 Good afternoon, everyone. I hope we didn't keep you waiting too long, basically getting set up. Thanks for joining again. This is the fifth and last part of this webinar series which we've been doing over the last five weeks. It's been very interesting for us and we've been happy that a lot of people seem to be joining and benefiting from it. Thank you for your messages and your feedback also. I'm Karan and Yogitha is with us too and basically we are from Green Essentials. We are based out of Goa and we will take you through this session which I think is sort of coming to the part where you will end up in a couple of weeks or so. The session of course is not possible without our friends at ASKEEK who've been helping us do all the technology bits to make sure things are working well. They've also been helping us moderate the session and making it easy for us to understand what your questions are and answer them. So thanks a lot to all of them. Green Essentials is something we started back in 2009 but it happened after we originally started growing in 2006 or so and basically we've been growing for the last 14 years at home. We started growing using organic methods and that's what we've stuck to because it's worked well for us so far. We have a kitchen garden store which is in Goa just outside one of the towns in Goa. We do these workshops or have been doing workshops for about 10 years now since 2010 and we've been trying to make it simpler for people to learn how to grow. We have also done I guess what you would call small scale farming because we've grown vegetables and fruits and herbs of a scale of up to about 1.5 hectares at its peak. We're not doing it presently because we are looking for a new space but I mean that was an adventure that I guess we can talk about in a different situation and then one of the things that we do also is to actually coach new kitchen gardeners helping them learn how to grow their own food and sort of hand holding them through the process. So you know the starting point of our presumption has always been and this is probably going to be interesting to a lot of you who live in apartments. We actually started by growing in pots. We did not really grow in the ground until later on maybe the second year or so of our growing learnings with growing. So we found eventually and if you would ask me to compare now that growing in pots is in a sense many senses easier and certainly it can be very productive. What you're seeing here is a bunch of basil plants lined up and you know just two pots of basil is more than anybody else can consume. Just to recap what we did in session four which was probably a longer session of the series since we were talking about pests and disease. So soil health is something we discussed in detail. How do we maintain soil health? We talked about how over watering frequently causes problems in gardens and you know not in the least because it creates the environment for fungal diseases. Mulching is something that we really stressed and as I said the other day you know if there is nothing you take away from these sessions it is that you must mulch your soil if you want to make gardening easy for you. It has several benefits and you know if you adopt it I'm sure you will you know see that it is one of the most important things you can do in your garden. We also talked about how we design gardens to have diversity even when we are growing in pots in a balcony on a terrace because this provides protection against damage just because of pests and disease and then we talked about several preventive things and remedies that we could employ when we are faced with the pests occurring in the garden. So for those of you who weren't there for the last session a lot of these are available to be viewed still online and if you join the telegram group I'll share we'll share all the links over there for all the past sessions and of course the recording for this one. Now this is the sort of structure that we've been following through the sessions and in this particular edition we'll cover harvesting of our produce of vegetables especially and of course something about how you plan for your next cycle of growing because when it comes to your kitchen garden it is something that proceeds and evolves through the seasons and through the year and while many of the activities that you will conduct will be similar from season to season the things that you grow are likely to vary substantially so this is what we'll talk about in the session that is just coming up. This session here are the key points when do you harvest how do you know that something is ready to harvest and how should you harvest to ensure that you get maximum product you know produce from your vegetables how do you plan your replacement or succession plant so after one crop gets over how do you make sure there is continuity you know either in that pot or in the kind of food that you want to grow how you can grow fruits including fruit trees in large containers something that many of you may not have considered you can actually if you have enough space have large pots growing pretty productive fruit trees in balconies and terraces also and lastly of course we'll get your question and answers about what we've covered just want to point out for those who are joining for the first time if you have questions that you think up during the course of the session you can enter them in the q and a section of your zoom interface so most likely at the bottom of your screen you will see the q and a section it's it's like two speech bubbles you just click on that and you put your question in and we will be able to add it to the list of things to be addressed right so please remember to do that it creates a much more interactive kind of opportunity for all of us to make sure that we clarify the things that we've talked about now harvest from kitchen gardens depending on how many pots you're actually growing in can be reasonably regular and substantial and if you've done your planting in a way which is diverse as you can see this is just one day's produce from one of our kitchen gardens and you get a lot of things there you can see strawberry you can see edible flowers from you know gourds you can see capsicum over there you can see some kale some karela and brinjals and tomatoes and so on so basil also so you know diverse produce is actually available you know achievable i'd like to stress that every image that you see over here is pretty much from our gardens i we don't use images you know other than that so over the years we've kind of ended up accumulating a lot of these and that's what we are using here so you know yoghita used to say this from our first session and we've titled these sessions to kind of reflect the same spirit her statement used to be at that time maybe 10 years ago she used to say if karan can do it then anyone can and we really believe that you know each of us if we decide that we want to and are willing to take a little bit of effort then anyone can grow so i'll pass it on to yoghita who will take you through you know some of the things that you need to keep in mind when you are harvesting your vegetables or in terms of being able to judge when your vegetables are ready for harvest right so over to yoghita hi everyone so i'm going to talk about the different things that can be harvested i have photos no i have photos on the on the screen that you can follow but i also had some things here which we can get to once we are done with the presentation so you know harvesting is really an important part pretty much an important part of the health and the life of your plant and what i mean by that is that several fruiting vegetables especially like brinjals like chilies and tomatoes and windy if they are not harvested regularly and soon enough then the plant gets the signal that my job is done i have produced a fruit which has produced seed now i can well pack up for the season so remember when you get produce like a lot of these fruiting vegetables make sure you keep even if you are not eating them harvested give it to your neighbors so that the plant continues to then put in more of its energy into producing new fruit and that's one of the things that extends its life so i'll go through some of the common crops that we would have chosen to grow and how we can tell whether something is ready or not corn is something that may not be very easy to grow in containers but you know a large 12 to 14 inch pot you could very well grow corn and you have the stalk of corn and between the stalk and and you have the leaves coming out so between that the ear of the corn emerges once it emerges you have the hair or the the the silicon thread right up on the top when the corn is still immature that will be very soft and tender and green and as it starts maturing that hair starts becoming brown and it starts drying up usually um you know from the time the hair emerges it's about 15 20 days to harvest things maybe 20 days to harvest things sweet corn where you want the kernels tender if like me you had tried popcorn then of course you have to wait much longer but a sure way to check that the kernels inside are ready is just open up the the covering of the corn go down to the kernels and poke it with a nail and see if a milky white liquid emerges it means it's ready otherwise if it's a clear liquid then you still have maybe three four days to go so you don't have to pull it off the plant you can just cover it back again and you can wait two three days and you can then sort of go back and harvest it so that's as far as corn goes um we have okra or bindi lady finger this is something that we would plant a lot just now and the the sure way to tell bindi is ready is you know when you are breaking it off the stem it should actually snap easily or even if you're trying to cut it with a pair of scissors it should come off easily because if it doesn't it means the entire bindi has become fibrous and sort of you can't really it become over mature even when we go to buy bindi normally we snap the top to see whether it's tender enough and if it breaks with a quick you know a nice sounding stamp you know this is tender and it's fresh and it can be eaten but if it doesn't then it just stays there and bends over then of course the it has become over mature so who don't end up buying that same thing when you're cutting it off make sure that basically it comes off very easily now with brinjal how does one tell firstly you should know the variety you are growing what is the size what is the shape what is the color sometimes you have a white brinjal and you may wait for it to turn purple but it won't turn purple because it's a white brinjal so you must know what you have planted sometimes it's a long one and perhaps you're waiting for it to become a nice fat round one and it never will so once you know your variety the one on the screen that you see is a long purple variety if you look at the skin it's very nice and shiny when it's shiny it's firm to touch and you cannot feel that it's got seeds inside if you just hold it gently in your hand and gently sort of press it you'll feel that it is tender if you feel that you can feel the seeds have become have gotten formed