Post date: Dec 10, 2019 1:32:03 AM
Things I noticed during garden visits this past weekend:
1. Don’t fill leaves into plastic bags and seal them, unless they are stone dry. Moist leaves, water and compaction means you will have a stinky mess on hand.
2. Remember the principles of air-water-food for life. If your leaf piles gets all three, it will remain healthy.
3. If storing in bins, make sure you open the led for aeration, make holes, are better still, cover the open top with a wire gauze.
4. Crushing the leaves enables decomposing. Crushed leaves nourished with greens through winter, will yield ready composted mulch by spring.
5. I found many unopened store bags in many gardens. Please release the microbes from their plastic jails. Open, pile up and aerate the store bought mulch, soil, manure whatever. Nothing is lost. Don’t forget that earth and all its products are capable of being infinitely rejuvenated. They don’t have expiry date.
6. If you have unused plastic bagfuls of cow manure, add them to the compost pile. They will help the work there.
7. You can anything and everything to the compost pile. Make compost your single addition to the garden. Easy, efficient and immensely balance nutrition to your plants.
8. Don’t waste too much time planning, thinking, imagining, wondering, and hoping you will work only if a gleaming garden results end of a few hours. Just get to work. Few hours a day. Work on few things daily. Soon the gleaming garden will happen.
9. Is there a good reason to grow in pots outdoors when there is enough and more soil and open spaces? Ask that question. Seriously. Moisture, nutrition, pests, yields, are all easily managed in the ground. As a container gardener at Mumbai who grew in everything from coconut shells to Pepsi bottles, I can swear that earth beats container, hands down. Unless you have have sun only in your patio, have a green house, or do hydroponics, or have a drip irrigation system.
10. Should you really have so many tropical plants in such huge containers? My heart goes out to this sweet fondness for everything India. Plants have a preferred micro climate. Consider going easy on yourself and grow what works well here. Make peace with the local beauties. And save yourself some energy and effort. Do you really think harvesting few lemons, growing that been tree whose leaf you never plucked (admit to it, ok) a d the moringa that yields few slim fruits, is really worth the trouble? Just saying...