Monsoon vegetables

We have been travelling a fair bit in the last few months. So the garden continued to grow behind our backs, without me being able to document its growth too much. Today I decided to document the state of the monsoon vegetables that we planned.

This planning started in early July, when I drew up this veggie patch map. We had seeds for all of them and planted them accordingly.

Veggie patch map

Three months later, here is what has grown from the seeds.

Pok Choy was a late starter, but has turned out quite well. We have never grown this before, so are looking forward to harvesting and eating it.

Pok Choy

Most of the rest of the vegetable seeds did not germinate, or died at the sapling stage itself. To the left of this picture, you can see a gourd. I'm unsure of which one it is, as it has not given any vegetables yet. And I'm not sure either whether it was something we planted or it is growing out of the compost! 

To the right of this picture is a Chilli plant we bought recently. 

Unknown Gourd and Chilli

We bought some Thai Basil to use for our Thai dishes. The leaves are amazingly aromatic!

Thai Basil

We've started eating Red and Yellow Capsicum in our weekly salad. I decided to save the seed and try to grow them. 

The plants have come up nicely. Let's see which colours they are.

You can also see a new Curry Leaf Plant that we bought. 

Capsicum

Our annual Tulsi or Holy Basil plant also thrives in the monsoon. You can see two types here. 

The front one is the Holy Basil, whole the one at the back is the Purple Basil given by Dad.

Tulsi

And finally, we have a lot of Gourds growing through the compost. This is one such gourd plant. I believe it is Sponge Gourd, but we'll have to wait and see.

Unknown Gourd

Refurbishing after a dreadful heatwave

This summer was the hottest on record so far (don't they say that every year?). And to make matters worse for our plants, we went on a long holiday. This subjected them to dry and hot winds, without receiving any water. Sadly, we lost about 50% of our plants.

Not wanting to cause further damager, we waited for the monsoon to arrive before we shopped for new plants. Yesterday was Plant Shopping Day!

We'd gone with a long list of pots to fill. And we've come back with a lot of plants! 

I'll let the pictures do the talking for this blog post.

Hibiscus

Pentas

Philondendron Xanadu

Crepe Myrtle

Lemonia

Plumbago

Texas Purple Sage

Ruellia and Evolvulus Blue Daze

Aralia, Golden Money Plant, Pearl & Jade Money Plant, Neon Money Plant, Aglaonema

Song of India and others

Croton and others

How we plan for new plants

Planning a garden is a lot of fun! We always start with a full layout our new garden and break it up into different zones. Then we go into detail for each zone to decide which plants would suit them best.

As our garden grows, we continue this planning. Sometimes we need to add more plants because we are filling gaps in the garden. At other times, it could be dictacted by the season when the dead plants need to be replaced. 

As the worst of the summer heat is expected to be over soon (Monsoon arrives in end June), we wanted to replace all the plants that sizzled in the summer heat. As we were away for a long holiday, we did lose a lot of plants. So this requires thought and a fair amount of work.

Step 1: Identify which spots in the garden need replenishing

Step 1

As I said, we had a lot of empty spots to fill! These were of different sizes, so the list had to reflect that. Also, some of these were indoor pots, so we had to know about those too. 

We also had some amount of material like soil and compost already. So we noted down those too.

Step 2: Identify the plants that would suit our needs

Step 2

The next step was to match each pot with the plant we wanted. This is where the size, material and the location of the pot became important. 

Step 3: Buy the plants!

And so, our plant list is ready! The next step is to buy them in the next couple of weeks.

Summer veggie seed sowing

It's been ages since we grew our own vegetables that reached the harvest stage! The last harvest was the monstrous Bhindi in Ahmedabad. But now that we have the sun back in our balcony, we decided it was time. 

I really wanted a proper veggie bed, not just individual pots. I had my eye on a fabric raised bed by AllThatGrows. Its light and can be assembled and dis-assembled easily. 

Fabric raised bed by AllThatGrows

For our vegetables, we wanted good-quality soil. Nothing better than IFFCO Urban Garden's soil mix!

IFFCO Urban Garden's Magic Soil

After prepping, we sowed seeds of Rocket, Basil, Lettuce and Baingan (Eggplant). We've also sowed more vegetable seeds in other pots. And we've sowed flower seeds in a shallow tray, to be transplanted later.

Our summer vegetable sowing plan

Seed sowing in tray

A few weeks later, we're starting to see small vegetable saplings!

Baingan (eggplant) saplings

More winter plants!

After the success of the winter annuals we bought in November, we were looking for more plants. We went with an open mind to buy anything that looked nice. And we picked up quite a haul!

The first one was Salvia. I've seen them growing in public places (which is generally a criteria for me to NOT buy them for our garden), but they look lovely. So we picked up two plants.

Salvia

Another interesting purchase were Stocks. Incidentally, this flower is part of a Hercule Poirot murder short story! Anyway, the flowers have a delicate smell and came in multiple colours. We picked up white and purple.

Stocks

One of my favourite flower is Carnation. We saw these pretty variety of Carnation at the nursery, which smell like cloves. 

Carnation

Our next purchase was Ranunculus. I've seen this beautiful flower in many gardening magazines and always wanted to own one. These grow from tubers and will come back again next winter. They will flower through spring. Lets wait and see what they are like!

Ranunculus

Our final purchase were African Daisy! We had them in three colours in Australia and they flowered beautifully from spring to autumn. I'm looking forward to them putting on a show here too.

African Daisy