Two Organisations Helping My Veg-Growing / Swapping Efforts

My husband and I have recently taken to gardening. Our enthusiasm must be catching for our daughter has made a very public pact with her brother and cousins on facebook that when they grow old they promise not to bore everyone with their gardening exploits. She belongs to a choir and has promised if we talk of gardening, she'll sing songs at us :). Our response- don't push it till you've tried it. 

Ambitious as I am, without becoming great at gardening and since the NZ government is encouraging city farming (which I've written about on the wonderful Pattu's terraced gardening blog) I've started toying with the idea of a produce swap day in our area. I'm aware that some of the everyday fruits and veggies available in NZ (not talking about exotic ones like hapus keri, the queen of mangoes) use up a lot of fuel to get here. We do have our Saturday Farmers' Market where local growers sell their produce at half the price of supermarkets. But why not take it a step further - get to know the community we live in and help ourselves become more self-sufficient by growing and swapping our own veggies?

This post is about two organisations I feel are helping my efforts. The city council - amongst many things, offers free visits and advice to individual homes. For example, a plot in our garden was overun by weeds. We'd been eyeing it for weeks and were reluctant to use a weed killer. We knew there was only one thing to do. Get the shovel and start digging. After a day of hard labour my husband managed to get one weed out with half its roots. Those roots seemed to reach middle earth. One down, thirty to go. Seeing how hopeless the task was we decided to shut it out of our minds and concentrate on the rest of the garden.

The lady from the city council showed us an easy way to get rid of the weeds and prime our soil for our edibles. She said this particular weed (unfortunately I don't remember its name) is very rich in nitrogen and rather than pull it out we should bury it as it would decompose and enrich our soil. The following diagram says it all.

• The lime makes the soil acidic
• the cardboard prevents sunlight and air from reaching the weed
• the third layer is basically a carbon rich (and dry) layer
• the fourth is nitrogen rich (and wet) and 
• all this together slowly decomposes to form more compost ready for the next lot of plants even as we grow our edibles in the compost which is the top layer. 

The Green Gardener has a .pdf document on creating a "no dig garden" that explains it in more general terms - the above was specific to our garden.

Next, I'd like to talk about the free course on starting a project - any project. It is through an organisation which has a strong presence in India. In fact, it is through the Indian branch that I heard about the course. The only qualifier - you can't go it alone. Between 2 and 6 people in a group are invited to enrol for the course -  I asked my neighbour if she would like to do the course with me and she said she would. The course teaches "Human Centred Design" - design based on stepping out of our comfort zones, reaching out to people, formulating ideas, prototyping and evolving them, interview and feedback skills and more. It is a five week course and we are into the second week. All groups - from over 130 countries - keep in touch through google+. We get no certificate at the end of the course - only knowledge to improve our skills of going out into, and dealing with, the community.

Let's see how successful we are. We'll keep you posted. As for our daughter, I'm sure you'll agree, she owes us a song.

Taken to Court for Growing Veges.

By now we know that traffic fumes and overcrowding are huge culprits in depleting our natural resources. One outcome - our fruit and veges (veggies) grow in very poor quality soil.

Last year my husband and I decided we'd try and enrich our soil. At first, after months of effort we managed to produce a smelly, gooey slop. Now we are producing much better soil - sweet smelling, although it is still a bit lumpy.

What are we doing wrong? We attended a free city council sponsored course to find out. Apparently we aren't using enough brown organic waste. We all know about the two types of organic waste but bear with me as I feel it is worth repeating.

Brown and green organic waste: Both are essential for composting in approximately equal parts. Both need to be moist - not wet and aerated so that the micro organisms that convert it all to compost get oxygen.

• Brown Waste includes: Brown, dried leaves, dried grass, hay, sawdust (in moderation as the carbon content is way too much) and all kinds of paper, preferably shredded.
• Green Waste: Fresh (green) Grass clippings, Kitchen scraps (fruit, vegetables, coffee grounds, tea bags), weeds, green leaves, etc.

 As for methods of composting, I won't duplicate the advice of millions of online experts..



This summer we tried growing a few fruit and veges in our own home-composted soil. I can't begin to tell you how impressed we were with nature's bounty. We had a bumper crop each week and it lasted us throughout summer. Our capsicums were the sweetest and tender crisp, our cherry tomatoes were sweet and juicy and our mirchi, fat and not too teekha - exactly as we like them. Next season we are planning on more varieties of veges, fruit and herbs.

Eventually, once we are confident we have reasonably green thumbs we hope to get involved with our neighbourhood's community gardening efforts. If you'd like to find out about community gardens which are gaining popularity in NZ, I've written a guest post on Pattu's blog.

You might well ask what our composting, vege-growing and community efforts have to do with the title. That is Ron Finley's story. He's a great ambassador for community gardening and its benefits. He also has practical advice on making each community garden viable, long term and sustainable. And yes, someone did slap a case on him for growing veges.

Here's the link to his story in his own entertaining, humorous and inimitable style - TedX talk by Ron Finley.