then you know that it is past its size and with brinjal it's better to err on the side of too early than too late because a brinjal that's too seedy is really no fun to eat so it should be shiny it should be firm and of course depending on your variety you should know when it is more or less ready it would take about maybe three months by the time you get to harvest your first plant moving on to the next vegetable cucumber again with cucumbers depending on what variety they are it's better to harvest them when they are a little tender rather than when they become whichever because the seeds develop inside and it becomes pitty when you when you press the fruit it should feel firm if it feels a little soft and pitty then you know that again it has sort of matured so once your vegetables have started producing it's a good idea to go and just keep a check on them touch them you know feel them and you will know the difference when you harvest is you know the first few you will of course have some wrong and that's a good thing because then you learn when not to harvest so that is that's really what you do for cucumber it should be firm it should be tender to touch and it yeah okay the next one chilies now chilies are interesting because different recipes ask for green chilies or red chilies and you can actually harvest them pretty much at any cycle at any stage in their cycle the green ones tend to be a little more pungent and as they become red they lose a little bit of their heat they tend to get a little sweeter if you would like to save the seeds of a particular chili plant then you must necessarily harvest it after it turns red the green ones are immature so in cooking or in food the green ones to harvest are fine the red ones also you know will be a little less hot but the taste and the flavor will be there and if you really want to harvest for the seeds then make sure you catch it only when it turns red tomatoes again there are different types of tomatoes you have purple ones you have yellow ones you have pink ones you have the regular red ones they are cherries and they are stable tomatoes of course it helps when you know the variety so you know what you're looking for all tomatoes start out green and when they when you see the first hint of color in them you know if it's supposed to be a yellow tomato or a red tomato you will see a first blush of color coming that's the point where you can pick it and you can store it outside don't store it in the fridge but you store it in a basket in your kitchen and it will eventually completely turn to its final color if you harvest you you can also choose to not harvest them and leave them on the plant and I'll show you when I'm transplanting the last of the cherry tomatoes on it you can choose to not harvest and it can turn full color like a full red before you pick it up off the plant and that would also be fine but sometimes I like to be a little cautious because you find either birds get to it or you know some other feature could get to it and it could get spoiled so the minute I see a little bit of the color is on I do end up taking them off absolutely moving on to some of the herbs like basil is is one of the herbs that the more you harvest the bushier it gets and the more productive it becomes and the logic is that basil will grow as a single stalk and at the at the point at the top of the plant you will see four leaves come in the shape of a cross here is where you really need to pick the leaves this is also the point where the flowers will start forming so when you you know break it off at this point of whether four cross leaves are you basically encourage more stems to grow and more branching to happen and for the plant becomes really nice and bushy and for each stem that you break the the terminal leaves off there will be more branching out and that in what you should keep in mind that if you don't harvest them again the plant will start flowering and at that point as soon as the plant starts flowering the chemistry of the plant changes to the point where the leaves they start tasting a lot sharper and a little pungent also so the the flavor changes and especially the the picture you see there is Italian basil it has a lovely fresh tender taste that sort of matures and becomes a little overpowering so to ensure that that flavor continues harvest regularly give it away to someone but make sure that you keep the harvesting process on okay so this is applicable now to a bunch of leafy vegetables whether they are mustard or spinach or things like arugula or fuk choy lettuces we start harvesting I would say about 45 days to 50 days after you've sown the seed um we try and go down to the lowest point where the leaf is attached to the main stem and just snap it gently with your hands you don't really need scissors because we are very tender and the leaf will come up and you can harvest from each plant about I won't say how many leaves you can harvest I'll say how many leaves you should leave on the plant so at any point you should leave about four to five leaves on the plant so that they continue to grow and you can harvest the remaining and um you know that that's true for pretty much all the all the leafy vegetables that you leave about four to five plant leaves and it will continue then to produce more um that's that's I think true for almost all of the all of the leafy vegetables now cabbage is an interesting one um it's a winter crop in most places uh it basically the leaves start forming and at some point they start curling in and forming the head which you see in the center of the screen now uh in the early stages you will see that there is the formation of the head but when you touch it it will be very soft it will be spongy almost and you'll feel like it's hollow or it's not a tight tight head by the time it is fully ready and ready to be harvested the ball becomes very firm to touch it's almost like it's really hard like a rock hard thing and that firmness indicates that yes it's now time to harvest make sure that the plant like some of the leaves can start cracking up if you wait it too long you'll find that the top leaves have started cracking open and that has been then that indicates that you are uh late on your harvesting and you need to take it off so you harvest it either by pulling out the plant entirely from the soil you dust off the soil and just cut the the the part that's attached to the root and you have your entire cabbage ready so that's really what you do with the cabbage um moving on to cauliflower or broccoli again from the same family they are also winter crops in most of the places that have seen them grown they require I mean places like Bangalore you could grow them pretty most of the year because your temperatures are cooler but like around 20 degrees or so at night thereabouts now the broccoli and cauliflower that we eat are actually the unopened buds of um the plant so it's a cluster of flowers and they are tightly closed if you wait too long each of these individual buds start opening um you probably may not have seen a cauliflower or a broccoli that has flowered but if it does you'll see the little yellow flowers inside and the minute you start seeing that you know that you have uh that the plant it has passed its prime so there are different varieties of broccoli the one you see here is a is what we call a sprouting broccoli so you'll find several little um florets and as long as the buds are closed and tight and firm it's good to go and for many of these things it's better to like I said err on the side of a little too early than a little too late because if it becomes um fibrous of pity or too seedy then it it sort of loses the flavor and the taste and also these vegetables are sweeter when they are harvested when they are tender another thing which I should have mentioned when I was talking about the leaves is that for most actually it's true for almost all vegetables they are best harvested in the early morning or in the earlier part of the day because it's still cooler and a lot of the plant juices are freely flowing in the plant and that's when it's really juicy especially with leaves if you go at about 11 o'clock or 12 o'clock in the afternoon a lot of the moisture will have gone down to the roots and the plant leaves will be very limp so if you're harvesting for a salad at about 11 o'clock or 12 o'clock in the heat of the sun the leaves will look really limp but if you harvest it in the morning and you can either put it in a glass jar of water and you can probably see it on my desk but I'll show it again later when the camera comes to me um you can store it that way and it will stay fresh for up to a couple of days so you don't have to worry about that but harvest in the morning before the sun gets too high and that's good for all your vegetables okay moving on to the next one beans beans um again it varies by size and variety so what you see are purple french beans um the way to tell when this is done is that you should not yet be able to see the outline of the seed inside the which means that the seeds are still tender and soft when you touch it the the pod feels nice and firm you cannot distinguish the feel of the seed inside the pod the minute you can do that then you know that again the fruit is sort of ripen and when you cook it the seed will have a bite you will feel the seed you may enjoy that flavor there's nothing wrong with it but normally we are used to having it when the seeds are still tender if you wait a little too long sometimes the seeds will become a little hard and chewy and then you can't really use them in the vegetable so try and catch it before that point which is now underground vegetables like radish and root vegetables like radishes carrots or bulbs like onions you basically need to um work your finger around the vegetable into the soil and go in for an inch or so maybe even a couple of inches if you can go that deep and you can actually tell by feeling around that the vegetable has formed like the radish has formed now radish is particularly a quick growing crop depending on varieties it can be as early as 35 days and it can go on to maybe 40 days so 40 30 say an average of 35 days you can be ready to harvest it so that's when you would poke around and check carrots on the other hand would be four months pretty much and you again can pull out one or two and we'll have a bunch of them you can pull them out and see or just work your finger in and you will know same thing for onions work your finger into the soil and you will get a feel of the vegetable inside and when it's about the size you'd like it you know even onions full grown onions take about four months or carrots take about four months and radishes are really fast so the other thing especially about radish and i think it's true even so for carrots is that they tend to when they're ready they almost poke out of the soil so if you have a long white radish you will find that when it's ready the top like inch or so is sticking out of the soil it could also happen when the radish is not yet fully mature so at that point if it's poking out you need to just take the soil and mount it around so that it's not visible to you anymore the actual radish only the leaves