First Principles

Creating your own food garden can be a fulfilling experience, whether you have a spacious plot of land or just a small balcony. The key is to work with your available space and choose plants that thrive in the tropical climate.

For those with ample land, start by figuring out what kind of soil you have and how much rain and sun you get. Once you have a clear idea of these three, proceed through the rest of this text and start selecting things to plant depending on what you're working with.

In general:

Raised beds can improve drainage, which is particularly beneficial during monsoon seasons, and makes maintenance easier.
Plan for pathways and consider installing a simple irrigation system to save time on watering (we've linked an extremely budget version below)
Don't forget to create a composting area. This will help you recycle kitchen waste and create nutrient-rich soil for your plants.

In smaller spaces like balconies or compact backyards, container gardening becomes your best ally. Choose plants that don't need a lot of space, pots with good drainage and use high-quality potting soil. Focus on compact varieties of vegetables that thrive in containers, like chili peppers, cherry tomatoes, or bush varieties of okra and eggplant. Vertical gardening techniques can maximize your growing area - try wall-mounted planters for herbs like curry leaves and coriander, or use trellises for climbers such as bitter gourd or passion fruit.

For balconies, utilize railing planters and hanging baskets to grow trailing plants. These add greenery without taking up precious floor space.

For composting in smaller spaces, consider the Bokashi composting system. It's a way of using fungi to turn your kitchen waste very efficiently into extremely nutrient-dense compost tea (in fact, this 'tea' is powerful enough that we're currently being overrun by malabar spinach at the office after experimenting with it).

While we can't recommend a particular brand, a simple google search will show you where to find most of these things in Sri Lanka. You can get plants and materials delivered to you easily.

We've linked some information you should learn before you go out and start buying stuff below:

One: Building soil and compost

Everything we’ve seen and read and everyone we’ve spoken to talk about the importance of building soil. This breaks down into a few things we can do:

Collect and dump lots of organic matter into soil, mix well, let it decompose (ie: compost)
Grow nitrogen-fixing crops that pump the soil full of nitrates (which other plants need to grow); set up cycle where these nitrogen-fixers help grow garden crops and those garden crops keep us supplied with compost.

Our most likely path seems to be:

First set up a compost-building zone in your garden. This should be at least 1 meters square, but preferably 3-4 meters square.
Make a hot compost.
First, buy or collect as much dry organic matter as possible. These can be leaves, shredded paper, chopped stems, coconut husks, wood chips. Add soil, manure, water, and mix thoroughly, then start the serious layering: six to eight inches of dry organic matter, followed by two or three of green (living organic matter), then more soil and manure. sprinkling of the soil options. Water generously before starting the next layer. Keep building until the heap reaches three to four feet high. Hot composting has a specific method and can yield you a compost in a month. Instructions here:
https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/2010/05/08/hot-compost-composting-in-18-days/
Use the hot compost to start nitrogen fixers and a long-term cold compost.
Nitrogen-fixing plants add nitrogen to the soil. Use the hot compost to plant a crop fast-growing nitrogen-fixers that a) fertilize the soil and b) can be chopped up and added as organic matter for fertilizer. In this way, grow your future organic fertilizer first. Azham and Nadim used sun hemp and gliricidia. Gliricidia is easy to find in Sri Lanka; it grows from stems. This is the ‘first crop’ and should be grown throughout to keep your plants supplied with nutrients. When these nitrogen fixers grow up, cut them down, add to a longer-term ‘cold compost’ (or lazy compost) that you keep continuously fed from your garden. Here’s a great guide to the process.

A lazy compost will take 4-6 months to be ready.

Two: Set up irrigation and plant basic survival foods

It’s hard to know where to start. Sri Lanka can grow almost everything, but all starting advice says we should focus on a few crops that:

can grow almost anywhere
can provide a variety of nutrients
can store well or grow enough that we can harvest when needed

To answer this question, I looked at resources around what grows in gardens in Sri Lanka, and cross-referenced against prepper survival guides, and survival / self-sufficient homesteading advice from the US. Here are the plants where they cross over most of the time.

Potato
Squash / pumpkin
Carrots
Lettuce
Sweet Potatoes
Tomatoes
Chilli
Beans
Cabbage
Garlic
Onions
Bell Pepper / Capsicum
Beet root
Eggplant

This is an important set: it provides some serious nutrients, and there are cross-compatible plants here that form polycultures (sometimes known as guilds); species that help each other grow. The key here seem to be beans: they’re excellent sources of protein and also double as nitrogen-fixers. Beans can be planted next to almost anything here and act as passive support.

Squash shades the ground and helps prevent weeds. Beans and squash and typically planted together with corn in ‘Three Sisters’ agriculture.
Carrots, onions, tomatoes, beans and lettuce grow well together. They show up on multiple guild systems. Tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, and squash (as part of a three-way companion partnership) works. Carrots also work with radishes; leeks also help carrots.
Tomatoes. Basil and Parsley work well with tomatoes. As do beans.
Potatoes are one of the most calorie-dense foods around and is a critical source of energy. They also work well with beans, cabbage, and lettuce. They grow well with coriander, which attracts insects that fight potato pests. Tomatoes and potatoes are in the same family and use the same nutrients, so avoid planting those together. They can work with garlic, but avoid planting next to onions and carrots.
Beetroot works well with sweet potatoes, onions and herbs, and with capsicum.
Eggplants, garlic, onions, and lettuce work together.

So next steps seem fairly obvious: we have six sets of plants that seem to work well together. We should go set by set and set up each. The main crops are squash / pumpkins, carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, beetroot, sweet potatoes and eggplants; as ancillaries we get radishes, plenty of beans, garlic, onions, cabbage, lettuce.

The first step is to germinate a lot of beans, then start setting up our groups. Here’s how to kickstart a lot of this growth, from someone in India:

If you have space, intercrop using ideas from below:

You also need to think about irrigation. Knowing our groups helps us set up irrigation, according to the needs of set of plants. If you have the space to dig ponds, watch:

If you’re on a rooftop or on an even smaller space/budget, have a look at this:

Three: interim harvests: fast-growing stuff for easy food

While the main crops above grow, you should also have a few things that you can eat inside of a month. Many of these are the greens from crops above.

Microgreens
Pea and Sunflower Shoots
Baby Lettuce
Baby Root Crops
Extra Greens

Four: Upgrading: flowers, companion plants and fruit

There seems to be a lot on how flowers help pollinate, prevent pests from attacking vegetable crops. This will require additional research into which flowers grow here, including this long list. I’ll upgrade this section as I learn more.

At this step, we should be upgrading the crops and planting fruit trees. Fortunately, we have plenty of fruit to choose from: mango, papaya, pineapple, avocado, banana, watermelon, rambutan, mangosteen, wood apple, guava, pomegranate and jackfruits. These will take time to grow but will keep yielding for a long time, not to mention providing shade for the garden.

Five: Monitoring your garden

If you're technically inclined, we have a tool for you! Over at https://github.com/team-watchdog/apocalypse-sensor-kit, we've built and shared the blueprints and software for an open-source sensor network that can read temperature, soil moisture, humidity, light intensity - and beam them all to your phone. If you have a very large space to look over, and if you have some engineering and soldering skills, we encourage you to check this out. It's entirely open-source, so feel free to use, modify and do as you see fit.