Before we could enjoy the fruits of our labour, before even the dratted monkeys could enjoy the fruits of our labour, our mango trees refused to flower. The horticultural department suggested enriching the soil with nitrogen or potassium, I forget which. We did as instructed and nothing happened.
Then a tree-planting friend suggested we might be watering our trees too much, so they were putting forth shoots instead of flowers. Withhold water, he said and we did, not even yielding when the trees looked pathetic. No show. A few years passed and our mango trees burst into bloom. Then of course, our troubles with the monkeys began.
I’ve written off getting any fruits from the mango trees now. But I realized that none of our animal friends like citrus. I planted a whole bunch of kumquat seedlings and almost every one of them survived to adulthood. But no flowers. One website suggested exposing the roots. I didn’t think that was advisable. Another suggested spraying panchagavya on the trees.
Every traditional farmer has his own favourite recipe for the mixture, but generally it contains the five products from a cow: dung, urine, ghee , milk, and curd. All these ingredients are mixed together in an earthen pot and set aside to ferment. This concoction is then diluted in water and sprayed on trees. Farmers swear it does wonders for plant growth, improves the soil, controls pests and induces flowering.
A dear friend shared her favourite panchagavya recipe. She added jaggery, over-ripe bananas, sugarcane juice, coconut and its water, and crushed bean sprouts. Enthusiastically, I got down to preparing this magic, albeit strong-smelling, potion.
Buying most of the ingredients was expensive but at least easy. The real challenge was getting the cow piss. I had to be at the neighbour’s cow shed early in the morning before the animals were driven off for grazing. Eventually, bespattered but triumphant, I returned home with a bucket of urine.
The trees have to be sprayed every 15-20 days and I ran out of stock. If you don’t have cows, making this concoction is an involved process. I was too busy with other things to bother playing ‘horticultural witch’ again. So it was back to square one.
Someone said prune the trees, another said no. One said give them fertilizer, another said that would only make them grow. Contradictory advice meant I did nothing. And then a friend from Goa suggested I beat the trees and curse them loudly. “You must be joking,” I exclaimed. He swore it worked; he had seen it with his own eyes.
On a recent visit to Yercaud, we met a couple who had an orchard. I asked, “What do you do to make trees flower?” He went through the usual: watering and fertilizing. And then his demeanour became more serious and he suggested that when all else fails, I ought to beat and scold the tree.
A jack tree in his garden wasn’t flowering for many years. One night, when his neighbours couldn’t see him, he whacked the tree with an old broom while berating it for not flowering. “You have to do it seriously, angrily. You cannot laugh,” he cautioned. “And it worked,” he summed up triumphantly.
We heard the same story from Wynaad. This was not a local tale but pretty widespread. Clearly some trees need corporal punishment to make them behave well.
However, I’m not tempted to try this, whether night or day. It’s not the neighbours I dread but Rom. He can always be counted on to reveal any embarrassing incident to friends, especially city ones who have no clue about country life. How can I keep up the pretense of being angry with the trees when Rom’s laughter rang in my ears? Besides, he insists on calling my trees “come-squats”. I imagined he would regale someone with, “Then Janaki beat the come-squats. And guess what? They did diddly-squat.”
