Produce from the Garden

After more than 2 months of our foray into Gardening, we are harvesting vegetables - ladies' fingers are in regular supply, though the plants were lucky to survive the pest onslaught, picked up some carrots, which resembled like potatoes than carrots! The soil was a bit hard for it to go down easily and it got stuck there. Also the multiple plants in a single pot seems to have hurt the growth. From the top, it looked pretty healthy ones, but it was able to go down easily I guess. We are hoping that the next set of carrots would turn out good because the soil was prepared for carrots and the plant has enough space in a single pot.

The podland pink tomatoes are ripening, but with an orange shade though. There are couple of trusses with 3-4 tomatoes on most of the plants, but after that the next set of flowers didn't really produce anything.

Hopefully things will improve in the next round of cultivation and may be we need to seek help from some experts!

Tomatoes and Chilly

Tomatoes have finally arrived in our garden on couple of plants. Rest of them have flowers on them and more should arrive soon. It is the Podland Pink variety from the Department of Horticulture. We had no idea what the stuff was till we saw some pictures at another blog.

The Ladies' Finger plants are fighting back and the new ones look very healthy and reminding us on what should have been if the pests hadn't attacked the plants. The new leaves also look very good. We kind of hurried in planting multiple plants in a single pot which seems pretty cramped and a very bad idea as well.

The chillies are out as well and in good condition as well. Not sure what's going on inside the carrot and onion plants. Onion plant seems pretty healthy and the carrots are catching up as well.

We also bought some flowering plants with flowers in it from Lalbagh to provide some variety and I guess it also helps keep the pests away from the vegetable plants. There is also the traditional thulsi plant in the lot, with its medicinal value. But you miss the excitement of seed starting and the discovery of the buds in the plants. But flowers are flowers nevertheless!

All of a sudden there are lots of things happening and hopefully we should be able to keep them pest free and have a good harvest soon!

News from the Garden!

Good news and bad news from the Garden - we have ladies' finger(okra) on our plants, but the plants have become pretty weak due to severe leaf miner attack. We were bit late to intervene, but after spraying the neem-oil and detergent solution, things became a bit better, but still not very good state. You can't hurry or slow down the growth of the plants - everything has a natural rythm that you need to get used to. But it hasn't spread across the plants, so we have not removed the plants and they continue to flower and produce more.

Tomatoes have flowered as well though there is a bit of leaf miner attack which we are trying to fend off. Carrots are doing well, but the soil we used appears to be a bit heavy for it to grow well. The green pepper plants are going steady and the lone onion plant seems to be the most healthy of the lot.

But it sure is a great hobby that the whole family(including our 1.5 year old toddler) can enjoy and work as a team unlike other individual hobbies like running and cycling.

Garden update!

You can't slow this down or make it faster - the plants in our containers are growing up. The Ladies' Fingers seems to be in a hurry compared to tomatoes and carrots! Everyone has their own pace right ? So you can't really compare a ladies finger and tomato!

The ladies fingers are becoming visible from far and growing at a good pace. The tomatoes took time to settle down and I guess we were a bit too eager to let them out in the sunny weather in the containers. They wilted a bit before the new real leaves started to sprout, but still a bit wobbly.

Carrots looks very healthy, but they are going flat out on the ground. We weren't sure it was carrot or bell pepper(capsicum), it didn't look like a pepper variety. It looks like our bell peppers just didn't germinate at all. There are also some green peppers, which are also just about surviving it appears, but looks far better than the tomatoes.

So it is interesting times and everyone at home is involved including our 1.5yr old daughter, Nishka. She is interested in watering plants, but doesn't know when to stop. So we have given her our sprayer, which doesn't hurt even if she uses it a bit more. She did pluck one leaf of a ladies' finger plant, but now she fools around faking it.

We also found a garden store nearby, in fact the branch of Varsha Garden stores, on the Kothanur Dinne main road, which runs along Bannerghatta Road. So no worries about lack of supplies though we are waiting for the Lalbagh Flower show to get over before we pick up more pots and soil.

[ I haven't found a an aim and shoot camera yet to get some pics, we are indeed missing the growing time of the plants!]

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.

Sowing the Seeds of ...

Finally we got going after all the preparations over the weekend. We sowed the seeds of tomatoes, ladies finger, carrot, chillies and capsicum in a propagation tray only to realize later that carrot and ladies finger needs to be planted directly. That was in the last chapter of the book :( We had tough time not letting Nishka(our daughter of 1y4m) not meddling with the ready-mix of coco peat and vermiculite that looked so exciting for her. The tray looked a bit big and we may have to cut into two so that we can place it in a container with water so that we don't have to water it regularly. I am also looking around for ways to avoid plastic - one possibility is using the coconut shells that we usually throw away.

Still some questions remain,

• How often do we need to water the nursery ? Do we need to keep it in the sun ? Cover it ?
• Which other plants need to be directly planted instead of transplanting from a nursery ?
• How many types of plants at a time ?
  

The terrace looks very inviting with the terracotta color with the latest water-proofing done. We enjoyed the skies(we have a clear view of the skies even after the mega multi-storeyed flats around) and laid out plans for the garden. We will anyway go slow on covering the whole terrace till Nishka can cycle around the pots, but we have plenty of room to get going for now!

Gardern Shopping Weekend

Image via Wikipedia

Except for the morning runs and a bit of grocery shopping, most of the weekend was spent shopping for our terrace Garden in the making.

