Our Terrace Garden

WE - My husband and myself were looking for a hobby which we wanted to do it together and get occupied during weekends.

Motivation:

It was One Sunday Evening in September 2014 when we started watching a movie called "HOW OLD ARE YOU" where the well talented heroine after wedding forgets about her talent and realises about it after starting an organic terrace garden and also motivates her neighbours to have Organic Vegetables.Till Now it must be atleast 50 times we watched the movie for the terrace garden.

 
This movie motivated us to start the Terrace Garden where we have a big terrace which we dont utilise it much except for evening tea , drying clothes and watching moon and stars with our two boys.

I started watching videos of G.Nammalvar - Green Farming on You tube which tells you how the pesticides affects you and how you can protect the plants organically through your home products.

Now we have around 350 pots with a King Size terrace where we harvest atleast four times a week with different kind of greens like Methi, Hongane, Mudakkathan (balloon vine) , Amaranthus and so on along with vegetables like Raddish, carrot, knolkhol, cabbage, cauliflower,beans, clusterbeans , tomato,chilli ,Beetroots,ladies finger and Brinjals.

What and Where you can buy:

Plastic Pots\Tubs: We use tubs for Brinjals, Tomatoes raddish and carrots.
Small Pots for Greens and Chillies.

Medium: We collected initially from the construction where they dug out the mud which is a very good medium for your plants along with soil for porous.
Anyways the dug out Mud will be thrown by them


You have everything in K.R.Market and also from Online Shops.

What you can do to protect your Terrace:

Initially we used Tarpaulin sheets but the muds and dried leaves settles down, Hence through one of our friend who gave us an idea of using slabs.
We also do rainwater harvesting where the algae settled water comes through the tubes and difficult to clean.

Tarpaulin Protected Terrace with the Pots

We have also added a waterproof liquid along with cement during moulding and have also coated with paints - water proof paints available in the market before we placed our pots.

Now we have placed all the pots in our terrace on the slabs and supported with the terracotta bricks.

So that our terrace is safe and also the water which flows through the terrace during rainwater harvesting is clean and there is no filter blockage.

Let me know if you need any details on Rainwater harvesting.


How you can protect your plants:

1) You can use 3G method as indicated by Green Farmer G.Nammalvar. I keep watching videos of Nammalvar which are really motivating. 3G method is to use Ginger, Garlic and Green Chillies mix as a spray for your affected plants.
2) Diluted Buttermilk can use as calcium Supplement.
3) Neem Oils Diluted can be used for viral infections in plants and so on
4) You can also spray water tot he plants to take away the mealy bugs or use tooth brush and brush it to remove the bugs present int he plant.
5) You can also add turmeric with water spray to protect from various disease.


Spray water:

Compost and Manure: We collected the veg.waste from our vegetable vendors/shops in our area B.Narayanapura Whitefield.
We also went to K.R.PURAM market to get the vegetable waste and flower waste.
Coffee shops from different locations in and around indranagar, Phoenix mall- Coffee day/Costa and various Coffee day shops in and around indranagar and Thippasandra helped us by giving their coffee waste which you can use for vegetable plants which provides more nitrogen for the plants.

Kambhas: 
Compost - Organic Manure from Kambhas takes around 30-45 days where we need to wait for a long time and the plants suddenly looked sick due to this.
So we went for a Bokashi method where we use leachate /Bokashi Juice and dilute it from the tap and spray it over the plants once in a week .
We also use the Compost tea fromt he Organic manure vegetable waste collected in Kambhas and also from the Paint Buckets. We keep it for fermentation a day and dilute it and spray for plants.

We use three and four tier kambhas for composting our kitchen and vegetable waste we receive from vendors.
We also use Bokashi fermentation by fermenting our vegetable and food waste.
We use leave it pot to store our Composts.





Use the Compost produced from the above process and harvest as many veggies you want and enjoy the Organic way of harvesting.

Grow your own veggies at home

Grow Cauliflowers at home

Celebrrate the week end

Week end harvest

Knol Khol as gift for neighbours

You can grow all vegetables at home

Thanks for reading my article.

Please do keep in touch for any clarification:
gayathrim80@gmail.com
 
 GNR