Urban gardening - Huerto en la ciudad

Back in Santiago and to our normal routine. We decided that this weekend would be perfect to start an urban vegetable plot.
The way we see it, Santiago is a gardeners' paradise: fairly mild climate (from 10-30 during the day and from 0 to 20 deg centigrade during the night all year round) and lots of sun. Main challenges here are:

1. Finding organic seeds
2. Getting good soil
3. And of course... ideally you want a good supply of water (and a water storage system... but let's not worry about this one for the moment and just use the tap - we have to water our silly lawn anyways...)

 Any foreigner would think "surely, you just need to do an internet search and find a good garden center"... well, you would be wrong, here things work a little differently: you can go to a garden center and buy the usual cr*p that everyone buys or... you can find some contacts who know somebody who is really good at gardening/has their own organic farm/lives in an organic hippie community/... and could provide some organic seeds.

For getting the soil, we have been composting now for about a year. We have:

• a wormery,
• a normal compost,
• a leaf compost
• a dog poo compost - our is much simpler than in the hyperlink, a hole in the ground where we add some fermented (1 to 2 weeks old) rice water.

The last one is useful when you look after a dog or more :op (dare we say, if we did not live in a city, we would most likely also be into humanure...)

The first three are complimentary tools for a healthy plot and in warm climates you can turn "waste" into great quality soil incredibly quickly. Main challenge: keep you worms cool and moist (no issue as they are mainly in the shade and we eat tonnes of fruit that keeps them moist as it decomposes). Keep your compost warm and moist (no real issue, we no longer wee in our toilet and give the compost as much nitrogen as our bodies can! who wants to wee in clean drinking water when you can help make good compost with your wee?). Put your leaves on a pile and wait for ages (surely anyone can do this!?).

With this wormery design, you do need to sieve a bit through the content - we recommend the worm works type of design as a better alternative (though made out of plastic so not compostable! ;o))

(even Mario loves compost!)

Lovely soil with high organic content - all the fruit left overs we did not eat last year!

For getting the seeds and seedlings, we tried the "contacts" route and it worked! :o) Two different friends had mentioned "El huerto de la senora Bertina" while asking them where to get good organic seeds. We (unsuccessfully) tried to get a website or a telephone number (silly foreigners, things do not work like this over here)... but eventually faced to reality which is we needed to get ourselves to the corner of Larrain with Tobalaba, here, and hope that someone would be there to talk to. And so we did and this is what we found (finally a phone number! :op):

(A veg warrior looking for Bertina)

(another veg warrior, the random dogs and people :o))

plants, plants and more plants everywhere

The mysterious Bertina is a lovely lady who has taken a plot of land in la Reina. Here she has built her own veg patch and grows and incredible variety and amount of plants. Her "allotment/garden" is also the home of several people and dogs that used to live on the street before she took them in. She was warm and full of life and we could not help but thinking that there was a lot to be learnt from her and all her years of planting experience!

The wise and friendly Bertina with our celery and calendulas - if you are into plants, pay her a visit!

She helped us find some seedlings, she took a seed order, she showed us her veggie plot and overall, we had a very entertaining and a little surreal experience: sort of like turning up at an unknown person's allotment to ask for some seeds and then feeling like they are an old friend you have not seen in a while.

Lots of recycled containers as pots!

Maximising growing space!

We might have got a little carried away as on the way back, we noticed how Mario was looking in a thoughtful manner at the mess we made of the hire car:

In the evening we planted a lot of the stuff... only to find the following morning that an intruder had been "messing" with our veg (note cat paw tracks all over our seedlings!)

Luckily for us, we are in south america and there are some monster plants around. We remembered a neighbour just around the corner had pruned an interesting tree... with some thorns and that perhaps we could scavenge some raw materials:

(yes, the thorns are for real and not human-made)

So, we armed our little seedlings ready for battle:

Let's see if we can convince the cat(s) that there are more comfortable toilets out there!

For this year, we are looking forward to tomatoes, pumpkins, broad beans, peas, chard, ruccola, lettuce, celery, oregano, melissa, mint, fennel, aloe vera, stevia, nettle, carrots, broccoli, leeks, garlic, borage, calendula and a few others. In the near future we may get some monster tree, (yes we got and planted some seeds and no, no idea what it is yet!), avocados, persimons and chirimoyas.

(thanks Mairead and Gary for inspiring us a couple of weeks ago to get back to growing our own) ;o)