Terrace Gardening Workshop

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Though I was the least interested among us in Gardening when we were kids, I developed some interest off late especially after reading about Dr. Vishwanath in Hindu about Terrace Gardening. It also fits well with my organic or green interests and gives an opportunity for the family also to participate in this project.

We have a 500sft terrace totally unused except for one kariyappila (kari patha?) pot which was gifted by our neighbor for taking care of her two other pots when she was not in town! We left it in our balcony for a while, but we moved it up to our terrace once we became the owners of the plant. Right now it is being fertilized by curds that seems to have created a good amount of worms in the soil.

I also happened to visit the blog GeekGardener who was just down the road and it was amazing what he was doing on his balconies. Another blogger in town, Raj Panda, also seemed to have done some neat stuff which he is sharing with all details at his blog. So I signed up for the terrace gardening workshop conducted by AME who helps out farmers to do organic farming. This is usually done by Dr. Vishwanath who has many things on his terrace at his own house in the city. But our class was done by Mr. Raghu Rao who has vast experience in farming, not just the terrace variety.

This was a one day course organized by AME Foundation, an NGO helping farmers do organic farming, where they have a classroom session and also show us what they are doing on their terrace where they have all kinds of vegetables from tomato, beans, carrot etc. They also showed us how to fill the pot with soil, sand and compost. An important learning from the session was that there was no need to buy pots or containers, you could use lot of stuff that you usually throw away. Thy showed some DIY containers with plastic bags and tetra packs for growing plants which I thought was pretty cool. For us it was a great session with loads of information to get started. In fact, Dept. of Horticulture office from where many of the folks buy seeds and compost is just across the road from where we live. The GeekGardner also was one participants and he shared a lot of information from his experience.

So we have all information ready to get going and I hope to post some details as soon as we have something to share. So onto the field till you hear from us about this new project that looks very exciting at the moment!