My main long-term aim with growing vegetables, as with most other home gardeners, is to be self-sustainable and not need to buy anything much from the vegetable market. Though I have a way to go for achieving this, there are days when all the dishes on the tables have vegetables only from my terrace or my patch from Green Thumbs; and that is such a thrilling feeling for me J.

I spoke about sowing winged beans in an earlier post, so I thought I must share a pic of my harvest as well:

Pic courtesy: Jyothi Vaidyanathan

Last week I harvested close to 5 kgs of beans from my patch. Even the really long ones were still quite tender and tasted good. For those who haven’t eaten this vegetable (and I was one of them!), it tastes somewhat similar to the hyacinth bean or avarekkai, but has it’s own flavour as well. 

I had sown carrots on my terrace a few months back, and recently thinned out some of the small ones along with the luscious looking leaves. So this evening when I realized I didn’t have many veggies around for my evening dinner I decided to make a stir-fry out of these greens :).

It is small victories like these that help keep us going, else it is so easy to succumb to the challenges of growing in containers and go back to just buying them as usual. It is also very important to remember the whole purpose of growing them yourself – and that is to escape from the chemical growth stimulators and pesticides that the ones from the market are inundated with.

It is unfortunate that buying organic has become more of a “fashion” than about the conviction of moving back to our roots. As it is the middlemen and retailers who get to charge the customer a premium and hardly any of this translates back to the farmer, what’s the incentive for them to grow organic? After battling the challenges of growing organically in a small way, it often makes me think of what the farmers must be going through and how much more encouragement they would need to stick to the organic way.

After attending the Urban Krishi Mela that I mentioned in my last article, and learning from seminars on topics like organic farming, composting and rain water harvesting and hearing personal experiences of those who are moving to farming in a bigger way than I am at the moment, I am all the more determined to move closer to my goal J. Who’s joining me?