are that's when it will develop well and it will be juicy otherwise the top tends to dry out and become greenish especially the white radishes they become green and they don't taste very nice in that section so as long as it's still growing make sure the entire radish or carrot or onion is under the soil not halfway up or whatever sticking out and when it's ready you just pull the whole thing out so back to Karan now he talked more about the fresh and planted okay so you'd have a sense now how harvesting is you know done for all these different types of vegetables that we mentioned there may be many that we've not covered but you know in general i think these are enough to give you a sense as Yogita said that it's not a very exact science you're not going to be very sure and it is something that you have to develop the ability to get right you don't want to be harvesting too late because everything becomes either chewy or not tasting as you wanted to do it's not tender like we usually like to eat them or you want to and it's better to err on the earlier side because quite often if you even harvest some of these things in earlier than they usually are you will find that that just means that they are a lot more tender crunchy and sweeter than you're used to eating them you know an example i give to people is that so we live in Goa and we are not really the best cabbage growing place in that sense cabbage like school weather it would much prefer to be grown for example in Bangalore right but even though that is the case when we have our cooler weather and do grow cabbages in our winter we find that the cabbages that we harvest because they harvested a little early excuse me they taste quite different from what we are used to in terms of the market cabbages so question i frequently asked during workshops is how exactly would you describe the taste of a cabbage and most people will either say it's neutral or a little bit spicy now the cabbages when harvested young are actually sweet so and and the difference is so pronounced that you know our daughter for example loves eating cauliflower and broccoli simply because she finds that when we harvest them young from the garden her experience of them has been more on the sweeter tender side as opposed to very flat or neutral or maybe even a little bit overdone when most people kind of source it from the market right so the difference is substantial and therefore we are quite you know clear about the fact that it's a better thing to harvest a little early now once you've gone through your harvest you have to immediately you know have you know you there is a crop cycle for every plant there's a period through which it grows we've talked about it in the past but there is a period of harvest and then the harvest comes to an end and what happens after that is a very important thing in the story of your garden through the year so what we feel is that as a kitchen gardener using limited space at home it is extremely important that we plan the successions or the next round of planting very carefully and there are different ways to look at this you know succession so one way we look at it is where we say that the same vegetables suppose this is something we want to source right through the year you know 12 months of the year we want to eat a particular vegetable say for example maybe spinach you know being an example so so because we want a regular supplier spinach we have to make sure that the new crop has not only grown but reached its harvesting stage by the time the previous crop is peatering out right so staggered planting is what achieves this outcome for us the second thing is that you know we may be growing the same vegetable maybe a different variety or maybe you know at different maturity rates as the seasons change and as a result we have to plan for early mid and late kind of season crops so so as an example you may choose to have baby spinach which is an early cycle crop or you may decide that you like your spinach leaves a little bigger than the baby leaves but not as big as the big ones because you're not cooking them you're actually eating them raw and in that case you know it will be a couple of weeks further or further along yeah same for also spring onions as yoghita said so I mean if you harvest them as spring onions obviously they are in the greens form that's what you're using them for whereas later on it is for the bulb largely because the leaves have usually died out right correct so to reiterate yoghita is just pointing out that certain varieties are just early and late variety so you may say broccoli but broccoli itself there will be one variety which is ready in about 50 60 days or so and another that may be 85 days right so so so these are things that you have to kind of keep in mind when you're planting and it's good to check these before you sow so that you know when the next succession needs to be time sometimes successions involve actually fast and slow growing crops also so the example yoghita gave of radish which is ready extremely fast it's 35 40 days usually it's ready but then your pot will be empty in 35 or 40 days when you pull out the radish and you must should have planned the next kind of slower growing crop to replace it for example say a brinjal or cucumber something like that right and the last thing is that in terms of successions you also want to keep in mind the idea of crop rations now for those who haven't been in the previous you know session one of the things we recommend is not to grow the same things in the same pots in successive seasons so let us say for example you grow tomato or brinjal which are fairly heavy free feeders in your pots for this season then the rotation crop which comes in after this should be something different from these and the idea is that you know it is because different plants require different proportions of nutrition and if certain ones have been depleted already then the next crop is not hampered by that because it requires a different set of nutrients so you may replace something like tomato or brinjal with say beans which actually add nitrogen back into the soil because they are leguminous plants and nitrogen fixers right so and at the very least even if you don't consider that they have different nutrition needs and they will not be overly depleting the same things that were consumed in the previous season right so now this I mean the next couple of slides require a little bit detail to explain but hopefully you know we should be able to understand the process very simply let's take the example of lady finger which is one thing we've suggested you grow at this time of the year we've suggested it because it not only grows well in the summer or the warm weather we are experiencing now but say a month from now or a little over a month from now maybe five or six weeks when the monsoon comes around it continues to do well right so in the summer the time taken for the growing stage of lady finger is approximately a couple of months so as you see in this graph in front of you you know through May and June say for example you would have the growing phase and by July these lady fingers would be productive now usually you can expect about eight weeks of productivity out of the lady finger after this it may be a little longer or little less depending on the health of the plant and the conditions climatic conditions but that is what you would expect on average so more or less by the end of August you are reaching the stage where your lady finger is reaching the end of its productive period right so what we actually do is that we plant the succession so you can see where it says hash to bring your number to bring all that's your second round of bring all which replaces the lady finger so you've gone from lady finger and then the succession in the same pot is the bring all right and it will take this succession period which is about two months is how long the bring all takes to grow before it's productive and then if you can see after that the productive phase is much longer here we are seeing it all the way through October November December but could well go on till January and February 2 right so so basically at the beginning of August which is the beginning of this succession period is when you sow it in your nursery and its transplant happens about a week later so that uh sorry a month later so that it can replace your uh you know existing bring all plant right in that way you are roughly your more or less you are ensuring continuity of produce in that particular pot starting with lady finger and moving on to the bring all thereafter right so let's take a second example for the same thing now the first this is a different pot let us say it is a you know about a 10 to 12 inch pot and in that the first round of what you will sow will be a spinach or palak right so again this has about a two month period during which it will grow it will be at least about 50 days before i think you will be able to harvest because it'll be too young before that right and essentially 55 to 60 days if you start harvesting it can be kept productive for another couple of months still now you know yoghita referred to the fact that you will not be harvesting pulling out the whole plant you will be plucking a few leaves at a time and therefore you need to have multiple pots but this plant will continue to produce leaves every week for you to consume and you can keep on harvesting bit by bit thereby extending the productivity of that plant for a period of time right and then what do we do we we plan the succession and in this case we've suggested say long beans right and these can be grown in the same pot the size of the pot is right again about a month before you are coming to the end of your productivity cycle you can put down the seeds and you are in a position to sort of have them grow and be productive soon after the previous crop gets over right now you can make this even tighter like you could actually put down the seeds a whole month earlier and so that on that end of august date you would have these productive bean plants rather than having them you know starting in the month of october which is what i've shown over here right so you can stagger this to be as close together as you like sometimes we like to leave it a little bit apart simply because you know you you also want the change in what you're eating so it gives you an opportunity to be eating other things while you have sort of a little bit got bored of beans so it gives you a little gap and you know then it's back for you to consume the last example and i'm giving you all three examples just to make it clearer for you and these are examples of what you could actually do in your pots is cucumber so again this has a little longer growing period as you can see it's about two and a half months and then it's has a longer productive period too it can be as much as three three and a half months of productivity from your cucumber plants if they continue to be healthy and continue to be cared for right so again what we do is that a month before we expect this productivity to end or even you know as much as maybe two months or before that we can start the next succession in our nurseries