Gardening with Your Own Formula

Some people may say that raising a garden in the back yard or in chamber pots is not easy. It consumes time to take care your plant. You have to provide the plant nutritious materials, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and vitamins. You also need to water the plant regularly. Let alone when the weather is not friendly enough to your plants. There are so many works to do with your garden. But if you know the smart trick to manage the garden, you will be surprise when you find simple and cheap material with simple ways turn into a magical formula to your garden.

The magical formula is called “microbes” and “natural nutrition”. According to Mrs. Setyastuti, the woman who has been promoting and practicing a natural farming system in her home village in Banjarnegara Regency (Central Java Province) and works with Bina Desa as a Technical Assistant for Sustainable Agriculture Program, when you successfully develop the microbes and natural nutrition you can grow any plant you want in your garden. She learned and adopted the technique from Dr. Cho Han Kyu, a famous natural farming practitioner from South Korea.
There are four microbes and many kinds of natural nutrition that make a perfect combination to nurse your plant. These are the steps to make microbes and natural nutrition.

Here are steps to develop microbes:

Put a bowl or two of rice on a flat bamboo plate. Let the rice decayed. In seven days smooth and delicate grey fungus will grow on the top of the rice. The fungus you will have from this stage is named microbe 1.

Then pick the fungus up, mix with 1 kg of bran (by-product of milling rice, usually to feed animal) and put them in a shady place. Let the compound be fermented in seven days. The stage is called microbe 2.

After the fermentation successfully done, pour soil from where you are going to plant the crops/plant to the microbe 2, and mix them thoroughly. Keep the compound of soil and microbe 2 in shady place for seven days to be fermented and then you’ll get the microbe 3.

Finally, you have a ready formula to grow your plant (microbe 4). Then put the microbe 4 into your chamber pot or to your garden. Mix it with the soil where you’ll grow the plant. Don’t forget to give the plants extra food with natural fertilizers and easy-to-make natural nutrition.

Steps to provide natural nutrition:
* Chop any vegetable (such as spinach, carrot, etc.), fish or fish bones, eggshells, cow bones, etc.
* Put each raw material in different stopper glass jar. Add palm sugar into the stopper glass jar. * One part is for the raw material and one part is for the palm sugar (1:1).
* Sealed the glass jar securely. Let the mixture be fermented in seven days. After seven days, you will find the compound produces juicy substance.
* Use the juicy liquid substance to pour your soil around the plant.

It is important to know what ingredients in the raw material that you’ll use as nutritious substance to the plants. For instance, fermented eggshells and fish/cow bones are sources of calcium (limestone); and fermented spinach is good to fulfill the iron nutrient for the growth of the plant. While strong smell of scrub herbs such as basil is good for pests repellent.

If you have already known that each nutrition has its own function for the plant growth and development and to control the pests, then you can make the natural formula by yourself to feed your plants. Now, what are you waiting for? Grow your own plants with your own magical formula (Ika N. Krishnayanti/July 29, 2006).