Hello All Garden lovers,
Ever since we moved to new house , I have been missing my kitchen garden. I was missing it so much that I thought of writing about it.
I had never done gardening before but a few years ago when we bought a new home and my in-laws came to stay with us for a few days, they inspired us to start gardening.
They have been gardening from quite a some time so they knew the know hows of gardening so it was not that hard to start with.
We started with the laying grass seeds in the garden. Let me tell you, that was not easy as it seems. There was a lot weed grown since the house was empty from last 2 years so we began ploughing the whole garden, levelled it up and sprinkled the grass seeds. This was a tiresome job, but we were so delighted to see the results a few weeks later.
We all are aware of side effects of pesticides and fertilizers in our food chain. This was really bothering us and was an inspiration to start our own fully organic kitchen garden. We decided to grow everything organically, not fertilizers or pesticides. And hence we started growing some vegetable plants for our kitchen.
We decided to only use natural fertilizers, like - Organic Chicken, Horse Manure, Banana Peels and making some compost based of Kitchen waste.
There are 2 benefits for using Compost made of Kitchen Waste :
- Its sustainable
- Its natural (no harm to mother nature)
But there was a problem with this 🙄🙄. We had a rocky and hard soil which was not very good to start a kitchen garden. So we came up with a solution:
Raised Bed:
Once you have a a garden lawn setup, next logical thing is to create some raised beds to grow some vegetables 😀😀
It was fun to create a raised bed on our own. I watched a few videos online to learn how to make a raised bed first and bought the required material. It does not require much, a few wooden planks and a lot of topsoil 😀
Here is a pic of work in progress :
We made a good progress and were very happy to see the finished bed but we still had 2 problems 🙄🙄
- Its normally cold and rains a lot at our place
- Slugs - the heartless enemy of a gardeners.
So we thought of making a tunnel shaped Poly sheet cover for the bed. We wanted to create something which would cover the bed and can also be opened like a lid to allow air circulation and direct sun. So we created something like this using wooden planks, PVC pipes and Poly sheets:
We were so excited with progress so far and wanted to have more space to to grow more vegetables 😀😀.
What would be the next logical step 😄😄 ?
A Glass Green House :
This was really a big step and required a small investment. This was not a small project and requires more specialized skills to build the green house. We bought the green house online and decided to assemble it ourselves. This was time to watch a lot of youtube tutorial videos again 😄.
After spending two days on this project we finally finished the assembly and here is the end result :
Let me tell you guys, it's not as simple as it seems from the video tutorials, specially the sliding door.
We did not just stopped there. We started growing different flowering plants as well 😀😀
Here are a few pictures of our yield:
Our First Potato Harvest :
Lady Fingers also known as Okra
Baby Cucumbers or Gherkins
Juicy Tomatoes
Bitter Gourd
A gradual decrease in bee population is a worrying concern these days. To help mother nature attract more bees we also grew lovely Flowers :
We had a lot of plastics containers at home, mainly empty yogurt and paint containers and so we decided to reuse them as flower pots and hung them on fences by spray painting them :
In summary, it took us nearly 2 years to make it a lush green space for ourselves where we can just be surrounded by plants and forget ourselves. But then we had to move to a new place for my wife's job. But we both badly miss our lovely gardening days.
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