right and they will start being productive you know after a period of about two and a half months which is the the period of growing for the chili plant right so the chili plant goes from seed to the point of where it can be harvested first for chilies in about 10 weeks or so which is two and a half months right and after that chili again not we've not been able to show it completely you know over here but it will continue to be productive for the next four to six months even right so right so so what i yoghita has just asked me to kind of you know emphasize also over here is please note that over here in each of these cases not only are we doing the succession but we are also doing a rotation so we are making sure that our plant you know actually gets replaced by another plant in the pot and in this way we will avoid a lot of soil diseases also we will avoid best issues also right and have better nutrition for the plants right but remember this is one way to get it so this is if you see the title of the slide it says how succession works in pots when you're seeing it from the perspective of each pot that makes up your garden right there is a little bit of a different way to look at it also and this is what i'll show you over here this is how succession works when you want to do the same crop right so for example i i think i mentioned earlier spinach and i said that you know if you want to make sure that you have a continuous supply of spinach you have to work in a slightly different way so over here we have you know spinach happening not necessarily in the same pot maybe in separate pots and that allows us to actually have the plants started even before the pot is empty correct in the previous example just going back to head we have waited for the pot to become empty and then transplanted in into this pot right but in when you're looking at from a crops perspective assuming you've got multiple you know pots what you could do is you could start say five pots of spinach up they would grow for a period of two months and produce for a period of two months which is till the end of august just as an example now what i would then do is right at the end of may just like four weeks from now i would start the next round of them so that they would grow till the end of july and then from august onwards while my spinach is still producing but perhaps in the second half when the production is coming down this one would be building up its production right so so basically there is overlapping between the different crops over here so you will see that if you look at the first line july and august is productivity then august in september for the second round or second pot and then in another pot it's it's it's being productive in september and october and then in october and november so you have this overlapping happen which leads to continuity in terms of you know what you are getting from your garden so in a very rough sense the formula is like this in the case of palak the growing period is two months the productive period is two months and the sowing interval how far apart you should sow your seeds into your nursery is just one month right so every month you should be putting down new palak plants so that you can have continuous productivity going forward right so maybe you can plan of this think of this as a nursery day a day maybe you pick a monday or a friday or some particular day of the week every month when you actually go out there and think about what needs to be planted as a succession and this is one way to kind of approach it okay so hopefully you know i have not completely confused you know everybody in this regard if you do have more questions i can answer that at the end of this session or in the telegram group where you're welcome to put down your questions uh more or less you can look at these two different ways which is why i have you know kind of use these slides to show different ways at looking at the problem you pick any one of these and you can kind of move forward with it and you know ensure that you have this kind of continuity so once we reach the end of the season the harvest has happened and you're planning the succession and but before you plant the succession you need to consider what the condition of your soil is and what nutrients are still available or needed for the next crop and therefore it brings us to an important stage with yoghita will demonstrate which is how to reset your pots at the end of the season which means basically looking at your soil and bringing it back to the level where it's going to continue to be highly productive right so i'll pass this on to yoghita and she will start the demonstration before i actually so i'm going to show you how to reset a pot but before i do that i just want to show you what i have on my table here um for those of you who were there with us when we did the session on microgreens these are the radishes that i've shown i'll lean over and sort of show you they have been harvested just yesterday and they were put in a in this glass box with a cover and put on the fridge and they look super fresh um they're spicy to taste and you know a nice zing so you can put in a salad in a sandwich whatever these are some of the red amaranth i wouldn't really call this um microgreens they're more like baby greens if you just see the difference in the case of the radish what you see here is literally just the first these these are the little heart shaped leaves these are the seed leaves they're not this is the real truly the the first fruit has started going so i've harvested it at this point and this is a microgreen in this case you can see that you know some of them are older like you see this has got about one two three four leaves already and the the the seed leaves are just here these are the so had i harvested it when only this much was there i don't know if it's clearly visible just these two then it would be a microgreen but at this point it's like a baby green very tender just had it um for a salad for lunch my daughter assembled it for us and um very very nice crunchy to taste um that is one thing another thing is i have a little valve here i i don't usually buy cut flowers but i often harvest stuff from the garden and i put it in these jars with a little bit of water it tastes pretty good for about a day or so tastes fresh so i if i harvest it today and there's certain amount that i've used i just keep it lying around the kitchen and then this becomes something that i will cook and you can have like a bouquet of herbs i've got some peppermint in here there's palak there's red bhaji um this is just one way to store it another way to store a leafy vegetable harvest is make sure that you put it in a wet a damp cloth and um you don't need to wash it once you harvest it do not wash it just take the harvested leaves put it in the damp cloth fold it up like a little package and keep it anywhere in your kitchen that is not under a fan because if the wet cloth is drying out when it's under a fan basically it's going to make the leaves wilt so any you know corner of your kitchen where there's no draft and it's not hot you can store this for up to two to three days it remains surprisingly fresh you do not need a fridge for leafy vegetables which is something i learned and i was very happy to learn okay i have a few bindis and a couple of cherry tomatoes here from the garden um we harvested a lot of the cherry tomatoes yesterday so i don't have more to show but i'm going to quickly clear the table and show you how to do a pot reset in this pot here um it used to be a tomato a cherry tomato the last of the cherry tomatoes you can see it's a nice red cherry tomato a lot of um a lot of flavor but this plant is done now so now the question is what am i going to plant next minute and how am i going to do it this was a tomato so i will certainly not plant something from the same family that means no rindall no chilies and certainly no tomatoes okay i have either i have an arugula plant here and i have a basil plant here that's a little small i'd also like to show you i'm not using this just now but um after the first session i had shown you how you can cut slices of tomatoes and grow seedlings out of them so here you can see there were two slices of some really nice variety of tomato i found in the market not the usual roma oval type but i just put the two slices in and i must have at least about 20 seedlings in here some of them are a little tall and lanky but by and large they look pretty healthy now this will become 20 plants of tomatoes either in my garden or i could share it with neighbors that's a lot of seeds from literally nothing just the tomato in the kitchen okay so i'm going to now transplant i think i'll put in the the arugula in here you can see this is the root ball of this plant it's got some soil in it so i'll just dust it out this is the stake that was attached to the plant because this is a vine and it can sort of fall so it gives it support i've taken that out what you see on top on top here is the mulch so i'm going to remove the mulch out just to see what's the condition of the soil inside i can see that the level of the soil in the pot has gone down a bit in some places i can see that there is a little bit of compaction so either you can use what we have a garden travel i forgot to get it for myself but usually the soil is still so soft i can just move my fingers and it just comes apart so it i really don't need tools here i often don't use a lot of the tools but so i'm loosening the soil in case there is any compaction and because this tomato tomato is a heavy feeder which means it will have taken out quite a bit of nutrients from the soil i have with me a bag of vermicompost so i'm going to put in a generous amount of compost leafy vegetables love nitrogenous manures like compost goat manure vermicompost whatever so i'm going to put in maybe two handfuls like this in this is a 10 inch pot okay and i'm going to mix it in into the pot itself so that the level has also come up to where it was for the plant when i would have first prepared this pot and i'm going to now plunk my arugula into this so this has been grown separately in a little cup we did this about we did this about maybe three weeks ago this should be three weeks old one step i forgot to do is i forgot to put back the mulch okay this is really a super important step i would not miss doing this if you run out of leaves you can always you know get some more from your neighborhood or ask you know friends who have a little maybe a compound around their house they can give them a bag and ask them to just save it up and you know keep it for you so now so now the pot is ready to receive the transplant i'm going to make a little hole in the center and i'm going to scoop out a little bit of the soil because that's going to be replaced with the soil in my transplant here i'm going to hold this turn it upside down sorry i have been asked to show you the root and the whole thing comes out now the beauty of this is if you look here closely you will see that the roots are undisturbed they are sort of formed nicely around the the cup and if i was pulling it apart from say a tomato thing like this the root would be broken