Bird's nest

We were in for such a surprise when one morning we found a bird's nest in our hibiscus tree and to discover three little eggs in the nest.

I have blogged about the whole experience in my personal blog. Here is the link and please do check it out:www.shensays.blogspot.com/2016/02/peter-paul-and-philip.html

Shelling beans

Shelling beans are the ones that are left on the plant to fully mature and the seeds picked to be used in the cooking either dry or green.Home grown shelling beans are very rare to come by here since most of us like to harvest the beans young and tender and prefer to eat beans with the pods.Although personally I like the shelling beans more,especially when they are green.This years' avarakai abundance has given us the luxury to leave some of the pods to harvest as shelling beans.For the past few weeks, we have been picking the shelling beans both green and dry and stored the dried beans and making varieties of delicious pulikulambu with the green ones.

So far we would have picked atleast 2 kilograms of shelling beans (weighed without the pods).One afternoon I was able to join my mom in the beans picking and shelling session and I truly had fun doing it. I was also able to photograph a lot.. as I was bowled over by the variety of color in the seeds although the pod color were the same.So obviously I had to record them in my camera and post it here for any reference.Here they are..

The variety of seeds from the same colored pods

Now the dried beans. They were completely dry on the plant before we picked and hence we did not have to dry them separately before shelling.

It seems like in our south Indian cuisine,tamarind and shelling beans are a good combination.Hence the dried beans are most probably reserved to be used in puliyodarai. I am very grateful that we have a good harvest when it comes to the avarakai creepers as they are already a year old now and still flowering to give us another round of harvest season.I am really grateful that we came across good seeds to start with last year as I now know the importance of good seed+good soil+good planning combination when it came to gardening. So of course,we are planning to select some of the best ones from the above lot to use for sowing in the Aadi month.

Newcomers

This year we have three newcomers in the rose department. I forgot to take pictures of the red rose so I'll present here only the orange and the baby pink one.



These two rose bushes were selected from the nursery late Jan. I should add,we got them in rather a haste but looks like we got lucky and ended with really healthy ones.


They have put on a good growth already and many basal canes are developing. Basal canes are very important to get good sturdy stems and in turn good blooms and so we do all we can to encourage them for basal canes.

This year's season is just starting so I am definitely looking forward for the roses to repeat the stellar performance they did last year.

Our daily dose of stress-buster

The chrysanthemums are going very strong in the garden.One thing I liked the most is that the chrysanthemum flowers that bloom stay fresh and open for a longer period compared to any other flowers. For a month now, each morning we have a lovely sight treating us - the white and yellow chrysanthemum blooms.What a stress bust it is!

Although there are plenty available on the plant,we had been plucking only an odd number or two for our use everyday, what with the jaathi malli and hibiscus and barleria and kanakambaram also blooming. So most of the chrysanthemums are left in the plant itself as there is no worry of them withering off any soon and there are a lot of buds still yet to open.

This weekend we decided we would make a garland and sourced some additional flowers from the plants .. and here it is neatly tied together by my mom.

I am yet to learn to make a flower garland and I admire my mom's handiwork on these flowers. I feel they are exquisite.

The rest of the flowers sourced for the day were also tied into a neat bunch and my niece wore it to school.

The roses are doing a good job as well and I will soon post some pictures of them.

Harvesting Coriander & Mint

The coriander we had sowed back in December is ready for harvesting. My mom has dedicated one tub for everyday's use and she is pinching a couple of leaves from it everyday for sambar or rasam.

The rest from the three pots went into a coriander thuvaiyal(chutney) on a weekend.. Here is the whole of the leaves that were harvested for the thuvaiyal.

Along with coriander leaves, we also add mint leaves that adds flavor and lifts the taste of the thuvaiyal to a new level. Apart from the mint bed that I had mentioned before,we now have one more pot dedicated to growing mint leaves. 

