Tag: urban garden

Reasons to have an urban garden

I bought two urban gardens six years ago, because I started reading studies on the possible effects of GMOs, herbicides, insecticides, pesticides, etc. We start by planting herbs such as parsley, mint, basil, etc. When the caterpillars ate everything, we continued to plant something “useful” like carrots (which came out tiny), beans with which I made a few tortillas (but was invaded by a white bug), etc. We continued to plant strawberries, raspberries, cherries, etc., and grew beautiful, but it hardly bore fruit. And we also tried Cherry tomatoes, but although I got to collect twenty Cherry tomatoes at once, they come out small and not enough to make a salad.

So we opted to plant peppers over a year ago, and they have lasted without using anything except water, and remnants of organic soy drink and organic whole milk (mixing the liquid left at the bottom of the tetra brik with water). We’ve collected a lot of green peppers, and some red peppers. We gather them green because they start to show black areas at the top, but some of them mature well until they turn red. Its size is medium, larger than a fist, so it serves as an ingredient for a recipe.

Now I tell you how to do it, but the great trick is to replant the seeds of the peppers we eat, so that production does not stop. This time we have done it by germinating the seed first, and using natural guano before planting (it is suitable for organic farming, and we will use it only once more within a month as dictated by the instructions).

Steps

• 

• 

• 

• 

Step 1

Extract the seeds from an organic pepper, and put them to germinate as when we did in school. A container with kitchen roll paper in the bottom, moistened with water, with the seeds on top, and covered. One trick one neighbor told me is to put them on top of the internet router, to get heat for 5 days (leaving the ventilation gaps free of course).

Step 2

Remove the soil where you will plant the seeds to oxygenate the soil (I did it 1 day before planting). If you want, pour and spread evenly the amount of natural guano indicated by the package. And water a little.

The brand we use from natural guano shows an amount for “before planting”, and another amount for the following month, in the case of peppers. For other vegetables, it recommends a third dose two months later.

I recognize that the first few times we did it, we did neither germinate the seeds nor add guano or anything, but consequently, the production was low. We started to see results after planting seeds, and more seeds.

Step 3

If we see the seeds germinated, then we can plant them. . We must see some green tails coming out of the seed, as shown below. We sink the finger a little into the ground, and we make a bunch of holes separated from each other, like when you draw a 3-striped board. Then add in each hollow 1 germinated seed, cover it with soil or substrate, and water well.

Step 4

Water (with rainwater when possible), observe, and remove weeds. We have to water in the early morning, or in the afternoon when the sun starts to set, and the soil is not hot. And watch out for watering a lot, because in our case the urban garden have underneath a water outlet hole, and all the nutrients of the soil go out there. Put a container under the urban garden just in case, and if the water comes out, then you can use it to water the next afternoon.

First the stem will come out, then the flower, and then the green pepper. If it matures and starts to turn red, then great.

But it’s also good for eating if it starts to turn black on top. From green it passes to black, and then to red. Below you can see that the pepper on the left is not yet completely red, when the one on the right is still green.

And if a bird comes to eat the worms and bugs on the ground, ask the children to make scarecrows with recycled products (1 stick, aluminum foil you’ve used, 1 sack, 1 bag of colors, markers, and imagination).

• 

• 

Thank you very much for the visit, and see you soon!