Newspaper shreds, pencil peels and coconut fibre — almost anything can be used as manure. Shrabasti Mallik finds out different ways to maintain an organic garden at home
The next time you peel a coconut, do not discard the fibre. You can grind it and mix it with saw dust and cow dung to make a porous base for your plants. Even newspaper shreds and small pieces of cardboard boxes can be used to make manure along with organic kitchen waste. All these will help you develop an eco friendly garden without even spending a single penny.
Many interesting ways to enhance the quality of a home garden were displayed at the fruit, vegetable and flower festival organised by All India Kitchen Garden Association. You can make home-made compost with dried leaves, coco peat (powdered coconut fibre), paper shreds and organic kitchen waste. It takes about six months for the compost to be ready to use. The quality of the compost depends on how much you mix it.
“It is advisable to mix it every day for at least five minutes. That way all the things get mixed evenly,” said Preeti, member of the association. If you dislike the stench that comes from the manure then you can also opt for liquid manure. You can brew it using a mixture of cow dung, superphosphate and potash. “The concoction will be thick so you have to dilute it with water and use as and when required,” she added. You can even make pesticide in the same way brewing neem leaves, tobacco, turmeric and garlic in water. “These can be stored in glass or plastic bottles and used for a few months,” she said.
If you think that plastic bottles should be thrown, think again. You can cut it in half or from the middle and use it as a pot to grow small decorative flowering plants. It can be placed on the ground or hung on the wall and they look pretty when used in indoor decoration. The attraction of the show was, however, two new technologies in green gardening — hydroponics and aquaponics. Both are ecological and consume less space, less water and less labour. Hydroponics system entails growing plants in water as opposed to soil, the traditional base. The roots of plants are put in a small plastic container filled either with coco peat or with small lica pebbles. The containers are placed in horizontal hollow tubes filled with water mixed with the necessary nutrients.
A motor continuously supplies water from the tank in all tubes so that the roots always stay dipped in water. “It is called the nutrient flow technique as it utilises only sunlight and water. In this system the rate of growth of the plants and their longevity are high. The set up is ideal because it does not need hard manual labour and can be used to grow anything — from small flowers to all kinds of vegetables,” said Alex Kathing of Future Farms. It comes in various shapes and sizes and the price ranges between Rs7,500 to Rs18,000.
Aquaponics is the culture of growing flowers and vegetables using fish culture. The set up is similar to hydroponics with only the roots of the plant constantly exposed to water. However, in this set up the tank has fishes and a special motor to suck in fish excreta and nitrates (which a fish breathes out) and dissolve it into the water. The pump then carries the water to all the chambers in the system. “This way every nutrient that the plant is getting is organic which in turn makes the produce organic, too,” said Sahib Pardeep Vedi, founder of Aquaponics.