Friday 7 May 2010

My Dear Flora :)

This weekend has been very special & kind to me. My little dream has borne fruit.. or rather leaves & flowers. geeee im talking about the beautiful red Amaranthus plant (Keerai in Tamil, chauli in Hindi, cheera in Malayalam) growing steadily & silently in a 4 foot wide pot at the balcony!The pic you see below (sorry about the bad quality image) is my first harvest (gift) from the tiny balcony garden that i tend to once a green moon...





This passion for gardening had been lying deep within for centuries.. until i chanced to stumble upon a wonderful blog - that of a geekgardener at Bangalore who grows agro produce in pots, buckets, tubes, tubs & sacks and gets a bountiful yield month after month. This ignited fire has been spreading wild all over me... sending me running all around Bangalore purchasing seeds, pots, organic manure, compost, cocopeat & what not. It has also made me poke holes into all plastic containers at the kitchen, dump soil into them & archive the seeds/seedlings... the day is not far when we will have lotsa veggies growing in our small kitchen garden, but no bowls/containers in the kitchen to stock them :P My better half is also scared that i might dig holes in his shoes & start a "sole" stirring drip irrigated horticultute project in its confines!

On display are a few sprouted cabbage seedlings... posing brightly from a puny pot, overcrowded like Mumbai's charming CST railway station at the peak hour (or) T.nagar's very own Ranganathan Street on a typical Sunday evening :)




Below are the very same cabbage kiddos transplanted to a spacious pot, and breathing a sigh of relief as if pushed from the CST station's thick populace to the sunny nooks of the IIT campus at Powai (or) Adyar's cosy Theosophical society (for the Chennai audience i.e.)  :-D well... i know im trailing off track, but nothing unusual abt it right? ;-)


Yeah, a red Amaranth is growing here as well! they are the coolest dudes in my vegetable garden, given the ease at which they grow without much fuss/fertilizer :) The little ones growing in the disposable plastic cups are tomato seedlings striving to prove Darwin's survival theory wrong ;-) And the cream complexioned apparatus that you see to the right, is not really a flowering plant from the Carribean or a hep veggie plant from Florida, but a plain boring (yet inevitable) washing machine in deep slumber close to my little garden :)


errr... how do i end this post now? hmm.. hummm...
well, so this is wht i have been doing for the past couple of months, only THIS... in my thoughts, vibes, moods, dreams, actions & nothing else. i am keeping my fingers & toes & nails & the dirt-between-them crossed... let me see if i can experience a "real harvest" of tomatoes & cabbages in the months to come... Next on target are brinjal & capsicum darlings... C'ya till then, will post more updates soon enough :)

6 comments:

GoodEarth said...

Thanks NealWireman!

Srikanth said...

This post did bring out the veggie in you :P.. loved reading it... gud luck with gardening..

"My better half is also scared that i might dig holes in his shoes & start a "sole" stirring drip irrigated horticultute project in its confines!" - well i hope u do something for it will make for an interesting post to read.. :P

GoodEarth said...

gee..thanks for the encouragement Srikanth!
im glad you loved the post. the day is not far (when i start planting in his shoes ;-))
Will post more updates soon enough!

Anonymous said...

Amaranth looks fresh and matches well with the color of the pot too. You have neatly tranplanted the cabbages and it looks very nice. Thin them to just one per pot later. One plants leaves will just cover the whole pots surface.

Looking forward to your capsicum and eggplants sowing!!...

Great work!
geekgardener

GoodEarth said...

Hi GG,
Its a great privilege to have you comment on my blog! im so delighted to see your comments & advice on the plants :)

since this is my first attempt at growing veggies, i wanted to try with only a few plants as a trial. so ive thinned down cabbages & now there is just 1 cabbage growing per pot... and 3 such pots.

Will post updates on tomatoes, cabbages, capsicum & eggplant in a couple of days.
Thanks GG!

Anonymous said...

Where did you get amaranth seeds from? I have been looking for them all over...
Lovely collection of plants in you patio garden I must say and tech view to go along :)I didn't know you live in bay area, you are then previledged to grow all year around, we here are wrapping up growing season.