Organic Terrace Garden by Purna Organics

After realizing that it is not really hunky dory trying to do a terrace garden ourselves, we have got some help, at some cost off course, from Purna Organics to setup one, and with support services as well.

We have had a descent harvest of okra, carrot(most of them looked like potatoes but) and tomatoes(were good for salads, not the size we wanted) though monkeys raided and harvested it couple of times. But the plants were not really healthy and was regularly attacked by pests. Though the organic pesticides worked, pests did hurt the plants and the produce.

What we didn't do well ? Poor nutrition - it was written all around the plants. While we did add composts and some organic manure, it was needed more frequently. And the size of the garden was a bit big for beginners like us to chew - there were too many tomato and carrot plants. The mix was overly skewed. We should have thrown out some of the plants initially. Also the initial enthusiasm died down and we couldn't sustain the effort.

So we found Purna Organics and they seemed to be doing a good job at it, but with a bit of money(Rs.250/sqft). I met Mallesh, CEO of the firm and saw their demo OTG at their office. He sounded very reasonable and he seemed to have done his homework and experiments well. I was impressed, but leaving your garden to someone else was not something that we wanted to. Mallesh said we could try on our own may be after 6 months once we have a better idea of things and he will supply the materials in any case. And we needed some help anyway.

Money was a bit too much if you look at just investment and returns - for a potential return of 5K, we would be spending more than 25K. So the only question that remained was the money - may be I am not buying that flat panel TV this year, or a holiday(anyway we have to water the plants) that we haven't done for while, or that book shelf that we wanted:) In the end, we felt it was worth the money. In order to keep our appetite for doing some thing our own, we thought we would do some on our own as well.

So finally stuck a deal around the new year! It was installed in another week at our terrace.