Ah, finally some tomatoes in sight!

Usually tomatoes are the 'staple vegetable(or fruit!)' of our garden. The usual process is that we crush a ripe tomato in a corner in the garden,the plants will grow just like that and then in a couple of months we used to harvest loads of tomatoes without any problems.

When we moved to the new house, we did not set up a garden immediately due to the soil quality. But even then, when a vegetable cart-vendor accidentally discarded a stale tomato near our compound it immediately sprung into life and gave us almost 15 kilos of tomatoes. Of course it was in front of our compound and so the plant and its harvests belonged to us :).

But back in August, I guess the tomato understood(??!!) that we took it too much for granted. So when we set the garden and planted a few shop bought tomato saplings along with some seed sprouted ones, they took life, gave loads of foliage (which is not edible) but sadly not one single fruit. The young saplings quickly got infested with mealy bugs.Never in our history a plant had been infested with this bug. We could not figure out the solution to control those pests.We still haven't with respect to this mealy bug and our internet-aided-remedies did not work against them. So we had to pull out all of the tomato saplings and also the brinjal plants that got infested from the tomato plants. That is a first to us, having not succeeded in growing home grown tomatoes.But hey, we did not give up.

We tried once again and then one more time. The last but one attempt started yielding fruits only now i.e after 4 months of struggle.

But in the latest attempt,the plants started forming fruits within a couple of months as per our usual history. I think the key for this feat is that it was secluded from all the other plants and then got quickly transferred to the terrace where there is plenty of sun and always a breeze.Apparently the wind helps in the pollination of the flowers. These are all extra efforts that normally we would not have taken.

Finally after 8 months of struggle we are happy to have some results in the tomato department.Especially myself- since Mom and Dad are seasoned gardeners they did not fret much about and always knew that it work out.I was the only one always ranting. I think it is still a long journey for me to become a pro gardener.

Okay let me end this post with a little trivia. Do you know that a tomato plant grows from the cutting of the parent plant?

Above picture is of a cutting that survived and started growing new roots. So no more fuss with the seed germination and transplantation. All it requires is to cut a side shoot from a healthy tomato plant and plant it in a container to extend the tomato harvests!

A look at the greens

This post is mainly a series of pictures showcasing the current state of the edible greens in our garden. All of them are being grown in small tubs or baskets.

Check out!!

Coriander 

Around a dozen garlic plants are growing currently

Spring onion

Amaranthus

Carrot - its green foliage smells just like coriander and edible too

Are they Zinnia?

A few months back a nearby neighbor offered us a Dahlia plant after seeing our little garden. Apparently this is the last plant that survived out of a set of five that he had brought from Ooty while visiting a friend. When he gave it to us it was middle of a hot summer and how much ever we tried we could not save it. We transplanted it from the plastic mug it came with to a nice grow bag full of soil+sand+manure mix but still the plant wilted quickly. We know it is the climate to blame.

But this did not stop me from dreaming for a Dahlia in the garden. So we bought dahlia seeds from the Sunday market vendor( for Rs.10) and I sowed initially five seeds. The vendor had already warned us that it would take some time for the seeds to germinate but even after a month gone, the seeds did not germinate.

So as a final attempt I emptied the entire packet into a small container and left it in the parapet wall leaving it to fate. After a 10 whole days nothing happened and so I decided it is going to be waste of the money paid and time spent. But after a dash of panchagavyam a set of tiny leaves showed up. I knew it was not dahlia but I was happy that at least something is growing from the seed mix.

This something turned out to be a most productive ornamental plant that gave out a flower within a month with only three set of leaves. I know it is only three set of leaves to be exact because I had been watching it like a hawk to see the flower and to know the plant type.

When I saw the flower I vaguely remembered that I had grown it in the past thanks to a gift plant from my schoolmate and I guess its name was Zinnia(the internet search confirmed it).




This too I think is a kind of Zinnia that came mixed in the dahlia seed mix.With just a couple of more leaves it has already given out two more buds and one of them is about to bloom.

At this rate, I am sure it will retain its title of most productive ornamental plant in our garden.

Beans Harvest!

To tell the truth, this post is long overdue. We have started harvesting the runner beans for almost a month now.Beans is the first vegetable we aimed at growing when we set the garden first. This was decided mainly citing two reasons. 1. We had plenty of experience growing beans in the past every time with a bountiful of results. 2. We started gardening in August which was the appropriate time to plant beans aiming for a harvest in the colder months.

The seeds were sown around August second week. Five seeds were sown and all of them germinated. I must admit I grew really impatient around November wondering why the plants did not flower yet. My mom was assuring me every now and then that Jan and Feb are the peak flowering and pod bearing months for Beans. And so it did!

The flowering happened around December second week and you can see it had its first visitor Mr.Bee the moment it opened.


Beans generally do not require much fertilizers and hence we did not add any except for some homemade compost. But as an afterthought I feel we should have sowed the five plants in different containers.We grew it in a big plastic grow bag wide enough to berth all the five plants but I still feel with different containers the harvest would have been a little higher in the scale.

Another lesson learnt was to add more compost during the flowering stages and I did just that last week. Evidently we could visibly see the difference in the new shoot and flower counts in the plants for this one week.



But still the harvests we had so far is much less compared to what we had around 15 years when we first grew the beans. This maybe due to the obvious lack of nutrients in the potting mix-which contained the red soil mainly from the nearby railway grounds...another suspect is the seed quality.The seeds were bought in the Sunday weekly market in our locals. So our potting mix for the next batch of seeds is not going to have any red soil but only cocopeat with homemade compost and will have more organic fertilizers like PG. I already made the trip to the seed shop in the town with my dad to buy some bush variety flat beans.

Fingers crossed for the second season ..