As we progress in life, things come and go. We start out with a plan and later it may fail or we stop executing it for some reason. Take the most common failed plans that most people complain about – exercise. When the new year rolls in some of us plan to exercise routinely and stay fit. Eventually, due to various reasons, some stop doing it. There were several plans I made after retirement, and some of them have either failed or we stopped them intentionally. One such plan was organic gardening. Just after retiring, we started to grow a small vegetable garden in the open space on the sides of our house inside our compound. I even built and programmed an automated drip irrigation system so we don’t have to worry about watering. But we stopped growing vegetables on the sides. So what happened?


I will be doing a series of updates about some old projects we started at the start of my retirement and this is the first of them. If you recall, we started organic gardening soon after I retired. We planted a bunch of vegetables on the side of our house.


Green leafy vegetables and some other plants on the side of the house (circa 2020)


We had a small harvests for the longest time too. While we had our struggles with the bugs and soil quality, it was still a lot of fun growing our own vegetables and eating fresh organic produce.


Radish grown in the soil on the side of the house (circa 2020)


In summers and winters the soil would be too hard and drip irrigation was not sufficient to soften the soil enough to grow root vegetables like radish and carrot. So we had to plan them for rainy seasons. For the other seasons we have to plant green leafy vegetables. Tomatoes and chilli grew well sometimes, but not at other times. Basically we had to figure out which plants like which seasons :). It was a good learning experience. Yet we stopped planting on the sides because we are having a better yield on the terrace garden that we later built.


Once we stopped growing vegetables, we even stopped the automated drip irrigation too. Now the sides look different, but still not too bad. Only thing is we don’t have fresh vegetables anymore from the sides.


No more vegetables


We used to have some tomato plants in the front yard and we stopped that too. Now we just have a garden with croton like plants. There is a reason we have neglected the organic garden in the recent past, but I will get to that in another post.


Front yard


That is all for today. Just wanted to give an update on all our old projects. Will be giving more updates in the near future.