and the plant would suffer shock as we explained in our transplanting session but here the shock will be minimal to almost none now i take this entire plug if you can call it that and just gently put it into the pot take the soil around it and press it in so that it stands there firmly it shouldn't be lolling about i could put back some of the soil that i've taken out i'm finding that it's sort of moving a little bit which means that in the breeze it will move around i have some more soil here maybe just a little bit more around it and press it down so it's firm on all four sides and just keep the immediate color around the plant clear and that's it my plant my pot is ready what i've done is i've removed the old plant i have loosened up the soil i have added more nutrients by adding more compost to it i have mulched it and i made a little gap where the plant will go i have transplanted it in there and now i will water this i won't water it on screen just now but i when i water it i will water it through till the water comes out from the bottom and the plant is entirely the pot is entirely ready for a new crop now so okay so now i'm going back to the slide um that's you yeah back to karan okay so so you know the harvesting we've covered and the resetting pots we've covered but we thought that in this particular session while we've so far you know largely concentrated on growing vegetables we thought we'd try and add a little bonus bit about growing fruits because this is something that certainly didn't occur to us in the early days of growing in balconies and on terraces and yet you know is something that is quite easy to do if you have a little extra space uh most typical balconies that we see in cities are maybe you know a little over a meter in terms of width not very deep and and they could be as much as four five meters you know in length right so so these these tend to be uh they sort of they tend to be spaces in which you feel you don't have enough width and space to put in a fruit tree and that is absolutely true therefore you would continue to focus on vegetables uh but if you have a little larger balcony or if you have a terrace that is open you know suddenly it becomes possible to do fruit trees too uh so we'll talk a little about growing fruit trees and pots and uh you know we found it very rewarding and and and the funny thing is we started doing this because we didn't have garden space right so we were like oh we don't have a garden but you know what if we just get food fruit trees started and you know even if we move around we can take them with us and it sort of made a lot of sense to us so we'll talk a little bit about which fruit trees you can grow uh now uh this is an example of a pomegranate tree it's growing in Bombay this is on yoghita's mum's terrace and it's they have several fruit trees in their pots these pots are about two feet two foot pots that's 24 inches typically when we talk about pot sizes it means they're 24 inches wide at the mouth so it's a fairly large pot it's not easy for one person to move it around but it is something that as you can see is very productive you can see at least a half dozen fruits right here in the frame and more on the way each of the flowers that you see will also uh you know convert into a fruit right so pomegranate is one example of something that you can grow and that is really productive guava is another thing that we quite enjoy growing and the reason for that is quite like pomegranate this is not something that fruits only once in a year it actually produces fruits at different points of the year as much as maybe three different rounds through the year so if you like guavas this is a very productive thing to grow and uh you know it actually gets to the point of fruiting pretty fast so I think we've got some fruit trees which are not even I mean grafts that we've planted into pots and which are producing fruit as little as a year later right and it could be uh you know something that you enjoy the fruits will be full-sized fruits they will not be baby fruits because it's in a pot or a smaller or a younger plant it's just that the quantity of fruit that you will have would be less than a mature tree uh this these plants can continue to stay in these pots for several years uh the pomegranate tree for example I think has been more than 10 15 years in those pots am I correct on that yeah and uh yoghitas folks actually have a kumquat tree that was you know as old as a dad so it it spent 60 years that's 60 years in a pot uh I'm not suggesting that should happen for every uh tree but uh you know you can get a fair bit of productivity uh certainly and of course in the case of the kumquat it moved from smaller pots to bigger pots over time uh but you could just pick a 20 inch pot which we feel is a good intermediate size and you could grow it for many many years in that um figs surprisingly productive so I know you look at the plant and you look at it and say that hey you know what it is it I mean it looks like a fairly scrawny plant just a thin stem and two branches but if you just count up the number of figs you have over there you'll see that it's a couple of dozen at least uh and uh this is a pot that again is less than a year you know in the pot a plant that is less than a year in the pot and it's already being productive for us so we you know it's it's a surprising kind of fruit not a very common fruit also for many of us but extremely delicious and can grow in pots very productively uh citrus is something that grows very well I had mentioned kumquats earlier but depending on your climate it could be you know lime certainly lemons those can grow very well uh palmillos can grow very well also especially if you're you know weather is on the warmer side on the more tropical side so these are fruits you can grow and they can be fairly productive you know a couple of pots of this is all you probably need for your family chiku like guava produces virtually three times in a year uh if you like chiku I mean it can be super productive this particular plant is something we have just outside our store it has now spent five years in a pot uh coincidentally we planted this in one of our workshops uh which was maybe you know uh you know five years ago and we kind of demonstrated how to plant it in this pot and we just left it there and it's a it's now I would say almost seven feet tall like it's taller than a six foot person less taller than I am and it's pretty wide too so it requires a lot of space because it's about four feet across also but at the same time is fairly productive you will at any point in time probably see about 25 30 fruits in different stages of production on this plant right custard apple is another one that grows well in pots and is productive uh it can give you you know several fruits and if that's some something you enjoy eating why not you know have it growing in your own garden for many of these things I would suggest depending on your preferences don't plant just one tree of a type ideally if you really like the fruit and you picked it I would say two two pots right so you may have room only for four pots and pick two sort of fruits that you enjoy and just have two pot seeds that that's what I would do uh really star fruit is something that is very common and also you know popular in Goa uh this is a pot that we less than one and a half years old again I think and it is very productive you will notice that in each of these pots we have very heavy mulch so we grow exactly like we grow the vegetables we mulch our pots the soil mixes also very similar it's 50 soil 25 percent wormy compost 20 percent 25 percent cocoa soil and with the sprinkle of rock phosphate that's largely the medium that we use to grow and of course we use a lot of panchigavya and jivamrut in order to you know water the soil from time to time or give it a flow foliar spray and this really helps the fruiting results that we experience this is mango now mango for most of us is a sentimental journey in itself I'm sure most of you are going out looking for yours this summer but here is something that is growing in again in Yogadhas folks garden in Bombay and this is now I think more than 10 years this tree if I remember correctly and I would like to point out though you can see about four fruit over there and another you know it can get up to 10 15 fruit in a season the one thing about mango is it's only going to produce once in the year so it is in a sense not as productive as many of the other trees the other thing is that in this particular case while it's worked well with a dwarf variety this is this is Amrapali we haven't yet reached the point where the pots where we are experimenting with more you know with larger tree varieties have fruited so we'll probably know in about a year I think several of them will be close to ready for fruiting and then we can kind of confirm that but the dwarf variety like Amrapali certainly you know is fairly productive you can see a lot a whole bunch of flowers over there also some of which will convert into fruits pineapple is something that you know grows in the shade we've talked about it for those of you who don't have sunny balconies this is certainly something that you can plant in pots you know or leave them in or use up shaded parts of your balconies to grow the the idea is to use usually a 14 inch pot and to put one plant per pot now most of the time the good way to do it especially in an apartment if you don't have access to pineapple suckers from a nursery is to actually use what is the crown or the head of your pineapple so if you bought a pineapple and it's been very tasty you just take off the top or the head you know of it and you plant it into the soil and it will take a little longer than a sucker would have taken to produce but it will produce and maybe in a couple of years or so you have pineapples right so just remember it's usually one pineapple per plant and you would usually need to give up that space for a longer period of time which is a couple of years before you would have that of course as we know it also grows in the ground watermelon is another thing that you can grow you will need a little bit of a motto or a or sort of a you know a structure to hold the plants a trellis to hold the plants since that tends to be a climber but you can have fruit it starts out as a small fruit and continues to grow in size and over a period of time comes to the size of the watermelon that we are used to consuming of course the size and also appearance varies according to the variety that you are growing right so passion fruit is in many senses a wonder now if you will see this particular case this was a garden where we set up and we didn't want to plant it in the soil so what we did is we took several pots you can see these you know close to about 10 pots and you can see there are about three of them a couple of them close to each other where the red arrow is pointing and essentially this whole vine is growing out of the pots it's not in the soil and I suspect you can see at least 30 fruit kind of indifferent you know close to getting closer to maturity over here it has been climbed onto this fence you can in a similar way climb it onto a