Adieu to Ahmedabad

We are moving again! 

We have decided to move further North, to Chandigarh. It’s going to be great and much more conducive for growing plants. I’m looking forward to winter flowers and fruits.

Meanwhile, what to do with our plants? Given the pandemic, it’s much harder to make the move in one go. We’re driving to Delhi, so can only take a few things with us. So we’re leaving some of our plants behind with friends to look after. If they survive, then great. If not, then it’s no big deal.

Plants with eco-friendly watering labels 

Sadly, we cannot take our Chikoo tree with us nor leave it with friends. It’s a shame because it had finally started to look comfortable. We were hoping for some fruit this year. But anyway.

We donated it to our society garden. They have given it a lovely sunny spot where it will be happier, I’m sure. It will be planted in the ground soon.

Chikoo tree donated to society

Making the best of monsoons

I love monsoons! And the best part about the rainy season is watching it from inside a comfy house. 

Our lockdown and subsequent voluntary stay-at-home continues due to the pandemic. We have been passing the time in many pursuits, one of them being gardening. 

After our seed planting drives in Apr and May, we have been nuturing them in the hope to get some vegetables. While we aren't there yet, the signs are encouraging. 

The best performing vegetable was Bhindi. Two of it's seeds germinated and shot upto 6 ft! Apparently, a potted plant puts all its energy in growing tall and bushy. So you have to prune the tip of the plant so that it focuses on producing vegetables. After we trimmed one of them, it started giving vegetables. I did realise that we need more than one plant if we want to actually eat them. About 1-2 Bhindis are ready every week, but how can you eat just that?

The other vegetable that did well is Chilli. We bought two types of chilli - Asian and India. Surprisingly, most of the Asian chillies have sprouted, but none of the Indian ones. We have about 7 Asian chilli plants now.

An interesting one is Peanut. We soaked a couple of peanuts from our kitchen and put them in the soil. The plant literally shot out a few days later! It grew quickly and with such confidence. It has started flowering too, with lovely yellow flowers. 

Peanut grows in an interesting manner. These flowers are on a long spike. Once the flower withers in a day or two, the spike drops to the ground so that the flower can touch the soil surface. From there, the flower shoots out a "peg". This peg is what the peanut grows on. 

The lemon also looks happier in the rain. The one lemon on it is already fattening up, while there are others developing.

The Chikoo is doing better this year because of a prune I gave it earlier this year. There are more fruits that we can see forming. Hopefully, they won't fall off.

It's always a pleasure to have flowers in the garden. This Mogra was a free gift from Nurserylive in our order last year. And it has done so well. Looks beautiful! It also seems to flower around the full moon, wonder why?

And ofcourse, every gardener's stamp of approval is given when there are bees and butterflies in the garden! We saw this black beauty in our garden and were very excited that it made the journey to the 13th floor. The picture is not much, but I wnted to include it anyway.

The other plants like Wedelia and Giloy are also enjoying the monsoon season.

Planting new seeds

This post covers two seed planting campaigns - one in early Apr'20 and one in late May'20. Since India has been in lockdown since 24th Mar, we have been able to spend more time around the house. We decided to take this opportunity to grow vegetables. Growing something from seed requires more care in the initial phase. We were not in the habit of working in our garden in India yet, though we had developed that habit in Australia. Hence, this was a good time to start. 

Apr'20 seed planting campaign

I had a bunch of seed packets that I had saved or bought in the past year. From those, I planted the following:

• Coriander
• Chilli
• Basil
• Brinjal
• Melon
• Unknown black seeds 1

Out of these, only Brinjal sprouted plants. Two of the seeds germinated and look healthy. By the way, the very cool and eco-friendly plant marker is from a meal takeaway.

Brinjal sapling

Brinjal plant with flower

May'20 seed planting drive

In the second drive, we planted the following:

• Coriander (again!)
• Chilli (again!)
• Bhindi
• Lime
• Sponge gourd
• Sunflower
• Pumpkin
• Unknown black seeds 2

The Unknown black seeds 2 sprouted, but we still had no idea what it was! The Bhindi seeds also germinated very quickly and gave us many saplings. Among the others, only Pumpkin sprouted.

