YOGA LIFESTYLE

My kitchen garden has had a tremendous start with an amazing amount of lettuce and green endive. After that the carrots came out and I had some lovely herbs like the coriander I used in many of the Sattvic recipes of this blog. Last week the potatoes came out, but as for the rest of the veggies: its waiting and waiting. The tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage and courgette are growing very well but slowly. In the meanwhile I am learning my kitchen garden lessons, because I cannot say otherwise than that it is extremely difficult to garden completely organic. The paksoi has been eaten almost completely, but the leaves of the cabbage and courgette are (almost) in tact.

Here are some of the great lessons I’ve learned these past days:

1. On the first picture you see the yellow flower of the courgette. Like with pumpkin and cucumber, every fruit of the plant starts with a beautiful flower and some of them are eatable. 
2. The second picture is made of the potatoes that came out of the ground: my neighbors children absolutely loved to search for the potatoes, they came out every corner of the garden. As you can see they are not the same size at all and there are many small ones. I thought that I had to take them out, because the plants were ready blossoming and weren’t looking quite well: that is okay with potatoes, you can just leave them into the ground until august or september! So I took them out too early (I found on the internet that I could take them out in july if they were put in
   the ground the beginning of march). Though taken out too early, their taste is very good. It is a very high quality potato!
3. Bugs and snails have been eating almost all the green leaves of the paksoi, but I leave the plants into the ground so that they have something to eat and hopefully they will leave all the other plants in peace (the radishes, fennel, broccoli, courgette, cabbage, cucumber, tomatoes, herbs, etc). I found an organic remedy on the internet and it seems like caterpillars are eating less now: one liter of water, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, 1 table spoon of green soft soap. Spray it on the leaves every day and repeat after raining. 
4. The green beans were destroyed first by bugs: I had three lovely plants (out of 6 seeds) and 2 of them had a nice amount of beans (like 15 each plant). After a couple of days all the leaves of the plant were eaten and the beans died. I went to my sister in law and she used the same organic seeds as I did and hers were exploding! I took literally hundreds of beans of her plants… on the picture you see that I’ve made a lovely wrap with those (in coconut oil stir-fried green pepper, courgette, sweat pepper, green beens and goats cheese on a mais-tortilla). So what happened? First of all, her bins are much deeper (over one meter) and are in full sunshine the whole day. But the most important factor is that she (or better to say my nephew) had put the seeds straight into the ground. He took over 35 seeds! And I just put 6 and let them germ into the house before putting them into the ground outside. I thought working by ‘the rules’ but that was not the best scenario with these bean seeds. I think out of her 35 seeds, 10 plants grew very big. Last week I’ve put more seeds straight into the bin outside, so that in October I might have some of those beautiful beans too.

Having my own kitchen garden still amazes me every day about the wonders of nature. It gives me inner peace and some lovely food straight from the source, which means that all the energy of the plant is preserved. It’s amazingly pure with a lot of prana (the plant fills itself with this life-giving energy from the elements). I feel better when I eat from it.

Though it is a hard job. I guess the circumstances count as well and it is not possible to just copy what you read on the internet: you have to feel with your intuition what is needed at each specific moment. And seeing the fact that we humans are loosing our instincts because we don’t have to find our own food in nature anymore and we don’t even have to navigate ourselves anymore, we loose connection with our true nature. I definitely feel much closer to nature and my true inner ‘natural’ self since having a garden! I now understand how this is helping my process of inner cleansing and the yoga-road to moksha: merging into the higher life-giving source which is to be found in nature and is similar to my instincts and intuition.