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.