A resident of Ittina Anai Apartments in Bellandur, Bengaluru, Aditya Rao along with his 85-year-old mother has turned their terrace into a lush green organic farm.

Aditya’s family is from Hyderabad where they grew up eating food from his mother’s kitchen garden.

“Around 2012, we moved here in an apartment complex, and she started missing how she grew her own food, something she loved the most back in Hyderabad,” he says. This was what inspired him to convert his terrace into a garden.

“The apartment structure restricted my mother, and she missed the open space to roam around during morning and evening hours. So I brought home a few recycled drums in which she started growing vegetables,” he says.

“These have now become a full-fledged garden with green leafy vegetables such as coriander, basil, mint, spinach, and gourds, as well as tubers like beetroot, radish, carrot and potato,” he adds. Aditya says the terrace also has tomatoes, peanuts, yams, amaranthus, chilli, capsicum, peas, different types of beans, and fruits such as papaya.

All the vegetables on Aditya’s terrace are grown using organic methods.

“We used recycled plastic drums to fill them with coco peat and mix the sludge extracted from a sewage treatment plant installed in our society,” he says. Aditya uses neem oil, water mixed with chilli and other natural methods for pest management.

He claims that due to increased green cover on the terrace, the temperature in his house has also come down by three to five degrees.

“We have not spent more than Rs 25,000 on maintaining our garden, and the rewards are unmeasurable,” he says.

The family harvests around 12 kg of vegetables in a week, and shares that their costs of groceries and such household expenses have reduced by 60 percent.