Sprouts of resilience

Home gardeners speak to SUBHA J RAO about replanting and redesigning their gardens post-Vardah

January 24, 2017 12:13 pm | Updated 07:54 pm IST

Gooseberry and guava trees ripe with fruit in Kamakshi’s garden were among those that fell.

Gooseberry and guava trees ripe with fruit in Kamakshi’s garden were among those that fell.

For the past two years, January has been a month of learning for terrace gardeners. If it was the floods and rains in December 2015, it was Vardah in 2016. Terraces ripe with vegetable and fruit were reduced to naught or just a pale shadow of their former selves. Many saw their thoughtfully put-up greenhouses get blown away, panel by panel. Some saw pots placed on ledges crash down two floors, with the plants and fruits intact. Creepers were wrenched from their base, all the flowers that would turn into vegetables were blown away. Plants stood bereft of their leaves, and trees, their branches.

The gardeners sighed, but moved on. For that’s what plants teach them, they say. That life can thrive in the harshest of conditions.

Sumithra Srikant, a resident of R.A. Puram, had planned for Vardah and moved most pots from the ledges. She waited inside her house till the winds subsided and returned to find she had a clear view of the sky. The greenhouse did not exist any more! Her sugarcane, planted to be harvested in time for Pongal, had toppled over with its massive grow bag, and the papaya trees lay broken on the ground floor, their fruits spilt all over. But, some vegetables had survived the onslaught. “My winged beans lived to tell the tale; so did the kovakai and greens. That cheered me up enough to replant,” says Sumithra, who also runs Aapti Gardening Solutions, which stocks saplings and seeds, grow bags and gardening implements.

Booma Prabakaran, who lives at Bollineni Hillside in Perumbakkam, was a newbie to terrace gardening two years ago. She had a fine garden with 40 grow bags and 25 pots when the rains began in 2015. The stagnant water finished off her plants and she had to begin from scratch. Beetroot, cabbage, ridge gourd, bottle gourd, okra and varieties of greens flourished. After Vardah, most of the pots broke and the terrace was a tangled mess. “I did not want to go up and see the destruction. It hurt. All my hard work was lying on the ground. But, I forced myself to go after a week, and tried to salvage what I could. Now, I’ve trimmed trees such as pomegranate, and am getting ready to start again. I don’t want to give up.”

They were given support, and have survived.

 

That spirit is something Vijay Lourdhunathan, who works as consultant practice manager at Oracle, is familiar with. That’s what drove him to resume work on his garden, which was almost destroyed. He has been raising vegetables in his Choolaimedu house for about two years and had about 70 pots on the terrace. Now, the pots that survived the winds have been moved to the ground floor.

“I will need time to re-plant vegetables. For now, I’m raising flowers. They’ll lend some colour,” Vijay says. And, possibly, hope.

How would you feel if you sat through the worst of Vardah at home surrounded by a mini forest of your creation, and find that the tree canopy is almost gone?

That’s what Kamakshi Kumar went through. She has been raising fruits and vegetables for over four years in her Tambaram home, and has planted trees in a 4.5 ground area around the house. The terrace had about 100 pots with vegetables.

“I had 10 varieties of fruits, including jackfruit, chikoo, guava and sweet lime. My vegetable patch supplied enough to make my 12-year-old son’s lunch box. In fact, that thought drove my gardening plan — I must be able to harvest enough for lunch, every day. It has worked till now,” she says.

“Though I was devastated, there was nothing much I could have done to prevent it. And so, I looked at the brighter side. With the canopy gone, sunlight flooded the garden. It meant fruit trees would grow well. So, I’ve ordered more saplings and am waiting to plant. And, harvest,” smiles Kamakshi.

HOW TO DO IT

If you’re a beginner and want to start a terrace garden, it’s not too late. Buy some grow bags and coco-peat.

Alladi Mahadevan, who runs the Facebook group ‘Grow Your Own Veggies’, says you can plant till the second week of February. Rains are expected in the coming week, so plant after that.

Ideally, plant on no-moon night (Amavasai). Mahadevan says practice has shown the gravitational pull on the earth is less; so germination is easier.

TOP FIVE

The best encouragement for a newbie gardener is seeing the fruit of his/her labour. So, begin with the easy ones.

Greens

They grow very fast, and can be harvested in about 20 days.

Native beans

They are lush and green and are creepers. They yield in about 50 days, and this goes on for four months.

Okra

Another fast-growing plant; the yellow-purple flowers are beautiful, and seeing the first vegetable, coated in a fine layer of down, is a sight to cherish. This takes about 50 days to yield, and you can continue harvesting for about four months.

Radish

There’s a lot of leaf cover, and once you uproot the plant, you’ll see this milky white or brilliant red tuber that’s pungent but delicious. The leaves are also edible. It takes 50 days from planting to harvest.

Watermelon

Plant this creeper now, and see it mature and ripen just in time for summer. It takes about 75-90 days for it to start yielding.

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