Gardening — it’s much more than just beautiful plants.

Covid brought some unusual changes to everyone’s life. Lockdowns and restrictions meant no travel anywhere, no friends outings, no tourism and so on — probably the list would be endless. A few years ago, I had tried a bit of terrace gardening so that our house could look green and a bit nicer. Then, however, gave it away as time pressure got better off me.

This lockdown decided to give it a second try. So around 15–18 months back started with few pots and usual plants at our apartment.

I must say there is great content on the internet to get you started — detailed videos on how to take care of plants and granular details about everything associated with it. Like a curious soul, I gobbled a lot of information and tried few things. Got some plants from the nursery, grew some from branches and a few from seeds directly. (I am unaware of what they called). In few months, we had a lovely green terrace with good 15 odd pots.

And then season changed, and with weeks plants started showing different signs, some were getting pale, and some were giving up. Thought of getting some consulting from the gardener. I was attached to see them grow that thought having to lose them was devastating. I even thought of getting the gardener regularly to take care of plants. However, somehow, I decided to not do so and go for it myself.

After few conversations with different people and some watching videos over YouTube figured out it’s about watering the plants. With a lot of experiments, I got the quantity reasonably in the range. After that, seasons changed, and then the same cycle repeated.

Fast forward one and half years, I think my second stint of terrace gardening has taught me much more than the first one.

• Creating pots and plants for your own garden is much more fulfilling than buying the good looking one from the nursery and decorating the terrace with it. Most of my nursery brought saplings either didn’t survive or not doing well.
• Different plants need different watering levels and based on the season, their needs change. Very obvious, isn’t it. But I had to go through the experience to get it imbibed.
• The gardening urge for patience and rest assured it’s always rewarded.
• And it’s not only the season, inherent plants characteristic, soil and sunlight it gets; all matters for survival and blossoming. Like our lily was not bearing any flowers, we randomly got the advice to put onion-soaked water to it and immediately showed the results.
• Mealybug troubles us quite often, and I have separate the pots. Many times I literally brush the plants’ first thing in the morning to get rid of mealybugs.
• I also learnt repotting during this time. And that’s one very different experience. The first-ever task was enriching; learning about how roots grow and judging their state is a very enriching observation experience.
• The good thing about nature is, it presents itself as it is all around us. It’s really up to us to observe, listen and tune in to it.

There are parallels and lesson from gardening for practically everything. For us during the taxing pandemic days, it provided a great escape. And to make it more rewarding, we also had a novel guest to our terrace; you can read about that in my previous blog “Surprise guest — a few days with Baby Indian Bulbul”