A Kitchen Garden, Not a lawn

Aru Bhartiya started gardening back in 2018 when she had shifted to Jaipur. An unused lawn and a cow in their house triggered the idea of growing a Kitchen Garden. Aru’s father has always been a gardening enthusiast and she has grown up living in houses where there was space and scope to grow a garden. In her Jaipur house, Aru has a roof-top and a backyard garden of 20*30 sq feet, which are full of veggies and herbs like roselle, chaulai , Malabar spinach, coriander, mint, chilli, ladyfinger, some flowers and a mango tree. Cow dung and compost from kitchen waste make up for the manure and neem water and a solution made using buttermilk are used as pest repellants.

Aru describes her first experience of sowing a seed and seeing it germinate as a magical moment of joy and contentment. “It is only when you do it yourself, you experience the joy”, mentions Aru. Her family has also begun to realize the importance of homegrown fresh food once they started experiencing the difference in taste. Most of their herb and leafy green requirements are now fulfilled from the home garden.

Aru believes that it is important for people to start feeling the unique taste of homegrown food, which would help them to begin thinking about it. To motivate people to do so, she cooks millet-based meals using vegetables and herbs from her own garden. These meals are served to a few families every Sunday. Not only this, but she also conserves and shares seeds with other enthusiastic gardeners and motivates her friends to visit the local farmers’ markets.

Aru used to be very methodical when she started gardening, but she gradually realized that plants grow and find a balance at their own pace and a gardener should have patience and move ahead gradually. According to her, an important value that kitchen gardening builds, especially in urban people, is the “empathy” towards farmers, because people start realizing what it takes to grow food. She also says that people have become more conscious about their food habits and their nutrition requirements during COVID-19 pandemic and consuming homegrown food can solve a lot of problems for them.

Follow more of her work at:

https://instagram.com/themilletkitchen?utm_medium=copy_link