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!

Growing my own food

Here's what I hope will be a sneak preview photo of the harvest from my vegetable patch. Somehow food tastes so much better when it's straight out of your garden, doesn't it?
We had a great harvest last year (and this photo is a partial record of that) so this year we decided to try and improve on it.

The first step was to increase the size of the vegetable patch. We somehow managed to cut down on the bananas and ended up almost doubling the space for vegetables. See what I mean?

I couldn't give up my lantana bush, though. It is still slam-bang in the middle of all the activity, attracting butterflies and birds to it.

By the way, did you notice the banana plants to the left? The one on the extreme left is heavy with fruit and is bending so much that it is almost in danger of falling over. My helper tried to prop it up with a small stick while he went hunting for a stronger one. I almost burst out laughing when I saw it... it was like trying to prop up a car with a toothpick!
If any banana farmer sees this he'd probably say I'm growing them all wrong. Officially, you're supposed to make sure there's only one plant growing and remove all the others growing from the same clump. But that's not the way I grow them. I allow most of the others to grow too but remove the ones which are of almost the same size / age. This way I have bananas ripening on my plants every other month instead of having to wait almost a full year to get the next bunch.

Cucumbers, gourds, beans and ladies' fingers (okra) are some of the monsoon vegetables that grow so well in Mumbai at this time.
By the way, you don't need a lot of land to grow most of these vegetables. A large pot in a sunny spot is perfect for okra but you have to provide enough space for cucumber and gourd vines to clamber and ramble. If you can guide them to find their way up or across window box-grilles which are a common feature of most Mumbai apartments, I think they'll be happy enough. Just make sure they're not in the way of salt-laden strong winds. Our monsoon winds can get quite vicious at times and I've had perfectly healthy, happy plants in my apartment garden die out on me in a matter of hours after one of these stormy sessions.

The flip side of the monsoon has to be the soil erosion in my sloping garden. I had worked hard at building up the soil and enriching it with well-composted cow manure and ash. But within a few days of heavy rains I found that most of it has flowed off downhill and left behind a whole lot of pebbles and rocks and other nasties.

Whoever said sparrows are hardly seen in Mumbai nowadays will be happy to know that they're thriving in my garden! In this uncultivated corner of my vegetable plot, I found a whole flock of them chirping and squabbling among the grass and weeds that the monsoon has encouraged.

Incidentally, did you notice the weed growing in the foreground (extreme left of picture), in front of the Caladium ? That, my friends, is Phyllanthus amarus, one of the most effective medicinal herbs traditionally used to treat jaundice and now has been found to treat Hepatitis B too. Just imagine how many other potential medicines in our gardens are pulled out as weeds.
As good an excuse as any if we want one to put off weeding, don't you think?

Anyway, back to the sparrows, I found this one perched on an old stump, keeping watch.

And his wife was busy stealing fibre from the dried banana-stem strips used to tie the trellis canopy together.

I wish she would have just pulled some from the bitter gourd plant. Definitely not my favourite vegetable, though my husband loves it. But I do love how it looks and its bright yellow flowers are quite pretty among all that green. I wish I could grow it just for its flowers and not let it fruit at all!

The Jungle a.k.a. my vegetable patch

I sometimes wonder whether I grow beans for their flowers . Or, maybe because it has to be one of the easiest vegetables to grow.

This is vegetable season in Mumbai ! With 3 months of rain, the land is transformed into a picture of fertility and abundance. Irrigation is taken care of by the monsoon showers so what work does the vegetable-grower really have? A bit of weeding once in a while thrown in with a bit of fertilising. That's it! These are glory days. Sit back and wait for the veggies to show up.

Once the monsoons show signs of approaching in May, people start getting busy. Land is cleared, weeds are burnt, soil is dug up and mixed with ash and well-composted cowdung ... and then they wait for the first shower to sow the precious seeds.
For some, the seeds are almost like a treasured legacy. Hoarded from last year's crop, which was sown with the seeds from the crop from the previous year, and so on. They've been saved from the first flush of vegetables, well-dried and rolled in ash to preserve them from pests.
But others, like me, haven't mastered the knack of saving seeds that'll last a whole year without getting all moldy or riddled with bugs. For us, the seed stores are like a lifeline.

The seeds available in Mumbai (and in many parts of India) are a bit of an adventure ... most of the packets have got no more information other than the bare basics : name of the vegetable (just "beans" or "tomato"), the name of the company selling the seeds and if we are lucky, a use-before date.
So you can imagine that each year's crop has me waiting in suspense to see exactly what I'm going to get. But I go through this routine every year. I love the idea of eating vegetables that grew on my land and which I know aren't loaded with chemicals!

This year I took advantage of my trip to Kerala to go to the store attached to a well-known agricultural college there. I was sure that here at least things would be more organised and I would get the name of the cultivar, etc.
No such luck! The man at the counter pushed some tiny packets of seeds at me with "beans", "okra", "bottle gourd", etc. stamped on them!

Oh well! It has to be good stuff, I told myself as I went through the ritual of preparing the land and waited .... and waited ... and waited for the monsoon. And then the monsoons breezed in, stomped around, smashed a lot of seedlings into oblivion and then, just disappeared!
I could've cried! My beans were drying on their poles, the okra (which we call 'ladies' fingers') leaves were shrivelling, my snake gourd plants withered away .... not good!
But with the help of a couple of sprinklers we pulled through. Normally the vegetables grown in the monsoon season are wholly rain-fed so it didn't even occur to me at first to set up the sprinkler. Trust my ever-practical husband to think of that!

Incidentally, the caladiums in the photo above, just appeared when the sprinkler got into action.
Oh ... this photo also shows why one should always supervise work being done for you! I had instructed the man who comes to help me in the garden, to put up some structures for the beans and gourds to climb up on. He made such short ones that I have to crouch every time I want to check on my plants and invariably bump my head on some pointy part of the branches he's used to make the mandap with.

Then the rains came back and helped things along. Not the usual sky-fuls of rain but a little every night. But, hey! I'd rather get that than nothing at all !
And now ... ta-dah!

The okra have got going too. Tender okra are very photogenic but somehow I don't like their smell. And their stickiness. My husband loves eating okra, though, so its always present in our veggie patch.

Have you ever eaten bitter-gourd? As the name suggests, it is very bitter but its supposed to be great for health. Diabetics, especially, benefit from eating it, according to Ayurveda and the tenets of natural healing. I don't know why I grow it... nobody eats it in my house but still it's there every year.

Its flowers are pretty though and that is a very cheery yellow, don't you think?

Like most gourds, it is a climber and will clamber all over a fence, wall or house if given half a chance.

Cucumbers are not grown on a trellis here in Mumbai. They ramble all over the ground.

See the cucumber jungle? Now do you know why I go armed with a long stick while harvesting? I dont want to stick my hand in there and pull out a cobra instead!

The tomatos are making slow progress, partly because of a lot of freeloaders. And partly because of the heavy rains we had initially which washed off all the soil around the plants and also plants along with it.

Using neem oil as our pest control has one disadvantage. One doesn't see the effect immediately. It takes a few chomped leaves before the azadirachtin (I hope I spelled that right) in the neem starts working on the bugs and kills their appetite and finally any interest in procreation. At the risk of sounding sadistic I have to say ... that's fantastic!

The harvest is in now, finally . Slowly but surely. The first harvest yielded just enough for one day, but now... ! I'm getting beans by the bucket-load! And bottle-gourds which would make great caveman's clubs ...
Don't tell my husband,but ... anyone want some okra?