Corn Surprise

They say 'a dash of color brings joy to life'. It felt so good to find out that, out of the 10 corn seeds that were planted one turned out to be pink corn :). A garden never seizes to surprise you.

P.S: This post participates in the Wordless Wednesday forum.

Spring Onion aka Shallots

A few days back, I was surprised to see a small spring onion lying in the backyard ground and overjoyed to see it had already sprung a bunch of leaves. I think it should have escaped my mom's hands when she was throwing the kitchen wastes in the compost bin and it ended up in the ground nearby. It must have been a week old but none of us noticed until then.

Its green foliage is so mesmerizing

On a closer look I could see a part of the onion was slightly wilt. Obviously it is due to this the onion had been discarded to the bin. There was good root development already and a tiny part of its root was into the soil when I found it.

I gently dug it out of the ground to give it a new home.I wanted to give it a nice container and see how it would prosper.So the plant was placed in a small used ice cream box filled with red soil+compost+sand and placed in a location where there is moderate sunlight with a little bit of fertilizer added.

I recall we had attempted to grow spring onion a couple of times before but every time the plant would wilt halfway thus giving no success to our efforts. So we had given up growing spring onion altogether.After seeing this volunteer's leaves I have some hope. Lets see how this goes.

Going the organic way!

When we started to set-up the garden,we wanted it to be an organic one.Home made compost was our first choice of organic fertilizer. We had been composting our kitchen wastes for a year now but the wastes were dumped in a pit in the ground and covered. Sadly that has also invited lots of ants and sometimes rodents too and young saplings had only a slim chance of surviving them when planted in the ground.

So we decided to set-up some plants in the pots and started composting the kitchen wastes in small buckets, covering them tightly and leaving them in a corner. Compost made in such small batches will be ready in 2 months to use in the pots.

Again 2 months seemed a long period to wait to start gardening. So to enrich the soil soon enough, we tried the below little experiment. Planting Green gram seeds in the soil.

Green gram seeds sprouting in soil( coconut husks added to retain water)

Green gram has a quick germination rate and they germinated the immediate next day. By the third day the plants had grown at least 6 centimeters in length.We could literally see the new leaves springing.

Third day progress

We let it grow another couple of inches, and cut them off to ground level, leaving the roots in place.The root nodules would have retained nitrogen from the soil and can be used further as nitrogen enriched soil which is crucial for leafy plants to grow.

I was glad to know this concept and amazed to see how quickly the process had completed giving us results in just 5-6 days. A quick trick that will come handy anytime in gardening.