This Kitchen Garden Day, an urban farmer tells Joanna Lobo how kitchen waste can be converted into nourishment for herbs grown on your balcony

nurture the herbs in your balcony
This Kitchen Garden Day, an urban farmer tells Joanna Lobo how kitchen waste can be converted into nourishment for herbs grown on your balcony

The lane leading to Preeti Patil's house at Dockyard Road, Mumbai is lined with stately trees with rain-polished barks. If you look up at the buildings, you will see one balcony with leaves and tendrils snaking out of it. This is Patil's two-year-old kitchen garden.
Patil, 43, is better known among the Mumbai's green fraternity as a founder of the farming community, Urban Leaves. Her own kitchen garden started at the same time as Urban Leaves. "I realised that if I had to teach people how to grow fruits and vegetables in the little space they have, I would have to try it first," says Patil. So she converted her little balcony, three by ten feet, into a kitchen garden. The balcony now has an abundance of green — kadipatta (curry leaves), lemon grass, turmeric and suran (yam), along with tiny shoots of spearmint, peppermint and tulsi.
Tucked away in the corners of this garden lie two earthen pots. These home-composting units are the soul of her garden. Home composting, says Patil, is necessary not only to ensure healthy plants but also for sustainability. "For a city to be sustainable, it is important that growth and decay happen in a cycle. If each household recycles its own waste, 80% of which is kitchen waste, it would lower the burden on landfills," says Patil. The resultant home-composted soil is nutrient-rich and eliminates the need for fertilisers and pesticides, making it ideal for a small kitchen garden.
Besides it is a useful lesson on recycling and decomposing waste matter.
To start your own kitchen garden, you can begin with composting waste at home. It's simple, really. All you need are two pots. Composting is a process that lets off heat, so Patil uses earthen pots to keep the compost cool. These pots are kept on a tripod stand, with holes drilled into the bottom to let out excess water, and on the lid for aeration. "You just put kitchen waste in a pot and sprinkle it with soil. When one pot fills up, use the other. Meanwhile, the waste in the first pot condenses, and its volume goes down," she says. At present one of her pots is cracked, but Patil covers the crack and will change the pot only after the compost is ready.
In less than three months, the soil is ready. The composted soil is used to plant lemon grass, kadipatta, chillies, tulsi and basil. "These plants do not require much soil and are good if you're just starting your garden," says Patil.
Two years of practise and endless classes on composting have ensured that Patil has her basics in place. Her composting units have no odour. "Composting requires air, a certain temperature and adequate moisture. So if your unit smells, it means the proportion of one of those three is wrong," she says.
Patil's garden is a mixture of techniques. She uses amrut mitti and compost soil and has a home-made self-watering system for some plants. At present, the highlights of her garden are two uncommon varieties of spinach: mayalu (creeping spinach) and kirai (the hedge variety).
The beauty of Patil's garden is the flavour it adds to her daily cooking. One leaf of spearmint is enough to add an explosive mint flavour to herbal drinks. The pudina, celery and basil are so fresh, they just need to be plucked and added to herbal tea, salads and soups.
Besides, the herbs she grows add a fragrance to the air. One that lingers till I reach home.