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

Indoor stars

After conquering the outdoor world, we decided to buy some indoor plants.

We had bought a Croton back in February with our winter shopping. It was doing well indoors, with very large leaves that are in different colours. In addition, the pot was good looking. We bought two of these.

Croton in a red pot

This month when we went shopping, we though to buy the same plant with different coloured pot. These would go on the staircase landing. We bought green pots with Croton.

More Croton

We also wanted a large plant for the drawing room, something that has height and draws attention to it. The nursery showed us Palms, which does the job. However, it has a lot of width to it, which would keep increasing as it grew. Then he showed us Araucaria, which is commonly called the Christmas tree. It looked fantastic! We bought two in black plastic pots.

Araucaria