While I’ve been growing vegetables for an year in the house, there’s been an itch to really grow the operations. So, as I wait for the opportunity to start ‘real’ farming, I’ve taken to setting up a kitchen garden in my apartment complex! I like calling it a backyard forest 🙂
It all started with a society meeting where some people were interested in creating space for a kitchen garden. I texted the group and some people said – let’s start!
So I gathered my tools, a box of seeds (which my wife had recently gifted me ♥️) and my enthusiasm! I was pleasantly happy to see a neighbour – Shyam aunty also equally excited to get started.
Identifying the land
We walked around looking for a good spot to start and found an empty piece of land with weeds growing in it. We marked out a spot, which was about a quarter of the entire piece of land and started to work on it. Our plan was to start with 4 rows about 5 feet each to start sowing vegetables.
Preparing the land
We removed any obvious weeds from the land, but weren’t very fussy about removing every single one from the land. Then, we watered the soil to make it easy for us to work with it. We realised that it had gotten quite hard and was difficult to move around.
After the soil was moist, we dug out 4 small rows of land which would serve as the planting area. This turned out to be easier than we thought because of the moist soil. We were careful to keep a walking path in between the rows, so we could tend to the plants later on.
We added a little vermicompost to the 4 pits as well to add some support to the soil.
Sowing Seeds
The most exciting bit was picking what to sow. We wanted to really make it a kitchen garden so we decided to plant vegetables first. The three of us – Shyam Aunty, wifey and I took our picks and then some and settled on spinach, tomato, coriander, and ridge gourd to get started as these were the easy vegetables to grow.
My wife also was excited to try out planting a watermelon, so we did just that! We dig a small hole next to our plantation rows and popped in the seed. For the other plants, we spread out the seeds in the rows we’d prepared and covered them with the soil we’d removed earlier.
The final thing looked like 4 depressions in the ground with walking paths next to it.We watered the rows a little to help it stay moist. Looking forward to seeing the seeds sprout. The 3 of us just can’t wait to see our backyard forest come to life!