Summer Fun : How We Created Our Home Garden

It was summer 2004. I was about 12 years old. We bought a patch of land for building our new home. The land was 160 feet long and 35 feet in width. It had enough space to have a kitchen garden. So we decided to spent the summer by creating a small garden

The land was covered with full of grass and cattle used to browse there. To prevent cattle from eating the plants, we decided to fence the area first. We bought stone pillars & barbed wire and sought outside help in fencing the area. We also put a small gate made with bamboo over the stone pillars

Myself, my brother and our parents started cleaning the grass manually. Our home was about 6 kilometers away from the land. So everyday afternoon we drove to the land and cleared the grass in patches. It took us about 10 days to remove all the grass.

In the mean time, we visited a nearby nursery and bought fruit bearing tree saplings. We bought mango, Orange, Lemon, Sweet lime, Sapodilla, Jackfruit, Indian Gooseberry, Jamun, Pomegranate and guava saplings.

We dug pits of about 2 feet by 2 feet leaving enough space from the boundary as well between each plant. We also bought some farm yard manure. We mixed the dug-out soil, sand and farmyard manure in equal parts, filled the holes and planted the saplings.

We planted in east end of the land leaving space for our future home also.

The planted saplings need to be watered regularly. Initially we did not have electricity. We drilled a bore well and installed a hand pump. Every day evening, we used visit the garden and water all saplings by manually pumping water. Sometimes my niece also helped us in watering the saplings.

We could get electrical connection after six months only. All those six months we manually watered the saplings to keep them alive. Then we removed the hand pump and installed a 1.5 HP compressor pump. We also built a small pump house and a water tank to store water

It is almost ten years. All the trees we planted have started bearing fruits. Now we are enjoying the fruits of our labor. Whenever we harvest fruits from the garden, I fondly remember the summer we spent in developing our small kitchen garden.