Organic Guerilla Garden

As someone who scorned at people learning botany - what the hell, plants will grow anyway, what's there to learn about it - it was a bit of an unusual thing to get into gardening. But it turns out that you don't really need to know botany to be a gardener, especially the guerrilla type. It is the sustainable living philosophy that got me into it. Growing ornamental plants was another thing I laughed at - coconut trees or cashew lined all over the place was more attractive to me. So it has to be vegetable plants that would give something back, not the ones with beautiful(to the beholders' eyes) flowers or leaves!

But the organic way of gardening is a bit different beast I figured out on the way. It is a holistic thing - it is about creating an ecosystem that thrives on each other, not a targeted breeding of some particular plants. That made perfect sense, but that meant flowers and herbs are also needed. Our first vegetable plant, Ladies' Fingers, were attacked by some pests(leaf miners) and we tried a bit asking around to save them, but nothing worked. So I did a bit of reading about organic pesticides - specifically, this particular article at GoOrganicGardeing.com was a superb one that explains the fundamentals of the organic way!

And the conclusion was that if you are serious about natural organic way of doing things, you need to build an ecosystem, an ecosystem of vegetable plants, herbs, flowers, ornamental plants, bees, butterflies, birds, bugs and pests! You really don't have to intervene, you just enable the ecosystem with the right balance that will take care of itself - that was an wonderful revelation! You don't worry about isolated events in the garden, but they are symptoms of something wrong in the ecosystem. And most of the time, the problems get cured by itself. Everything has a place of its own in the organic ecosystem - isn't that a life lesson that we sorely miss most of the times ? And surely, a garden with just vegetable plants cannot thrive organically!

It makes Gardening a whole lot more meaningful and worthwhile to do! So we are building the ecosystem now, it is no more a organic vegetable garden - it better be an organic garden. Flowers look beautiful now - so we have a thulsi, shoe flower, marigold and a dahlia plants in the mix. I would have loved to setup a honey beehive as well, but this being an urban guerrilla garden, that might expose us a bit! We need a bit of watery area as well for the plants and the butterflies - so the water urn which is a typical ornamental thing, looks pretty attractive as well! And composting is indeed part of the game to complete the cycle - and thanks to DailyDump, the guerrilla composting is not that troublesome indeed.

And it is guerrilla style because it is fairly impossible to sustain a natural garden in an urban environment which is not designed for sustainable living, but for industry scale living that encourages suboptimal innovations that doesn't consider the complete picture. BTW, I still think that people should not learn too much about plants and their DNA - that creates the genetically modified seeds, people do micro-optimizations and loose the overall big picture in the bargain. It is such a shame that they have to invent Bt seeds!

So we are on the lookout for the birds, bees and the butterflies - attracting them into the garden would be the ultimate test of being organic! And the rest should follow!