Picking up the threads of gardening - 3

 As Covid receded, we started to venture out and explore our new city. While we knew some nice nurseries by now, we were on the lookout for a place to buy fibre glass pots.

The advantage of fibre-glass pots over plastic pots are that these are more durable in the sun. Plastic pots become brittle easily. In addition, these pots come in beautiful finishes and are sturdy, even in large sizes. Ofcourse, terracotta pots are my favourite, but they are limited in their shapes and sizes. So I buy them for specific plants only.

We found a good shop for fibre-glass pots on Google Maps. We bought two rectangle pots.

Now the question of what to plant? We wanted to place these in our bedroom balcony. This balcony was a utility baclony, so we wanted to plants that would survive without much fuss. But also, they should smell or look beautfiful. This time we went in for some flowering plants. 

I also saw an ad by IFFCO Urban Gardens on Instagram. This was the urban garden arm of IFFCO, who are known for seeds and fertilizers used in agriculture. They had luanched new potting soil and fertilizers for the urban gardeners. I really liked the look of their potting soil as it was a nice mix, designed to be light and airy.

Here's what the baclony looks like now.

Magic Soil by IFFCO

Jasmine

Rose, Wedelia

Picking up the threads of gardening - 2

This post is about the plants we brought back from our Delhi trip. My parents are avid gardeners themselves and can never walk by a nursery without buying a truckload of plants! So it is no surprise that they always have some to give us.

They picked up a jade plant for us from the nursery. 

Jade

My parents are also very fond of green tea in various forms. So they always have a Tulsi plant or two. This one was kept aside for us.

Tulsi

Finally, they picked up this plant from a trip they went on. My mother literally grabbed a handful of cuttings and planted them in various shallow containers. A few cuttings were given to us.

I found it really difficult to identify this plant. Even now I'm not sure whether this is right, but I think it is Pilea Depressa. It is really easy to propogate and looks beautiful cascading down, when placed at a height.

Pilea Depressa (Baby Toes)

Picking up the threads of gardening - 1

My last post was more than 2 years ago (I'm writing this in Oct'23). Not to say that we did not have plants during that time, it was more the fact that I did not have the mindspace to pick up the laptop over the weekend as well. 

So let's recap the last 2 years of our balcony garden, before we move onto our new balcony garden! As always, the posts are published according to the date the plants were bought.

The first thing to arrive after we bought the first set of plants, was a bonsai for Anshuman's birthday from my parents. It's a beautful looking plant! 

Ficus bonsai

Then for some unknown reason, we ordered a big loot from Nurserylive. This order was a big pain as they stalled the delivery for many weeks and communicated nothing to us. Then suddenly, 8 weeks later they came back to life and shipped everything. These are in 10 colourful plastic pots and we hope to brighten up our drawing room balcony with them.

As we get no sun at all, we picked plants that do well even without sunshine. Also, our plant selection consisted of only perrenials. This ensures that we do not have to do anything to maintain them, which is great because we have no tools.

Crotons, Spider Palm

Pandanus

Meanwhile, we also ordered some plants from Ugaoo because we were annoyed with Nurserylive. These were indoor plants.

Aglaonema Red, Money plant, Stromanthe Triostar plant

Snake plant

More about the next set of plants in the next post!

Indoor plants

After starting our plant collection on 1st-vaccine-day-for-Pallavi, we thought we could take on more gardening resonsibility. Mind you, this was after we had RESOLVED to not have any plants for the next 6 months. After we had packed all our gardening stuff and put it in storage. So much for resolutions!

So we decided to head out to a nursery and get some indoor plants. We wanted no-fuss, no-dig plants for indoors only; nothing else. Or so we told ourselves.

When we got to Durga Plant Nursery, we were astounded by the sheer volume of plants they had! We didn't have a list, so we walked around to see what we liked. And as usual, we had to do the dog-toxicity test for each plant. Finally we settled on these.

Crotons - They are set in the corner of our bedroom, near the glass door. They get bright light throughout the day and direct evening sunlight.

Croton

Cordyline - This one has lovely maroon leaves. The new leaves are bright green in colour. The Cordyline has been placed to brighten up one of our home office.

Cordyline

Chilli - We wanted to have some basic veggie plants. Chilli is a good no-fuss plant to start with. The nursery-man literally pulled it out of the ground and gave it to us for free. I had to give it a bit of TLC for it to survive the transplantation shock.

Chilli

Curry leaf - Try as we might, we could not find curry leaves in any grocery shop (we realised later that our society had a huge curry leaf tree going in it's orchard!). So we thought we will buy one and see how it goes. We had killed the previous one we bought in Ahmedabad, so my hopes are not high with this one.

Curry leaf

Start of a new garden - Chandigarh

 And so we moved again! 

This time up North, to Chandigarh. From the gardening aspect, it's going to be interesting. Ahmedabad was hot and dry for the most part, whereas Chandigarh gets 4 well defined seasons in their full intensity. So we'll have a cool Spring, hot and dry Summer, rainy Monsoon and cold Winters. This gives us a lot of opportunities to try growing different things during each season. 

We don't have as much space as terrace garden though. At the moment its just two 4x6 blaconies. None of these balconies get any direct sunlight, except for 1-2 hours in the afternoon. That's the worst kind of sun really, something that I'm sure the plants can do without!

As this is a tempory accomodation for a few months, we didn't want to start a garden. We thought we could easily manage without plants for these months. So we packed up all our gardening gear and put it in storage. How little we know ourselves 😁 Because the gardening bug hit us within a month of being here! And in the most unlikely of the places.

We had gone to get a Covid vaccine shot. While driving out from the hospital, we took an inside route and stumbled on a virtual nursery forest! It had huge trees and look liked a forest, yet it was a nursery. Turns out that it was the government nursery, which catered more for mass plantations. Anyway, once we saw it, we had to stop and look around. And when a gardener looks, they almost always buy. 

This was our first plant. It is called a Shrimp plant because of the shape of it's flowers. It is doing well on the balcony, thought droops on really hot days. The flowers last for almost a month before dying. The plant tends to become leggy, so requires a trim from time to time.

Looking forward to more plants in the balcony :)

 

Sow & Reap, the urban gardening podcast

It was inevitable that one day this gardening bug would grow further 😀

I've been working on the the idea of a gardening podcast for a while. But it's not something that could have been done alone. Not only would the research and work get overwhleming for one person, it needed more voices to keep it interesting. I was thinking about something like Gardening Australia, where a group of presenters talk about different topics. Of course, it would be difficult to manage, but the different voices would keep people engaged. 

I reached out to Mom first to ask who could be a good fit for this. The person needed to be an amateur balcony gardener, have knowledge and be able to understand podcast and the technology behind it. She suggested Sangeeta, who was enthusiastic in her gardening journey and comfortable with technology. I also asked my cousin, Chandana, whether she would be interested. Both of them said yes!

So, we started working on it. Deciding the seasons and the sections was the most difficult thing. We wanted a mix of short and long sectiosn to add variety. We wanted to share failures as well as success. And we wanted to not overwhelm people with too much information in one section.

Finally, our 1st episode was ready to be launched! We launched it on 20th Mar 2021, on plant-a-seed day. Quite befitting, don't you think?

Check out the podcast through the link here: https://linktr.ee/sowreap.podcast