This pot is the result of our continuous effort to have a backup to our mint bed. We tried so many times to grow mint in a pot and after an early success the leaves and the mint stalk eventually dry out and we could not find the reason behind it. Only lately I put in some mint stalk in a pot that was filled with compost and coco-peat. This pot was originally planned to grow potatoes but they did not come up well(another story that I'll tell about later) and so I decided why not try the mint in this pot.

The four mint stalks that I put in here were terribly sad looking for a few days but we did not let it be and kept encouraging them by pouring lot of water over it. Then suddenly the magic happened and they put on vigorous growth as is the characteristic of mint.

After harvest

The lesson I learnt here is that a loose soil is a must to grow mint. My earlier attempts had a high ratio of red soil which tend to become cakey after a few days. Looks like mint loves coco-peat too.

Its tomatoes season again!

This time we did not sow the tomatoes seeds for the new season. Instead we resorted to the weekend market where they sell vegetable saplings and got around 10 tomato saplings for a mere 10 rupees. As the vendor suggested I simply split the bunch into two and potted them in two pots. And that was in early Jan. 

The saplings took to the new soil very soon and sometime around the end of Jan gave out tiny flowers. Since they are in the terrace there is no problem with pollination and we soon we saw tiny tomatoes.

And on close look, I spy atleast three varieties among them.One is the heirloom variety which is very hard to come by and am grateful we got it.

Another one looks like pear tomatoes.There is also the hybrid variety which we call as Bangalore tomato.

The tomatoes are still small and it will be week before they are ripe for harvest.There are still more flowers coming out.. so looking forward for a good harvest season!

Bush Beans harvest

Bush bean seeds that we sowed during Christmas weekend have given us a good harvest. From around 10 plants we had the below pods harvested.

Bush beans are really a fuss less plants.They do not need any maintenance during their growth period (which is just one month) and start yielding promptly once they have grown a half foot high. This certainly makes them my favorites in the gardening department. The only drawback is that there would not be any lengthy harvest seasons. At the max each plant give around 10-12 bean pods (for poor quality seeds like what we had sowed) and then slowly die. If someone is able to secure good quality seeds then they are sure to get a bumper crop. We are yet to get our hands to some quality seeds when it comes to bush beans.

We had around 10 plants sowed and the pods harvested came to around 500 gms. They were collected from the plants during a period of two weeks.My mom made a delicious sambar with the beans that were harvested and it was surely something of a treat from heaven. I think the extra taste is brought from the freshness of the home grown products.Next time I am sure I will sow more number of seeds as they hardly take up space as well.

Some people recommend radish as the first choice to grow for the newbies in the field of home gardening. But in my experience radish is a good crop to start with but only if you have secured good quality seeds.On the other hand I would happily recommend Bush beans to anyone who wants to start gardening and see quick results..for even with poor quality seeds there will definitely be a modest amount of harvest and that too within just one month.

Jaathi malli - End of season review

The jaathi malli vine in our garden is now two years old. Its flowering season is usually during the autumn and the blooming time is in the evenings.Ours is the unusual white variety which I was not familiar to at all until I saw the first flower..for usually the jaathi malli flowers are brownish purple in color. I started liking our white variety and it became my favorite very soon.

During its second year,the vine has picked up vigor . We had a good time harvesting the flowers and looked like our vine likes the rainy days the most,since that is when the flowering season started.I could not take pictures of the flowers on the vine as it was very tricky to photograph from the corner in which the vine is located. So I had attempted to take pictures of the harvested flowers..just a little bunch for a sample.

 The vine averaged to around 50-60 flowers per day for over a month..then they slowly reduced to the forties.Their fragrance very strong,very typical and unmistakable of this particular kind of jasmine flowers.

Somehow by a stroke of luck, we were able to propagate a new plant from the vine's side shoots, transplanted it around last Jan and now the new one has started flowering too.. but just one on every other day.This propagated one was mainly brought up to serve as a back up so we are happy to get anything at all from it.

Overall it was a good season for them and we are inspired to nurture them more once the avarakai branches come down.Especially the white color of these flowers are so mesmerizing when looked at from a distance with their green background.