It's been over 7 months since our outsourced terrace garden came into existence. Though the produce is no where near what we need, there is constant flow of produce from the garden. As you may know this is based on the concept of a square foot garden where each vegetable has exactly 1 square foot to grow - pretty much cramped I would say. This is the typical urban philosophy where you cramp up stuff which is not so natural as you can imagine. The natural fallout is that those who can grab land from the neighbor's by their muscle outgrow the others and produce pretty well. But there are some plants that doesn't need too much space - for example, ladies finger and most of the leafy ones. But in general, I think it is more or less like mechanized animal farming, not so natural at all.
We have had one bumper crop of tomatoes which we had to distribute to neighbors to finish the stock, but all of those plants died at the same time which resulted in no produce for a long time. But when we had a lot of tomatoes, it was also very cheap in the market as well. So it may be same breeze that got us a lot of tomatoes like the farmers. Ladies finger was always producing, but not in abundance though. Brinjal was not something we wanted, but it appears to be producing copiously. It is enough and more for us and the monkeys. We have two varieties of beans, one of the meter beans produced good amount of beans, but the normal beans which is supposed to be an easy plant, didn't thrive very well. A ridge gourd plan thrived very well going all across the trellis, but no produce at all. Most of the leafy veggies do very well as well. We had one good crop of beet root, but nothing after that.
We have had our share of bugs, birds and monkey trouble - this is indeed very natural ! They are out looking for food, they don't real
ly care whether it is your organic terrace garden or not. And the basic tenet of Organic thinking is that don't fight it, get used to it. They do spray organic pesticides, but that is again fighting the symptom. The idea of an organic garden should be
to create an ecosystem that will provide for everyone - but this is again not a practical thing in an urban guerrilla garden. We are in fact trying to grow some flowers and herbs that are supposed to create this balance or take the hit instead of the vegetables, not sure if that is working well, but it gives a good variety to the garden. And monkeys need special treatment - it appears they don't like the smell of dry fish, so we put some around the vegetable garden, but still they come in and pluck the veggies. But the lesson here is - don't fight the pests, get used to it.
Also the idea of outsourcing itself is not a good one for an organic garden where you are supposed to toil it out and get up close and watch it grow, watch it being eaten by bugs and birds, watch it produce, take care of it completely. This is more or less like a young mother leaving her new born baby in the crèche or a babysitter. In fact it is even worse because you are not even involved in the seeding process itself. So we are planning to drop the idea of outsourcing once the current contract expires. Like any outsourcing effort, you tend to blame it on the vendor who we pay for the service. But it did give us some good ideas and we now have a one-point source to get the supplies for the garden. But overall the experience has been pretty good - lots of learning about plants and the interplay of bees and bugs etc.
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