grill or you know in your window your balcony window or you know use a net on the grill to allow this to climb and it would be extremely productive it does tend to take up a grow very fast vigorously and take up a lot of space so just make sure that it's not in a situation where it's blocking out the light for the rest of your plants but it's a great thing to grow for example on a wall or a fence downstairs because it will just spread to wherever the sun is and give you lots and lots of fruit so so as you would have seen you know it makes a lot of sense to grow fruits if you have a little extra space if you're somebody who actually stays in a rented place it's good because you can actually move these things along with you and in many cases you can also like for people who have actual gardens I often suggest to people you know why don't you grow it in a pot for a few seasons and if you really like the plant then put it into the soil in your garden because you know that is something that literally it's your legacy to your kids and you know if it's a really good tasting variety you will want to retain it you know for a long time and through your life right what I'll do now however is you know shift to the part about how you actually plant in a pot and Yogita is going to demonstrate this for us it's it's going to be reasonably familiar to you since we've talked about planting vegetables but I think there are some details that is important to note and Yogita will kind of point these out to you right so over to Yogita um before I start showing how to transplant I have with me here a Chico um have with me here a Chico which is a uh it's a graph now I will simply touch upon what is a graph what is an air layer what is a seedling or a sapling um for some fruit you may find that people put in like avocados people start an avocado seed and it will grow it will germinate and it will put out roots but the roots and the shoots and everything but the thing is that um many of the fruit trees when they are grown there are two things when they are grown from seed number one you cannot be 100 percent sure that the same variety will express itself now that's the whole thing about the genetics of a plant and I won't explain that you can read up about it if you are interested in and it is extremely interesting um but uh you know the the seed will then produce something that's a little different or it can produce very light so very often fruit trees are not propagated by seeds but they are propagated um in ways like uh in in ways that are called air layering or grafting a graft is basically where you see huh this is a very nice plant I love the fruit of it I want to replicate it's like you can say a genetic clone so you'll take a cutting from the tree in life and you will fix it onto uh what called a root stalk of another plant that is usually um of the same family it will be that's that it will be either uh you know resistant to disease in that area or it will just be a sturdy uh root stalk onto which your main plant that you're interested in in this case is chico and most likely the root stalker and I don't know if it's clearly visible I can come a little closer you can see the darker stem here this is the this is the main chico plant and the the lighter stem here is that of a skin disease basically what is what the chico grafted already so um this will be ready to produce this is a one-year-old graft I will put it into this tree into this pot and it will be ready to produce in another year itself if I was to plant chico by seed it will take at least five to seven years lime lemons also at least five to seven avocados perhaps 10 to 12 years so trying to grow something from seed is not advisable simply because it takes too long and you cannot be 100% sure that you will get the same plant that you want and air layers is basically where you take a branch and you you take a portion of the stem and you treat it in such a way that it starts growing roots from that stem itself then you disconnect that it's a complete plant in itself and then you plant it in your spot and you have another another plant that will again be ready to produce in about a year so basically I'm saying that if you want to grow a pooping tree do not go for seedling I would not go for seedling I would much prefer a graft or an air layer and do ask your nursery when you go to buy whether it is an air layer or not now how do you transplant a pooping tree I have a much larger pot here this is um it is a 14 inch pot actually um this is also not a very large tree if this was a larger tree I would have taken the next size like an 18 inch pot or so um I have prepared for seedling um like we have done in the past where I showed you that you put um stones at the bottom you fill it up with uh you know about maybe I fill the three fourth with soil now what I'm going to do is I'm going to place this in the pot and just see where the level of the soil in the bag comes to I I want the level over here to be pretty much the level once the pot once I take it out of the plastic bag it should basically be at the top level of this pot so I think I can take out a little more soil it's a little higher than I would like now what I have done in this is that visible not really dark in the bag so anyway so I have you can just imagine the the pot is full three fourths of the way I have made a little depression in the center now with the pair of scissors I'm going to cut this up and expose what is called the root ball of the plant okay you can see some of these are the the cheeky roots um this is a nice clay root ball the root sorry yeah the color of the soil is very different you can tell from the color that I have here um which is very usable that this is darker which is lighter because it's clay um I'm going to again place it in here and see that this level matches up with the top level it still needs to go in a bit and that seems about right so I'll place it right in the center of the pot sometimes you may end up with a uh with a graph for the plant that's likely crooked so you can always choose to plant the root ball you know um uh crooked to adjust for the fact that the the tree has grown so that eventually what you have is a and an upright growing plant um as I put this in I'm just going to loosen out the bottom um so that it gives a little just to add to what Yogita is saying um it's it's what you should also check do is check the graph drawing sometimes there's still a plastic piece over there and I'll talk about why it's important to deal with that so now I have also with my fingers generally I'm just moving in the top and once this is done I bring the soil goes up the root ball is still sticking out I'm now going to add more soil the amount that was under the soil when it was in the bag is pretty much the level at which I want it so I will not go I will not for example bring the soil up to this my grass line is somewhere there so I'm going to basically keep this as I can still add a little more space in the pot that is more or less and again I will press it down for you never do this pressing after you have water on the soil because if you do that you will compact all the air spaces and that will not be good for the cannot do pressing now then making it firm while the soil is still dry and I think this is more let's done my last final most important step is the mulch I have these collected from my neighbors garden and I cover the top with mulch always keep the collar around the plant here maybe like an inch or so just make sure that the mulch is not touching the stem it's sort of like a ring around the plant and now I water it deeply currently mentioned about this tag mentioned that this should be taken out of the mind of yes so this should come up this is a G2 I will take this off now why would I take that off or you know where they make the graph they actually tie it up with plastic so that it stays together and multiple and getting wider sort of way together if that remains it's like a style around the neck of the plant and the plant is going to continue to grow but that is going to really constrict at that point and the plant will end up with a funny shape and have a plane bump in the middle of a plane constriction and that's not really for the plant so make sure anything over here if there are times they're all and that's a G2 plant in a pot this is a 14 inch pot this plant will now it will I will stay here for at least the next 18 months I don't do it up to size but eventually over time as the the plant grows inside so when the roots fall maybe in maybe 1.2 years I will graduate with either an 18 inch pot or a 20 inch pot so that then I have another long run of maybe another 2 years or so and a 24 inch pot is pretty big and it can accommodate like you saw the photo that's shown the large 5-year-old plant I would not put G2 in a pot larger than 24 inches it really doesn't exist because it will also be pruning and taking it at a proper height so the next 18 months for this plant grows over to you Karan. Thanks Yogi Pa. Okay so I'll just come back to the presentation that we were watching and I'll sort of summarize a few of the things that we have covered in this particular segment which is about growing the fruit trees in pots so the things that you need to keep in mind are this number one ideally you know most of the time I would grow in a 20 inch pot I would not use a 24 inch pot unless I didn't really have to move it around because you could pretty much need three people to move a 24 inch pot around it has such a large volume of soil and the pot itself is heavy and the tree when it would have grown into that you know into its over three four years will also be pretty big and heavy so it become very difficult to move avoid the 24 inch pots unless you know that more or less you know it's going to be stationary or unless you feel that you have enough help and it's okay to you know move it around. The 20 inch pots a couple of people can handle it and yet it has enough space to grow that you could have a plant there for the next 10 years or so depending on which type of plant. I think I noticed a question somebody was asking about you know how come these are big large trees they actually grow up being two stories high and how you were squeezing them into a pot so that's the beauty of nature you know it uses the space that it has and what kind of happens is that because of the root ball itself constraining the size to or the extent to which the roots can grow and because you know nature is designed it so that the roots are about the same volume as the upper leaf canopy so if you have less roots you will have less branches and less leaves and it will still be productive it will still be mature and produce fruit okay one of the things that I want to highlight over here do not do this if you have a very shaded space you cannot be growing this in like two three hours of sunlight or four hours of sunlight you need to have a bright sunny place for all fruit trees otherwise they are not really productive so you know you would find them producing a lot less than you want otherwise pick your fruit trees very carefully by which I mean make sure you go to somebody who has high quality saplings you know maybe your