Kerala - Kochi   

Growing vegetables for healthy living

KOCHI: The terrace garden at headquarters of the Vegetable and Fruit Promotion Council Keralam (VFPCK) at Kakkanadu has kindled a lot of interest among people in its neighbourhood.

Set up as part of the two-year-old ‘Harithanagari’ programme, it is now visited by hundreds of people daily.

The visitors were keen to know how gardening could be done in the terrace, the types of vegetables that could be grown, the techniques involved and the fertilisers that were used, said a spokesman for VFPCK.

The ‘Harithanagari’ programme was launched two years ago with a view to spreading the idea of terrace garden in the urban areas. With a perennial shortage of locally-grown vegetables, the ‘Harithanagari’ campaign is expected to help meet this shortage by creating an inclination among city-dwellers for cultivation of vegetables.

Trained personnel from VFPCK would help people to set up these gardens and give them tips on how to go about doing it.

More than 500 terrace gardens had been set up in different parts of the city, said the VFPCK official.

The basic concept was to help the city-dwellers use their spare time. Besides helping grow fresh vegetables, terrace gardens provided a form of relaxation that was much-need in urban living now.

Among the vegetables grown on the ‘Mythri Bhavan’ terrace are tomatoes, green chillies, bush swords, ridge gourds, azolla, fennel, coleus, lettuce trees and clove bean.

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