Ladies Fingers are off the soil first!

Almost all of our ladies' fingers have sprouted after 4 days - though they should have planted straight on the pot, we goofed up a bit and hopefully it doesn't really impact the plants. Unfortunately, my still camera isn't working, so here is a small clip of video of it.

Now we need to transplant them to pots or DIY containers. Looks like we need more containers than we had planned for. It also rained a bit yesterday and the one pot we filled seems to have a bit of drainage problem, it takes a while for the water to drain out.

So the next set of questions were pretty well answered by Mr. Raghu Rao, who was our instructor for the Terrace Garden Workshop.

• So how many plants in a pot ? what size of pots ?
  
  Ladies finger plants grow quite large - upto 3-4 feet high and the leaves spread out too. Normally the spacing between plants should be about a foot (12 inches or 30 cms). It will be good if you can put 1 or maximum 2 plants into a pot. If it is a pot of 6 inches diameter, just put one plant into it. Planting two will not work out.
  
  If you have pots which are 10 - 12 inches diameter, you can put two plants in each pot. Make sure that you leave a gap of at least 6 - 8 inches between the plants, though.i.e the plants will have to be planted about two or three inches from the side of the pot, so that there is at least 6 inches between the plants if you are using a 12 inch dia. pot. In a 10 inch dia pot the spacing between the plants will decrease but they will grow away from each other, so it won't be a problem.
  
  But since ladies finger has deep roots, the pots should be at least 10 inches deep so that the plant grows unhindered.
  
  
• Watering, fertilizers ?
  
  You'll have to water them well and put manure in while the plants are growing and again at the flowering stage. If you harvest the fruits tender, then the period of yielding can be increased.
  

So we have transplanted them to two 12" pots and a 8" one. But we have planted 3 of them in the larger ones and selected 2 healthy and a not-so-healthy ones in each of them. It was bit of an effort filling soil, but we should get better with more experience. The late breaking news is that tomatoes and capsicum or carrots(not sure which one, the labels were erased while watering - need to use ball point pens next time) have sprouted as well. Hopefully we should be able to move it to pots in a week or two.