agriculture department maybe a particular nursery that you know as a reputation for good plants because you will be investing a lot of time and attention in growing this plant over the years and you know at the end of it if it's not such great fruit either in terms of taste or in terms of productivity then that's not a lot of fun so I can't I mean it's not even possible for us to look at a plant and know whether it's a great variety more or less it's you know the tasting of the fruit that kind of validates that so just you know go to a plant go to a place where there's a a nursery which has a good reputation in terms of quality and you should find good trees it's worth spending literally double going to such a nursery rather than getting it from some root side stall because the the amount of investment of time and other things that you will do is really high for fruit trees over the years and last thing is to prune your fruit trees regularly so this is another way in which they do you know stay in the pot for a longer period of time by limiting the canopy size you are also limiting the root size the inverse of what I mentioned earlier and in that way ensuring that it does not outgrow the pot right so these are things that you need to keep in mind for fruit trees of course I mean there are 100 other things that can be discussed in this regard but I think that's all that we have time for today just to summarize what we've talked about through this session I mean apart from the fruit trees the first thing is harvesting is pretty simple once you know how it takes a little while get the hang of it but hopefully we've given you enough kind of hints and tips on so that you can get it right the second thing is don't run out of produce and the only way to do this is to you know plan your successions carefully it's it's very how do you say it's like a big let down if you know you have a great season and then after that you have nothing so you know it just spoils the mood right yeah it's yoghurt saying fees to famine and that's not the situation we want kitchen gardens ideally should be productive right through the year 12 months of the year you know of course growing different things then when you're resetting your pots for the next succession please add nutrition so that there is healthy growth and large productivity for the next season too you can grow fruits as we said if you have a little extra space and sunlight this may not be applicable to all of you but for those who can I think that's a great way to go and it adds to diversity both to your garden and to the produce that you're getting from it right so this brings us to the end of the presentation section of this session you know we wish you the best since this is the last season and you know last session and we hope that you have great results in the garden in case there is something you would like to know from us the best place to do this is to join the telegram group that we've created with has geek it's called anyone can grow anyone can grow and basically it's the link that you can use to join it is t.me slash anyone can grow with no spaces you can see the link sort of mentioned over there you can also of course email us at info at green essentials dot in if you'd like to reach us for something else but in terms of the group itself I think it's a place where you can find we can answer your questions you can even share your pictures as you see over here and it's fairly easy to use if you're familiar with what's up it's not really very different to use so please do join us there and you know ask any questions over the next few weeks also we'll try to answer them as soon as possible it may be that you ask in the morning and we only get back to you in the evening because we tied up with stuff but we will come back to your questions over there right what I'm going to do is just going to ask amok to do something that I forgot to ask him to do at the beginning of a session he's going to run a couple of polls for us so amok if we can run these polls I'd appreciate it if you can you know give us feedback over here in terms of how you felt about this session okay it looks like we've generally had people get at least somewhat confident so that's a good thing amok I think we have another poll so in this case we'd like to know how you describe yourself as a kitchen gardener do you think you're a beginner or do you have some experience maybe in ornamental gardening but not so much in kitchen gardening and therefore a lot of this is familiar to you okay so amok will do the other ones after the question and answer session we'll sort of move on to that so just a reminder I know that many of you would have already done this but if you want to put in your questions if you are watching this on youtube you can add it to the comments and we will try and address them if you're you know viewing this through zoom then basically you can just go to your q&a or chat window and you can sort of ask your questions there right okay so I'll just request Anish perhaps to help us with this and kind of bring us the question so that we can answer them thanks Karan thanks Yogeta that was again a very informative session today we have a few questions on harvesting we have a few questions on fruit trees and we have a few questions on various kinds of charts especially like the ones you showed today so I'll start off with the questions on harvesting we have a question from Anila she had grown she had started growing broccoli in the month of December and she ended up getting flowers instead of getting broccoli heads so she wants to know what went wrong there's also a question from Sangeeta she had planted carrots and when they when she harvested it they were pale and very hard so she doesn't know what went wrong then yeah okay so a little bit of information I'm missing in that regard which is that you know where they were growing but let me answer the question I think it will kind of make it clear for them also so broccoli and carrot both are winter crops first of all so in the case of the broccoli you would typically want to plant closer to October and the reason for this is broccoli needs cool weather to sort of form the heads right so I am guessing that when she got the flowers would have been closer to February perhaps and or maybe even early March and what happens at that time the flowers don't convert into a nice large you know head with the broccoli simply because the cool weather is not there so what's interesting about broccoli is it doesn't mind when it's if it's warmer while the plant is growing but at the point at which it needs to produce the flower it needs to have cool weather right so this is true for broccoli it's also true for cauliflower and if you want to form the nice solid head of a cabbage like a closed head of a cabbage then this is also true for cabbage so that's something you want to keep in mind now coming sorry Yogita wants to actually chime in with something I'll add something to the broccoli question it depends what variety so there are varieties of broccoli that produce one single large head and then there are varieties that produce several smaller florids now it may have been that you got several florids clustered and you may have thought that that's a bunch of flowers I don't know if you have a photo do share it with us but just keep in mind that there are different varieties so you may have got several tiny florids and not the big one head of broccoli that we are used to seeing in the market so was it because that's the case or maybe you can just get back to us on that so yeah that's a good thing so for example you can consider that for iceberg lettuce which a lot of people want to grow now it comes in two variants one is a heading variety and one is a loosely variety so sometimes if you that's what you've been eating from the markets where typically we see the heading a variety you may not realize that you know this is just a different variety so that's that's one kind of issue in the case of the carrots it sounds to me like they were probably too old but I'm not sure usually the carrots as Yogita said would be ready about four months after they've been sown also again if you have planted late carrots need cool weather in order to grow into nice juicy carrots now if this ended up you know kind of happening a little late then the carrot is usually very stunted not as big and certainly it can it will not be as sweet and juicy also right so the the other thing that you can experience with carrots is that if you grow carrots in very clay soil which is very compacted then they don't do very well what they read is loser soil and almost sandy soil they seem to do much better in that so there's multiple reasons why the carrots might have failed maybe if you can sort of ask this question in the telegram group and maybe provide us with photos or tell it tell us when you had sown them we would have be able to answer it even better okay we have another question on how kora asks how do you know what is the best time to harvest galangal and turmeric so um galangal and turmeric are both from the same family that is the ginger family these are underground rhizomes that's the that's technical word they look like roots but they are not the roots they are these underground rhizomes that we usually grow these plants for now typically they take a minimum of six months and something like turmeric can actually be left in the ground for over a year a year and a half before you harvest it so um how to know when they are ready pull out a plant if you have just one single plant then you can uh you know again poke around and see whether the the rhizome has developed um if you're growing it in a pot for example um then you will find that uh the plant the the tops of the plant will start withering after about six months or so and they'll become brown and they'll dry out and that's because the pot has pretty much become root bound it's really full full of these rhizomes you empty out the whole pot once the plant is dead you empty out the pot and you remove the rhizomes that you want to consume and you can always save one or two and put them back in another pot with fresh soil or in the same pot with fresh soil and you can continue the cycle of growth you harvest what you need and you put back to grow what you can spare and I would say for the langal and ginger at least six months for a healthy I would say the longer you wait the thicker and bigger the rhizomes become healthy can go on for up to a year and so I would just add to that that quite often the indicator is when the plant rinds up and you know when it kind of falls over that's when you know that it has reached one end of the cycle in that sense right so that's when it's a good idea to check and kind of make sure that you harvest the plant okay so moving on to questions on fruit trees there's a question from puja said she asks if there are any disadvantages to grafting trees fruit trees into pots and there's another question from Anila she had tried growing a grapevine in a pot which completely dried up she wants to know what went wrong okay so first of all you know the graft trees now a lot of the differences are really philosophical grafts like it or