Many of my friends from India and outside UAE wonder if it is possible to grow vegetables in hot and humid climate like UAE. If you all also wonder so , let me tell you it's very much possible . One of the Dubai Resident  Ms Vandana has proved it nicely.

 Vandana's organic vegetable garden, once covered in solid concrete paving, is now a green lung in a sprawling Barsha villa complex. Vandana's green oasis is not the only one in Dubai, with gardens sprouting up throughout the country. Dubai Sustainable City, a new community on the outskirts of Dubai, is equipped with natural biodome greenhouses, organic farms and individual garden farms and welcomed its first residents in January.

That community forms part of a nationwide drive to promote environmental awareness and limit waste. Those are not the only efforts being made to go green. In October, the UAE Ministry of Environment and Water urged residents to buy 'ugly fruit' in the supermarket as part of a National Campaign to Stop Food Loss.

On a much smaller scale, Vandana's modest garden is festooned with aubergines, cucumbers, tomatoes, over-sized marrows and football sized cauliflowers, all from left-over seeds from her kitchen.

Preventing waste is one of Vandana's key motivators, as all the food in her garden is 100 per cent organic, using vegetable waste straight from the kitchen. Any seeds she  uses  in her kitchen, tomato seeds or pumpkin seeds, she puts  them in the ground.

She and her husband began looking into growing their own food after realising how much preservatives could be in products. And how much food miles these imported food in supermarket might have. And she says that taste doesn't suffer for it. She said: "It will give you so much joy. it tastes different from what you buy and eat in the market, which is not organic."

Every Thursday, she distributes fresh organic vegetables to her family and friends, depositing the rest with a small restaurant she co-owns in JLT, with her best crop crowned vegetable of the day.

"My garden is a blessing. It's good for everybody, whatever little you can grow it's good for you," she says.

Vandana is not the only one embracing organics, and that it couldn't be easier. 

The chief benefits of growing our own vegetables is the freshness of the yield, least /zero food mile plus the enjoyment of the process itself.

Source : 7 days