Invisible farm

Work with street children to grow vegetables at and near their shelter. Use roof-tops, tree-branches, hanging baskets etc. In public and private spaces. These vegetables would compile a nutritionally balanced meal for the children.

They grow vegetables for other children who don't yet have access to shelters and are still on the streets. In a way this would be doing something for their past. They also explore making pickles, jams and other such things which can enhance their diet over the long term.

There is a parallel attempt to gain skills like blogging (audio, pictures) to share their stories (general and stories of the vegetable-growing) with the world.

During this process they also explore the soil ecology of their urban locality, learn to clean and re-use toxic soil and make it suitable for growing vegetables.

The steps for the workshop at Jamghat, Lado Sarai.

1. Scout places in and near the street-children shelters, where the conditions exist for growing vegetables
2. Make a map of these places
3. Make a list of mechanisms suitable for growing vegetables in those spaces responding to the conditions which exist there
4. Map the nutritional attributes of their existing diet
5. Decide which vegetables are to be grown
6. Understand the needs of the plants, the daily care to be taken of them and decide who is going to be responsible for the tasks
7. Make friends with nearby gardeners (malis) for support/guidance wen needed
8. Make a projected schedule of the growth of the vegetable plants
9. Buy seeds, design containers, buy tools

1. Talk about “invisible friends,” sharing and the generosity of cities
2. Doing things for our past
3. Knowing and repeating each other's stories to make them ours

1. Understand what needs to be done
   1. document the entire process through photos and voice
   2. document the growth of the vegetables
2. Download all the required softwares on the computer
3. Learn and practise the softwares
4. Put the first few posts
5. Keep posting all the way through December

1. Cook at least one meal together
2. Configure bit-torrent at the centre to download movies and music?
3. Understand the dreams/aspirations of everyone in the group
4. Design ways for the group to be in touch and contribute to each other's aspirations

CHAPTER 1: DATES: September 9th to 14th

1. Day 1: talked about growing vegetables, „unknown“ friends and sharing, mapped places around the shelter where they can grow vegetables and learnt audio recording on audacity
2. Day 2: a simple discussion on nutrition, diet and vegetables. in simple flower-pots we sowed chilli, radish and spinach seeds
3. Day 3: get baskets, setup baskets, get containers made, talk to neighborhood gardeners, put audio recordings on the Internet
4. Day 4: prepared more soil, sow seeds in baskets + pots, post the group's experience on the audio blog, talk about the “public fruit map (delhi)”
5. Day 5: containers (all kinds… bought from a flea market), sow seeds, audio blog activities, work on the “public fruit map” @ googlemaps
6. Day 6: responsibility of continued care and documentation of the farms, plans for next time, sharing contact details, feedback, plans/ideas

CHAPTER 2: Soil, Public food

CHAPTER 3: DATES: TBA

CHAPTER 4: DATES: TBA

1. Pictures: http://cityspinning.org/tag/jamghat/

1. Enrich the children's diets with the vegetables that they grow
2. Seed cycles of vegetable growth
3. Organise a feast at a public festival in December with vegetables, recipes or secondary products (like pickle) that the children have grown or made themselves
4. Some of the baskets in which vegetables are grown by the children are also installed around some of the sites at the festival space in December. The baskets are all painted by the children to name/identify the care-taker of the basket
5. Get the children to keep podcasting to be able to talk to the world without barriers of literacy, maybe have an archive of the podcasts available as a CD at the festival