not grafts are the most popular kind of way of propagating right now and quite often with seedlings I mean it's sort of the best way for you to be certain you've got a good plant with seedlings as yoghita said it can be a hit or miss depending on the type of plant we are talking about most of what is called the nursery industry now produces grafts and even agriculture uses grafts right so so is it possible to get seedlings that are wonderful absolutely it's possible but if you look at it in terms of you know your your your odds in terms of that I think grafting tends to provide a better thing the second thing is that the grafting means that your you know your plants will be productive much quicker and you know in farming that's what people want and you know that's why that is chosen and quite often at least from what we've seen a lot of people even wanting to grow at home wanted to be productive quickly rather than just waiting for years and years on end right so I would say that is the reason why grafts are the sort of best choice there is one other way to do it which unfortunately we can't get into in the amount of time we have there is another form of propagation called sorry I'm losing it for a minute air layering yeah sorry just slipped out of my mind for a second so air layering is a way where almost anybody who has a good tree at home can actually take one of the you know branches mature branches and produce a rooted plant out of that so it's sort of again a clone or like a like a child of a mature tree which is why it will give you the same benefits of actually being very productive quickly at the same time you know it will be with roots and you can kind of grow it over there one thing that may not be equally effective you know effective in this method is as Yogita said sometimes the root stalks are chosen because they are extremely hardy and disease resistance in a grafted plant right so sometimes it may be that those tend to be more I mean easier to grow than this plant which you've produced from an air layer and and therefore like it comes down to your choice like I would we often do air layers from our grafted plants and it works very well but also we grow a lot of grafted plants and we are fine with them too they may not be productive for nearly the period of time a seedling plant is but as I said your chances of being happy with the results are and and and achieving results earlier are much better there was a second question on growing a grapevine in a pot sorry yeah so now again I'm not sure where she's growing the grapevine in a pot for example you know we we made a trip to Bangalore I think last year oh Coimbatore sorry last year and we we you know picked up a few grape plants from there just to kind of experiment with it even though we knew that in Goa the you know the climate is far from ideal for growing grapes right so so we have these things growing they don't look super healthy in that sense they're doing decently but I wouldn't say that they look super healthy and they haven't produced it yet right and the reason for that is largely in our opinion climatic it really doesn't have much to do with it so so basically a couple of years two two and a half years is the time that it takes for grapes to get productive and the problem that she's facing could be either because number one the climate isn't right number two it's not long enough since she originally planted them and the plants aren't growing very healthy okay one more thing I'd just like to add is sorry to cut you off is that the grapes also seem to be susceptible to you know fungal issues which is what I was saying when climate climatic conditions are not ideal okay we have a question I don't know if this is about what you were talking about just now air layering we have someone asking if we can grow a mankurat mango tree from a branch of another without grafting this is like to directly plant it into the soil instead of grafting it onto another sorry the question is you can make an air layer out of a mankurat very much that's very possible it would take about a month possible to plant it directly into the soil instead of grafting sorry sorry I'll just cut in there for a minute basically an air layer means you take a branch and you treat it in a particular way where there is root formed right at that place where you do the air layer on the branch right so after you detach it from the parent plant you would actually be sowing it directly into the soil without grafting so it is an alternative way of propagation compared to grafting correct so I think that answers the question that he was asking about and basically we'll move on to the next one so I think we've covered most of it on on harvesting and fruit trees oh wait we have a question from Kora he he's been growing bush peppers in a pot and he says that to grow the bush peppers the peppers have to be plucked off to get to make it grow bush here is that the is that what you have to follow to sort of get a healthy bush pepper plant no not necessarily the plant itself if the soil is nutritious will produce a lot of little little little branches and on those branches the little peppercorns will come so make sure you are giving your soil enough nutrition and it is not a very rapidly growing plant it will take a couple of seasons I would say for it to become a really bushy plant it will produce I think a bush pepper can produce within a year's time and you harvest the peppercorns as many as you get and you keep looking after the plant if you multiply in the amount of produce you get from the amount of peppercorns you get so there is no such thing that I'm aware where you have to break the peppercorns for it to produce more okay the final set of questions are regarding resources and charts that describe the seasonality the geography and the harvest timings of various plants are there any resources that people can download right so what we'll do is that we'll put up the charts which we already have ready which is for the coastal parts of India immediately give us a little time we've actually been very tied up between the webinars and other things over the last few weeks and we haven't gotten around to making the ones for other cities so I think as a one of the outcomes that we are what we plan to do is that we plan to do charts for at least 10 to 15 different cities it'll take us a little time to do but we will share these on the telegram group so we'll make sure that we share the the ones for the coastal cities so Bombay Chennai Goa you know even Kerala all of these places can use these charts immediately the Bangalore charts and say for Delhi and places like that will be a little different and it'll just take us maybe a week or so to kind of get done with those yeah sounds good for our viewers who are not willing to wait for that long please join the telegram group and ask whatever doubts you have and I'm sure Karan and Yogeta will get back to you in a day's time or so yes that brings us to the end of the Q&A session today I think we have a couple more polls to run and I hand it over to Karan okay so I'll just I'll ask Amok to kind of run those polls for us to begin with and I'd really appreciate it if you can give me responses on these questions I hope all of you have found these sessions useful because that's really the intention we did then with and I hope that it leaves you feeling more confident a lot several of you have said that that is the case about growing we would like to see this engagement continue I think we are going to take a pause for a couple of weeks but after that we are planning sessions related to composting for example a lot of us have talked about you know where do I get compost in the current situation and does that hamper my growing and as we've said you know you should be able to compost at home so we'll plan a couple of sessions around that just after a break of a couple of weeks while we catch up and prepare these charts and in the meantime please you know stay in touch with the telegram groups just repeating the link over here for you it's t.me slash t.me slash anyone can grow without any spaces I think it's a much more useful environment in which to do it okay so if you can also give us your feedback on the session itself for those of you who may be seeing it on youtube we'll try sending you a separate kind of form where you can rate us for those who are you know viewing this on zoom it's good to know how useful you found it please be frank and we'll try and make sure that we you know try and improve these sessions further okay thanks Amok so moving on one of the things that a lot of people ask us is about seeds and while shipping of seeds has been a little challenging you know the seed store is something we run to get good seeds to people these are vegetable seeds all of them are open pollinated varieties now hybrids many of them are organic seeds we also try to make sure that you know all of these are seeds that have been tried and tested for several years in our garden so we know and are confident that it will do well even in climatic conditions similar you know across the country so these are things that are easier to grow that are productive even for beginners and that's really the goal with the seeds high germination rate that is something that is important to us and varietal purity that is something that is important to us shipping is working well for some cities like Bangalore and Chennai I think places like Bombay and Delhi is still a little complicated right now and very slow but hopefully that should change over the next few weeks also for the for those of you who sorry just a moment also for those of you who feel you need even more help you know we also do this and you can get in touch with me at the number listed below just WhatsApp me or call me and we can try and see if we can help you in a more engaged way over a longer period of time thank you all so much for joining us and for having stuck with us many of you are stuck with us through these sessions the videos are available we'll share the links the videos of the previous sessions are available those links will be shared on the telegram group also along with this recording once it's been completed and great luck with your health with your you know life going forward in this uncertain period and with your garden I hope we both of us wish you the very best and thanks so much Anish, Amog, Zainab, everybody for helping us you know get this out to folks in what is really you know the time of our lives it's the strangest period way beyond anything any of us could have anticipated we are grateful that you know for most of us health has been with us through this period of time and we hope that you know we will find maybe some somewhat of a new version of health and happiness over the next few years even though things seem so uncertain at this time so thank you so much for joining us and we will try and remain in touch with you look forward to seeing you all again bye bye it was great doing these sessions Karan actually said most of the things I wanted to say but a big thanks to everyone and has made you really made this possible and it's been good fun for us to do this as well so until we see you again happy garden