In fact I started on friday itself with a trip to the Hulimavu Dept. of Horticulture office. I thought they were closed on saturday, but that wasn't the case. I took a break from work and cycled to the place, which is a huge place among the concrete jungles that have come up around Bannerghatta Road. May be it was strategically located for all the farmers around earlier before Bangalore became a concrete jungle, but now looks out of place with no serious farming around. But being a Government organization, the place will not disappear fortunately.

I picked up some seeds, since I didn't have a specific list of items to procure, I picked up an already packed one with tomatoes, capsicums, ladies finger and zucchini(what was that?). Also bought 5KG vermicompost for which I had to get my car to pick it up. The boy at the compost counter was also a familiar one, who used to do car-washing at our place. I dropped the compost guy to the next stop and he said they also have bio-fertilizers, which I didn't have much idea about. The seeds were around INR 120/= and the vermi compost was just INR 5/= per kg. It is amazing that they don't have a proper board that tells people what is available for the public from them - yes, it is yet another Government shop, but people were nice once you go inside.

Next stop was at Lalbagh, where they open shop at 930am, I had dropped by at around 8am on my way back from running to check their timings. Bought a bag of pot-ready-soil which was INR 120/= which sounded a bit expensive. They didn't have coco-peat in stock though. I also bought some seeds of green chilies and carrot.

Then I went to Varsha Garden store on KR Road, where I picked up some ready mix for sowing seeds, coco peat, a propagation tray(which looks a bit crowded and narrow and not organic), a water spray(which was really expensive at around 250 INR - I should have just gone for a cheaper desi one). They seem to have some good variety of stuff and the guy was very helpful too. All in all it was around INR 470 business for the Varsha guy.

I also picked up some terracotta pots, which have become a rarity in town and is being replaced by plastic and concrete ones. I picked up 3 large(INR 70/=) and medium(INR 40/=) sizes each. The lady wanted to sell more and I was tempted to buy as well, but didn't want to stock up too many before we start some gardening. But I did pick up 5 more medium ones near my place (near JD Mara bus stop on Bannerghataa Road)for INR 30/= each. The guy dropped the price pretty quickly from 35 to 30 when I said I wanted 5. He was a bit sober early in the morning and would've dropped a bit more I guess:) But he was nice and pretty interested in selling stuff unlike many others who seemed a bit unfriendly and not interested. They were a bit burnt pots, which I thought was ok. One reason the terracotta pots are disappearing may be because the pots break pretty easily and there were many damaged ones at both the places. But for our organic garden in the making, these pots were the only choice despite the risks involved. I also bought a sack of red soil from him for INR 50/=, which was a bit too much for just soil, but anyway I didn't want to bargain too much with these guys.

Overall it the money spent was well within INR 1500/= and my wife keep reminding me that it was way below the money I spend for running and cycling. But in the end everything remains a good investment for a bright and green future!

And the field is getting ready as well, with some water proofing done on the terrace before we start sowing and growing stuff. In any case the next step is to do the seeding which we could do indoors. So the excitement is building up, and hopefully we'll take off in couple of days!

I have plotted the places where I picked up various things on the following map, which is in fact is created using a running log website(I haven't figured out how to do this on a google map yet), so please ignore the green and red marks which are usually the staring and finishing points of the run. Click on the blue notes on the map for the locations of the shops mentioned above. You may have to zoom-in a bit to see the notes properly. I couldn't post pictures because my camera stopped working for sometime and I am on the lookout for an economical but useful one.

Terrace Gardening Workshop

Image via Wikipedia

Though I was the least interested among us in Gardening when we were kids, I developed some interest off late especially after reading about Dr. Vishwanath in Hindu about Terrace Gardening. It also fits well with my organic or green interests and gives an opportunity for the family also to participate in this project.

We have a 500sft terrace totally unused except for one kariyappila (kari patha?) pot which was gifted by our neighbor for taking care of her two other pots when she was not in town! We left it in our balcony for a while, but we moved it up to our terrace once we became the owners of the plant. Right now it is being fertilized by curds that seems to have created a good amount of worms in the soil.

I also happened to visit the blog GeekGardener who was just down the road and it was amazing what he was doing on his balconies. Another blogger in town, Raj Panda, also seemed to have done some neat stuff which he is sharing with all details at his blog. So I signed up for the terrace gardening workshop conducted by AME who helps out farmers to do organic farming. This is usually done by Dr. Vishwanath who has many things on his terrace at his own house in the city. But our class was done by Mr. Raghu Rao who has vast experience in farming, not just the terrace variety.

This was a one day course organized by AME Foundation, an NGO helping farmers do organic farming, where they have a classroom session and also show us what they are doing on their terrace where they have all kinds of vegetables from tomato, beans, carrot etc. They also showed us how to fill the pot with soil, sand and compost. An important learning from the session was that there was no need to buy pots or containers, you could use lot of stuff that you usually throw away. Thy showed some DIY containers with plastic bags and tetra packs for growing plants which I thought was pretty cool. For us it was a great session with loads of information to get started. In fact, Dept. of Horticulture office from where many of the folks buy seeds and compost is just across the road from where we live. The GeekGardner also was one participants and he shared a lot of information from his experience.

So we have all information ready to get going and I hope to post some details as soon as we have something to share. So onto the field till you hear from us about this new project that looks very exciting at the moment!