper berries are packed tight? It looks even prettier when they ripen.

If you have a banana plant in your garden, then you're set for several meals. In fact, almost the entire plant is edible one way or the other. It's not just the ripe fruit which you can enjoy as a fruit or dessert. The unripe fruit , the inflorescence and the pith of the pseudostem, all make great ingredients and feature in several of our regional cuisines.
Oh, and you can use the large leaves as a plate and compost it after your meal. No washing up! How much better can it get?

This is another plant from which we got a surprisingly good harvest this season. I'm not too fond of bitter-gourd as a vegetable but I have to admit that it does look pretty. I love the leaves and the simple but eye-catching bright yellow flowers.
Heck! I think we're doing it an injustice by confining it to the kitchen garden!

And I love how tenacious it is. The bittergourd vines can latch on and climb and smother any surface in a cloud of green almost overnight.

Interesting texture, don't you think? And they're very good for you. There are all kinds of reports of it helping to regulate blood-sugar levels.

Every once in a while, a few escape our eyes (well, it's a green veggie on a green plant, after all) . And this is what we find. A glorious warm sunset-orange rind and blood-red arils that rival the pomegranate in glossy, brilliant red-ness.
Definitely prettier than tastier ... to my eyes, at least!

This one I like, though! The Red Amaranth is grown in my garden round the year.The tender leaves and stem are rich in iron and its grain is increasingly being recommended too for its nutritional value.
This season, however I didn't get around to sowing its seeds. But guess what, some of them volunteered to show up anyway. In the stoniest, weediest part of the vegetable garden!
hmmmm.... I wonder if my garden is sending me a message here? "Don't bother weeding and cleaning"?
But here's my story, all those weeds are left undisturbed on purpose. Some of them are butterfly and pollinator food, you know. That tiny blue flower to the left? The Red Pierrot butterflies love them. So, now you know.

And how could I leave out the Carambola? This tree is just beginning to mature but I love how profusely it is bearing fruit on almost  every inch of bare space! This is definitely my kind of tree! Low on maintenance but high on yield.

Wait, there's more. But I think I'll keep those for another post. Maybe by then I'll have more pics to share. Of the tomatoes and other veggies which are growing and soon to yield any day now. Can you see me smiling?

In the meantime, here's a pic of cherry tomatoes from another harvest. Get growing your own food, everyone. It's not so tough. And it's definitely fulfilling. Also, tastier and healthier than the fruits and veggies you'll buy in the market.

And, if each one grows some, we'll all have a table-ful.
Smile, everyone!

Go Bananas!

For all my friends living in non-tropical countries, here's a riddle. What's red, thick and shiny and looks like a famous rock-star's lips ? Your clue is in the photo above.
Ummmm, no-o-o........ actually that's the bract of a banana flower. If you did guess right, come on over and I'll share some of my banana wine with you.

That's how the bract opens up, revealing one line of white/cream flowers underneath each one. Incidentally, these flowers in the photo above, are male. The female ones which develop into the fruit are found higher up the stalk.



When I was a child, we used to sip up the sweet nectar found in the flowers. There's such a tiny drop of it that it hardly seems worth the effort but children know differently, dont they? And, so it seems do bees and other nectar-loving creatures, even these huge wasps in the photo above.
I saw a sunbird sipping on one the other day but it was too precious a moment to disturb by going for a camera.

Who can fault such excellent packaging? Each bract tightly fitted over the flowers until its moment arrives to unfurl. The banana flower dangles like a pendant at the end of a long stalk. The fruit is found growing higher up on the stalk and after the last 'hand' or tier of bananas have formed on the bunch, farmers cut off the dangling flower and stalk. This is meant to conserve all the nutrients into developing the fruit instead of getting wasted on the now-useless flower.

Useless? No way! That flower would soon find its way to the kitchen and be transformed into a very tasty vegetable dish. Hmm, only magic or a very determined housewife could transform a flower into a vegetable!

There was just no way I could cut this one off... I couldnt reach it even if I stood on a stool! Not all my banana plants are so tall though. This is just one of my shooting stars!


Incidentally, if you're wondering why the leaf behind the flower in the photo above is all slit and tattered, blame it on the wind. Otherwise, the leaf is large and is often used at traditional meals as a plate.

Yes, you read that right. The clean leaf is cut into more manageable sizes, washed and the food is served on it. At the end of the meal, it is thrown away onto the rubbish heap to decompose and add to the fertility of the soil.

Simple! No washing dishes, or drying them, or worrying over chipping, or even silly things like matching crockery!
I found a photo in Kitchen Mishmash which is quite descriptive. Take a look!

Oh, and the leaf is also used to grill fish. The prepared fish is wrapped in banana leaf and cooked. The charred banana leaf gives such a delicious flavour to the fish that just can not be replicated without it.

I love seeing the leaf unfurling from the tight roll into a funnel and then into a broad expanse.



We cut the banana bunch when the sides of the bananas start smoothening out. When it is raw, there are thin rib-like lines running down the sides of the banana. By the time it starts ripening, this rounds out and the ribs disappear. That's when you know that it's time to cut it down. Wait too long and either the bats and crows get the fruits. Or, by the time you do cut it, the fruits start stripping off the bunch and you're left with a mess!

The banana plant will yield fruit only once so instead of cutting the bunch down, we cut the whole plant at the base . The bunch of fruit is carried off and the pseudostem is slit open to get at the core. This is again used to make curries. Very messy, and murder on the hands, but tasty in its own way.

In almost all Indian homes, a sweet, ripe banana or plantain often rounds out the heavy, spicy meals. It is excellent for digestion and for a sweet tooth too. And it looks so vibrantly colourful too.

I've got about 50 banana plants of different varieties growing in my garden. Sometimes 7-8 of them are harvested within days of each other and I go berserk trying to dispose of them. How much can one family eat?

Bunches are pressed into the hands of friends, relatives, workers and anyone who happens to visit. Recipe books are desperately consulted and tried-and-true recipes surface. Banana cakes, desserts and tea-time snacks are my stand-bys in this time of desperation. Next in line is my banana wine, potent enough to have me babbling all my secrets to anyone who'll listen. Jams and syrups are possibilities but I've never ventured there yet.

If you have a few extra bananas getting over-ripe, you may want to visit this site or this . Between them, they've got about 5000 ideas for you to decide what to do with them!