The Backyard Kitchen Garden – Part 2

This is a series of posts I’m writing as I grow a food forest in my backyard. You can read the first part of the backyard kitchen garden here.
Starting a Backyard Forest in my Apartment – Part 1

It’s been a week since I started work on our apartment kitchen garden and we’re already starting to see some fruits of our labour 🏋🏼‍♂️ last week. I’m writing this post as a quick update on the kitchen garden in Chennai, India and will also talk about why the garden has so many dry leaves on top.

Here’s how it looks right now

So, what’s sprouting?

The first row I’d put in the coriander seeds, the second row has tomatoes 🍅. Both of them haven’t yet sprouted properly.

The third row, we hit jackpot as all the 4 sponge gourd seeds sprouted. Don’t they just look fabulous!

The fourth row has spinach sprouting and oh, so much! This is going to be fun.

What’s the deal with the leaves?

Most of you would know this, but a significant step I learnt was ‘mulching‘. You add dry matter on top of your garden soil and keep it covered. In one video I saw recently about this amazing permaculture farm near Chandigarh, you should never have soil exposed much like you wouldn’t leave a wound exposed.

What is mulching, or mulch?

Mulching is almost like adding a covering layer to your garden soil which has many benefits.

• The soil won’t dry out very quickly. Especially helpful for the tropical weather of Chennai.
• It restricts weed growth as you’re effectively blocking out the light from reaching them.
• This dry matter will slowly decompose and add valuable matter and thus enrich your soil. I’ve read that doing this for a couple of years greatly enhances soil quality!

The one question I had was if the mulch would start to smell or look rotten as it starts to decompose next to the garden. Since the climate is dry and there’s ample sunlight ☀️, the mulch actually doesn’t smell at all and slowly just merges with the soil.

I’ve just used some dry leaves from the apartment boundary which were collected. I put them all in a bucket and keep pressing them with my feet till they kinda broke down and I didn’t have large leaves in the mix. Then, I spread the mulch mix all around the garden like you can see above.

Let’s see how this goes. Keep reading as I post more stuff on my work in my backyard kitchen garden 🥗!