Unknown black seed 2

Bhindi saplings

Pumpkin

Time to watch them grow!

Pests in the garden

With the change of season from winter to all-too-soon summer, plants undergo some stress. Additionally, the water we use is RO waste water, which has a higher salt content and low minerals. Some of our plants were invaded by pests. This post is not pretty, but important to document the journey of the plants.

Tecoma

The tecoma plant had some wierd looking bug on it. It looked like a hard blob with spikes. When I squished it, it popped. 

Unknown plant

Sadly, I have forgotten the name of this plant. And now I cannot identify it because these bugs sucked the sap out of it. These bugs were pretty smart as they are the exact colour of the leaves. For weeks I kept thinking that these were buds for more stems. It was only when I looked closely, that I realised that they were pests. I had to scrape them off each stem, but the damage was done. The plant died soon after.

Common purslane

This volunteer plant soon started to harbour a colony of mealybugs. The infestation became so intense that they moved to other plants and to crevices in the pots. Days of alternate neem spraying and picking with tweezers helped to curb them.

Watering system - revamped!

While we were very grateful to have the drip irrigation installed, the pipe used to transport water from the tank to the pots had very small diameter. This really slowed down the transfer of water and increased the disparity of flow at different points. If one drip was more open than the others, then the water would totally stop in the others. So we decided to increase the diameter of the carrier pipes, while keeping the drip pipe the same. The drip pipe allows for modularity as the connectors can be clipped to the pipe easily. 

I ordered all the material from the Amazon, buying a started drip irrigation kit for 10 pots. It consisted of drips, drip pipe, hole piercer, stopper and connectors between carrier and drip pipes. Separetely I ordered 50m of the 16mm carrier pipe and pipe connectors for the 16mm carrier pipe. I also ordered wall clamps for the larger pipe. 

As with all things, the final step took the longest! We couldnt nail the wall clamps into the wall well enough. It took a lot of effort, even with a new and heavier hammer! So, we hired a plumber to come and execute what we wanted. He had it setup in leass than 2 hours! 

We also bought a lawn sprinkler to ensure equal water to all areas of the lawn. Due to the low pressure, it doesnt cover the entire lawn in one go, so we move it around. But despite that, it is a life-saver! Our previous lawn had died, so we replaced it. After replacing, we wanted to ensure that the same does not happen again.

The entire setup can be seen in the video here.

And finally, with all this water, the grass was growing pretty fast. We had enlisted the services of our scoiety gardener to trim the grass. But we wanted to remove that dependancy too. So we bought a manual lawn mower. 

We also bought a lopper to trim the branches of the chikoo tree. It had many branches that were growing inwards and scraping others. This leads to diseases due to poor air circulation. The lopper was used to cut these branches. 

With all these things in place, we were set to expand our garden!

A well watered garden

In the previous blogs, I had mentioned the challenges we were facing with watering the plants daily. It requires too much effort to water individual pots, which is why most of our plants died. Sometime they received too much attention (water) and sometime too little. Plus, it made life difficult for us if we wanted to go on a holiday. While friends can turn on the tap, it's a big ask to get them to spend 30 mins watering each pot.

Anyway, with all that sorted, we let our small collection of plants flourish. I'll let the pictures do all the talking!

Unknown

Bougainviillea

Potato plants

Of course, where there is water, there are weeds. This plant came up in the Chikoo tree pot by itself. I'm letting it live as it has nice flowers and is a ground cover.

Common Purslane

We also bought some new plants, now that we can look after them. The yellow flowering plant is called Tecoma. It is shrub that produces trumpet shaped flowers. It grows in abundance in Ahmedabad, so should be alright throughout the year without demanding too much.

Tecoma

I also saw a Tibouchina. It was more expensive than the other plants, but I hope that it wll tie our two gardens together - Melbourne and Ahmedabad. It looks as lovely as ever, with purple flowers and hairy green leaves.

Tibouchina