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

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

Starting our India garden

It's been almost two weeks since we moved to our own home in Ahmedabad. It has a lovely terrace on the top floor and an L-shaped balcony on the bottom. We selected it primarily for the open space, which would allow us to continue gardening.

Drawing room balcony

Continuation of drawing room balcony around the corner

Terrace balcony view

Entrances to the terrace

Storage nook

Over the years, we have planned a few things for the space we have. For instance, we know we want to grow vegetables in raised garden beds. Other ideas came (and are still coming) to us as we live here. The master bedroom has french windows with an overhang roof. This would be ideal to train a fragrant creeper like jasmine.
However, all big things must start small. In this case, with two plants.
There are two large nurseries close by. Both deal with commercial clients who landscape, so had a lot of feature plants. The collection was good, but some of the trees were a bit overwhelming for a small garden. Two plants are worth mentioning though.
The first nursery had a Thai mango tree. It was about 3 feet tall and already had ripe mangoes hanging off the branches. It was ideal for a terrace garden.
The second nursery had a Karaunda (करोंदा) tree. It reminded me of the tree in Ghaziabad. The plucking of the vegetable (fruit?) was hard as the tree is quite thorny. Preparing it is even harder as it has to be cooked well enough such that the seed pod in the middle can be slid out. The vegetable is extremely sour and not to everyone's palate. Yet, it is synonymous with my childhood. Sadly, it won't grow on a terrace.
Having browsed through all that, we picked up one plant each from each nursery. From the first one, we bought a Money plant.

Money plant

From the second one, we bought a Curry leaf plant.

Curry leaf

Now onto bigger and larger projects!