Going the organic way!

When we started to set-up the garden,we wanted it to be an organic one.Home made compost was our first choice of organic fertilizer. We had been composting our kitchen wastes for a year now but the wastes were dumped in a pit in the ground and covered. Sadly that has also invited lots of ants and sometimes rodents too and young saplings had only a slim chance of surviving them when planted in the ground.

So we decided to set-up some plants in the pots and started composting the kitchen wastes in small buckets, covering them tightly and leaving them in a corner. Compost made in such small batches will be ready in 2 months to use in the pots.

Again 2 months seemed a long period to wait to start gardening. So to enrich the soil soon enough, we tried the below little experiment. Planting Green gram seeds in the soil.

Green gram seeds sprouting in soil( coconut husks added to retain water)

Green gram has a quick germination rate and they germinated the immediate next day. By the third day the plants had grown at least 6 centimeters in length.We could literally see the new leaves springing.

Third day progress

We let it grow another couple of inches, and cut them off to ground level, leaving the roots in place.The root nodules would have retained nitrogen from the soil and can be used further as nitrogen enriched soil which is crucial for leafy plants to grow.

I was glad to know this concept and amazed to see how quickly the process had completed giving us results in just 5-6 days. A quick trick that will come handy anytime in gardening.