It was a pleasant Tuesday morning when the three of us ventured into the outskirts of Bangalore. Varthur is a typical suburb of Bangalore, home to Varthur lake.We were visiting the Varthur Goverment school and first grade college to survey the place for gardening. The space that was earmarked by the school as vegetable garden was now full of Parthenium with a couple of radish and tomato here and there.
From whatever knowledge we had gathered about organic and natural farming, we started discussing about whether to cut the Parthenium and just leave it there to decay or clear it entirely and grow something else. The thought of propagating millions of Parthenium seeds seemed scary. So we decided to pluck out the existing Parthenium and dump it elsewhere for composting and replace it with another weed - a 'useful' one this time. The kids were free and we could't wait, so, within a matter of a few minutes, about 15 boys and 5 girls were plucking out existing weed even as we discussed if we need to cut it at the base or pluck the whole plant out. In the meanwhile, two of us got horse gram from the nearest grocery shop.
This is when it occurred to us that we were replicating the story of stone soup. The story goes like this:A hungry weary traveller is passing through a village and wishes to have some food. However, he doesn't have any means to buy food. He requests one of the villagers to help him with some hot water to make soup from a magic stone. As the stone starts boiling, people start gathering around, curious to know about the soup. The traveller then asks for some potatoes to make the soup tastier.. and then tomatoes, and salt and pepper and finally some bread to go along with the soup.
Coming back to the Varthur school, we felt a need for some gardening tools and sent a couple of kids to look for them. Soon, a ten * ten patch was ready for planting. The children, some of them who were quite eager about gardening, quickly broadcast some seeds and went for lunch, happy after doing the good deed of the day or may be it was our good deed of the day. Once the ground is covered, we plan to plant vegetables.
Horse gram is a ground covering weed that grows very close to the ground and acts as living mulch and prevents other weeds as well. Being a leguminous plant, it has another important function of fixing nitrogen into the soil.
Typically, horse gram (Macrotyloma uniflorum) is grown at the end of the growing season, it is one of the easiest beans to grow, hardly requires water and very nutritious. Once the beans are ready, the entire plant is plucked out, dried, beaten and heaped to gather the beans at the bottom. It is one of the lesser known beans and is mostly associated with poor people's diet or as cattle feed. It is often considered a last resort for farmers if rains have failed.
Coming up next: Yummy recipes with horse gram.
