Tuesday, March 20, 2012

My Experiments with Drip Irrigation

Water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource, drip irrigation is one among the solutions to conserve agricultural water and improve agricultural productivity. Drip irrigation, also known as trickle irrigation or micro-irrigation or localized irrigation, is an irrigation method which saves water and fertilizer by allowing water to drip slowly to the roots of plants, either onto the soil surface or directly onto the root zone, through a network of valves, pipes, tubing, and emitters. It is done with the help of narrow tubes which deliver water directly to the base of the plant.

I managed to purchase few accessories from 
Trivandrum Agro Bazaar. As a first phase, I hand picked few items whose usage is known to me.
However to start with let me try with simple methodologies. In this blog I will share my 
experiments with drip irrigation on my roof garden.

Drip pipe from the bucket aligned through the plant sacks. Pierced the pipe with pin holes. Noticed that the frequency of drip is little faster, so used sellotape  to control the flow of water.

Used a Plastic bucket and at the bottom of the bucket made a hole. Used a rubber bush to fix a nozzle ( Used a plastic bottles opening).

Here I used a Plastic bottle to check the flow of water and the frequency of drips. It took almost 20 Minutes for water to flow out  from 1 Liter of Bottle. Bottle was placed half a meter above the plant.
Fogger 1 Way With Tube


Image shows the closeup of the nozzle and used the same for drip as first phase of experiment.

Ideally this has to be connected to another hose which in-turn is connected to a water tank.


As mentioned before these are the accessories which I purchased from supermarket.

I have to do few research on individual items, and will be updating this blog in another post.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Homemade compost


We live in a society where we are dependent on others, now the challenge is how well we can manage to reduce the dependency. Lets us consider the waste management process, every household in India is contributing 7 to 10 Kg of waste from kitchen in a month. There are other solid wastes which may contribute to another 5 Kg. Are we really serious about this, or just waiting for the government to propose any schemes or plans on waste management?  Are we serious about our kids and their living in future?  Or just ignore them as we are getting accustomed to what our parents or the previous generation did?
There are a lot of cost effective homely waste management processes. In this blog I would like to share my contribution on how well I can make my city clean while managing my kitchen waste and converting it to a productive vegetable plantation and further a fruitful result. 



Clay pot for disposing kitchen and other degradable waste. This is an ordinary pot meant for planting seedlings.


There are other terracotta pots available for converting waste to compost, which will have proper air circulation options in the pot to support worms to help in decomposing the wastes.


Pumpkin which grew from the waste, this pot has all the waste from the kitchen.

Another pot ready to get planted. This is a mixture of vegetable, excess food waste.

Black Soldier Flies and Larvae

- They never transmit any diseases 
- They don’t bite or sting and they avoid human habitats. 
- Their presence in waste deters or even eliminates house fly reproduction in that waste 
- Larvae rapidly consume almost any organic waste except for high cellulose items like yard waste 
- Larvae reduce the volume of household food waste by up to 95% 
- A 2 foot (60cm) container of larvae can process 5 lbs. (2.3kg) or more of household food waste in 24 hours