Composting Update

It is almost 6 months since we started composting at home and it seems to have stuck and become part of a regular routine Though we haven't yet used the compost yet, the recycling is going on. The leave-it-pot is almost full, but the level keeps going down when more thing gets further composted. Except for nasty smell in between that you have to get used to, it has been pretty smooth sailing after the initial bumps. We did think of stopping it for a while when the spirit was pretty low, but finally kept doing it. May be we need one more leave-it-pot(or some container) to make the composting easier. Now old and new waste gets mixed up in the leave-it-pot which makes it difficult to get some compost out. If you have two of them, you could let one compost completely before dumping new stuff.

Overall, well worth doing it, not very difficult to make it a habit, surely worth a try!

Harvest from the Garden

It's harvest time in our 80sqft vegetable garden on the terrace. Regular supply of okra(ladies finger), beets, cucumber(sambar variety) and green and red leaves(keera/cheera/dhantu) are coming in. It has a become a bit hot for the plants, but they are holding on well. But capsicum and carrots seems to have a tough time though. Carrot was a complete failure, capsicum plants seems pretty difficult to get off the ground. Tomatoes and bitter gourds should be on their way in a couple of weeks.

The biggest threat to our garden produce is not pests but monkeys - they raid the place regularly, then drink water from the tap and leave it open! They plucked a cucumber and on the way they plucked the plant out. A friend of us suggested keeping some dry fish around, it seems they don't like it at all. So we are trying it and seeing if that helps. Fortunately, they don't pluck plants without any fruits on them - so the roots and leafy ones are pretty safe from them. This is an interesting challenge. But they don't come inside the house now that they have stuff to steal outside.

GM food

While I don't claim to be an expert to make a comment on the Genetically Modified(GM) foods, I find something really odd about this whole GM thing, in fact something very unnatural. While most of our so called "development" has been using very unnatural and unsustainable techniques, it sounds very odd that the agricultural scientists or biotechnologists has to take this route to save the world from a very natural process of growing vegetables and fruits. Instead of looking holistically and trying to figure out the problems, they are modifying the seeds which would make the seed companies the key part of an otherwise natural process. You are breaking the natural cycle by doing that - may be they had done it before(hybrids) and got better results, but this more intrusive and more unnatural.

What's wrong with their approach is the typical western(followed or pushed out to the world) technique of "local sub-optimization" that fixes just one part of the complete chain in the short term creating significant problems in the future. Pesticide based food revolution was a great example of this. While I can't say for sure the GM foods would create such problems myself, I am not willing to believe the seed companies who are behind this research. To me, their approach is fundamentally wrong and I have every reason to suspect they are in it just to make money and dominate the farmers world over. I am very disappointed at this direction of agri-research which doesn't find anything wrong with introducing an external agent(seed companies) in a very natural cycle of cultivation. In fact the technique that they should apply is the "trimming" technique that would remove the unnatural agents in the cycle to make farming far more sustainable.

While you see this technique applied in other fields of science and engineering, at least that is in the domain where there were no natural process existed before - but typically it is a short term fix against a long term solution. In fact, I can't believe that you need such a complex research to go down really into the genes and fix the productivity issue - I am sure there are cheaper and simpler ways of doing this in an organic fashion. This is an excellent example of technology wasted and gone in the wrong direction.

But it looks like the powers that be behind this GM nonsense are too powerful to be ignored and they will ultimately push it down our throats. Bt cotton has already cultivated in large scale though we don't eat them. But when everything turns out to be a business, this is inevitable. Seed companies want to control the farmers, researchers get money from these guys to push their agenda and most of the farmers are also worried about short term money making, this vicious circle would finally take us in a very wrong way. Even if I want to cultivate in an organic fashion, I am not guaranteed it will be organic especially in a country like India where enforcement of any policy is pretty pathetic.