WASTE TO TASTE AND URBAN GARDEN ECOSYSTEMS

June 04, 2025

The vibrant taste of a sun-dried tomatoes on your pizza, the freshness of mint leaves coupled with the zesty punch of lemon in your mojito, and the freshness of herbs that garnish your meals. There's that additional oomph that your kitchen garden can bring to your food, and you shouldn't be missing out on that! While the taste is elevated when you source ingredients from your garden at home, the waste in your household also reduces and that is a critical part when creating a sustainable urban garden ecosystem.

KITCHEN GARDENS:

Kitchen gardens are basically to serve what the name suggests, kitchen. It's an area designated for the growth of vegetables, fruits, and herbs for domestic usage. Like said earlier, a kitchen garden isn't just a collection of plants but a reflection of what urban gardens should stand for, an eco-system with multi-layered benefits.

EMBRACING WASTE:

For any plant to thrive and stay healthy, its foundation needs to be strong. For plants that is the soil. Living soil is what one should strive for, which includes compost and microorganisms. This will ensure that the soil's nutrients are plentiful, it has a high-water retention capacity, and a good structure. How does the soil embrace waste? For those of your who have read the previous blog, this question's answer will come spontaneously to you, compost created from kitchen waste. For further details refer back to the previous blogs for an in-depth detail as to how compost can be created and what all you will need.

Embracing waste does not stop at just compost however for kitchen gardens, it goes far beyond. The dreaded lemon seeds can be your next lemon plant, and withering mint leaves on a stem can be replanted to grow new fresh ones. Your tree/plant itself can be due to being cautious and not reaching to the easy conclusion that something is 'waste'.

CREATION OF AN ECO-SYSTEM:

Compost, seeds, and stems all come together to form a eco-system that work hand in hand. The lemon seeds that were going to be discarded form your lemon plant, which give you fresh lemons for your lemonade on a hot summer day and not to forget more seeds to create more lemon plants. The lemon's skin is what will be the bedrock, or part of the soil for its next sapling. Not to forget, a kitchen garden attracts beneficial microorganisms and insects which can increase the nutrients in the soil that the plants take up in turn of getting an urban garden they can call home.

In conclusion, remember your kitchen garden is more than just a repository for ingredients for your fruit salad. It's a microcosm of an urban garden eco-system. And many microcosms that come together in an urban garden is what will bear benefits for the wider eco-system. So, each of you can make a difference, and it is important not to forget that. So be cautions in what you call waste, it can create a part of your meal 2 years down the line.