Making of my kitchen vegetable garden - Day 1

Inspired by various sources, I am also making an attempt to grow my own pesticide free organically fertilized vegetables at home. Inspiration came from close friends, news paper articles, and definitely my office where they develop tomatoes, and cabbages along with software programs.

There is one more reason why I want to do this. I want to go back and live closer to the nature, I am looking to bring back my childhood days, I want to show my child how our parents use to grow vegetables at home without using pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

For a techie like me who have never produced any living thing other than my own child,  this is going to be a challenge. Not knowing where to start and what do to.. there are too many things I need to learn. But I am confident, as I have no problem in learning and practicing new things. In fact, I love to do new things.

Recently, I watched an English movie 'The Martian' where the hero is stranded in the Mars and with limited life support systems. At the end of the movie he gives a lecture in the college where he explains that life is all about solving problems. You begin the math. you solve a problem, then you find another you solve that you find another and finally when you solve enough problems you find success. In his case he solved enough to reach home.

Coming back to my kitchen garden,  problems are many... lack of space, unavailability of good soil, cow dung, cow urine, earth worm, seedlings and other accessories like bamboo sticks to give support to growing plants.

So its not easy to farm as our parents did in old golden days. They had plenty of land, good soil, cows, goats and chickens. They never had to buy earth worm 50 paise per piece. Never had to buy cow-dung and urine from shop...Oh god...where are we now.

The problems we have to solve is different from what our parents had to solve.
Luckily smart people have solved these problems well before hand. And we have solutions availabel for sale. The only thing left for me is to find what is the right solution and use it. Solutions are available in shop for anything under sun. Which is a plus of this generation.

Even though many solutions are available in shop, my idea is to make my own solution wherever possible. This will not only help minimize costs of farming but also give me a pleasure of doing it myself. The moto is "Re-use as many things as possible that is found around my house".

Yesterday, I think I made a good progress. Bought couple of  tomato, venda, payar and cheera seedlings from VFPCK kakkanad. I got 3-4 bags of good quality soil from my wife's parental house.

I planted them all. It took around 3-4 hours to do all this. One day passed, they all look healthy as of now. Anyways, I have a feeling that I had a good start.

Now I am thinking about bio-fertilizers and bio-pesticides. I thinking how to get cow-dung couple of sticks to give support to plants. Hope I will solve this soon.

Couple of snaps: