 So, hi everyone, good evening. I'm Karan and Yogita is also here on the session. Both of us are from Green Essentials and we'll be conducting the session thanks to the support that we have from Hasgeek who makes all the technology very easy for us in this situation. I'm glad that you could join us. For those of you who are joining us after the previous session, welcome back. And for those of you who are perhaps joining for the first time, we're glad to have you here. I'd just like to point out that the past sessions are available online. So, if you would like to see them, just let us know and we will share with you the link where these are accessible. Now, this session I think should be very interesting because a lot of you in the previous ones mentioned that you would like to know more about managing plant health and dealing with pests and disease. So, that's really going to be the centerpiece of what we talk about today. This is part four of a five-part series that we've planned. Basically, we hope to have the next, we will have the next session on the coming Thursday that is next week and next week. And that will be the last in this series. So, coming to really what we want to cover today, I'll start with a little bit of a background for the benefit of the new people who joined today. We started Green Essentials because Yogata basically started growing a lot of our vegetables at home and we felt this was something we could share with people. So, we started growing in around 2006 and basically Green Essentials is also an organic kitchen garden store in Goa. That's where we have been located for the last 20 years or ourselves. We've been doing the workshops on growing food for about 10 years and along the way we've also been doing a fair bit of growing of vegetables basically because at a larger scale, at the farm scale. Now, what we really aim to do other than of course running the store is to make it easier for people to grow their own food. So, that's really the main goal that we have with what we do and with these workshops too. So, what is this whole thing about growing food about? We have talked in the past of it being about food security for instance, where in recent times because of the lockdown, many of us may have found access to fresh vegetables difficult to find. So, that is one aspect of why you should even take the time or the effort to grow your own food. Another aspect which we feel is way, way underappreciated is just the difference in terms of taste and flavor. So, everything that you will eat that is grown in your own garden will taste significantly different from what you've been getting from the market. And the primary reasons for that is because it is way fresher. So, food freshness really matters and what you're seeing on the screen right now in front of you is an example of the extent to which it matters. So, you will see that on the left side we have a bunch of parlok that we bought for the market and which was stored in the fridge which in theory should keep it fresher. And on the right side is some spinach or parlok which has been harvested from our garden and it was stored not in the fridge but just in a basket covered with a wet cloth in the kitchen. Now, if you just look at the two, the difference is just incredible. So, the home grown produce stays way fresher and is much more delicious when one gets around to kind of eating it. So, that's really the focus of why we feel we should grow and of course this flavor also leads on into nutrition. The food is just way more nutritious because it is fresher. So, these I would say are the key benefits of us wanting to grow organic food at home. Now, just as a recap, in session three we talked a lot about which seedlings can be grown sown in groups or singly. We talked about individual seedlings being easier to transplant because you didn't have to separate, you know, plants together, there was less damage to the roots. We suggested that, you know, the time to term transplant is between 21 to 25 day old seedlings from the day that you sow. And at this stage usually there are between four to six true leaves on the plant, right? And the plant is usually say about three inches or a little bit more in height. The requirements of the plants determine of different plants are different and therefore, you know, you decide what can be planted together in a pot based on these requirements. And lastly, we had actually covered microgreen then shown how they can be easily grown in places even where you have very low light. Okay, so coming back to, you know, this sort of sequence we've been following right from the beginning of the sessions. We are now at the stage where we want to cover growing and caring. And this is more or less the most important stage of growth that you can experience, right? So this is the longest stage in a sense because your plants may be in this growing phase from anything from like say four weeks to, you know, even as much as three months depending on which plant it is. And this is the period in which we have to take the most care in terms of being observant, seeing what problems occur and then intervening, you know, to ensure that their health is good. Okay, today's session, here's what we plan to cover. The first thing we want to talk about is creating the right environment for the plants to thrive. So vegetables, of course, as we've, you know, we all know, take a little more effort to grow and we want to make sure that the environment is conducive for them. What do you do to keep your plants happy and healthy? What are the interventions you can make? That's another area that we'll talk about. To our mind, this is the most important stage of, I mean, aspect of being a gardener, figuring out what you need to do to keep your plants happy and healthy. And this is the one which deserves most of your time and effort. The next thing we talk about is, of course, identifying fine problems that may be occurring with the health of your plants and finding solutions for them that are organic, especially for the most common best problems that you're likely to experience, right? So, you know, before I go ahead, I'd just like to remind you that, you know, you can actually send in your questions to us. If you are viewing this on YouTube, you can add in a comment and the folks from Hasgeek will kind of make sure that comes up for answering when we reach the Q&A section at the end. You should enter your questions into the Q&A section of your Zoom's interface. So, if you look at the bottom of your Zoom interface, there are these two speech brubbles and they've got Q&A written on them. Click on that and you can enter your question in there. It would just be easier for us to, you know, view the questions and make sure they address. Please, you can do this right through the session as we go through it or you can do this at the end. But please do do that so that any doubts can be clarified. Now coming to the actual growing stage and here is what, you know, we believe are some of the common mistakes that new gardeners make. And we'd like to share them so that you can, you know, sort of make sure that you avoid these particular mistakes. There's nothing wrong with it if you have made them. These are the same mistakes we made in the early days of our growing. So, let's hope that you can avoid them from now and we are convinced that these will lead to better results. So, planting too much of one thing is a very common mistake that people make. As an example, you know, for example, there was a friend and they decided that they wanted to plant 20 pots of lady finger. Now they ended up having a lot of lady finger but not much else and that's not something that you really want to have. The other mistake that everyone makes and even more so if you've got a gardener doing it for you is over watering of the plants, which happens literally, you know, to such an extent that more or less people seem to be watering those plants to death. And people will see the leaves being shriveled and think that they need more water whereas what they actually need is less water. So it's an easy mistake to make. Now, the other thing that we notice is people start growing because they are so eager to get things sown. They start growing in very poor or depleted soils. So they don't take a lot of care about their soil before they sow. They actually then, you know, look at the performance of the plant and then decide that, oh, it's not doing very well. I need to do something out of my soil. So that we believe is a mistake. You need to fix your soil and address your soil before you even start sowing your seeds. Then people frequently forget to plan their succession crops, which means that they will start growing something, enjoy the produce, be very happy and suddenly realize that the garden has run out of things to eat. And that's because they didn't plan the next round of growing. And of course, the last thing is growing things in the wrong season. This is very, very common. We run an online seed store and I frequently am perplexed by the seeds that people are buying at a certain point of time. For example, we are in summer now in most parts of India. It's getting warmer and you will have people wanting to grow cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, things that do well only in the cool season. So seasons is another aspect to kind of look into and pay attention to. Now most of us are going to be growing in containers. There may be some of us who have our own gardens and are actually growing in the garden ground. But if most of us are living in urban spaces, we have an apartment. And what we would like to remind you if you've not done this before is that growing in containers can be very, very productive. What you're seeing here is like a half pipe that is used for water harvesting very commonly. And you can just fill soil into it and shallow rooted leafy vegetables can really thrive even in these conditions. So imagine this across along your balcony railing as a place where you can get really good supply of leafy greens at any point in time. Now what are the principles that we want to follow for growing? And we believe that starting with the principles is a very good thing. Because eventually most of us have lost touch a little bit with how nature works or how plants work. So when you get down to growing for the first time, it requires a little bit of re-engagement mentally or remembering things that we've forgotten. Most of us have probably touched upon it last in school. So here are some principles of natural farming which also translate to growing even if it's in pots on your terrace or in your balcony. The first rule is that if we are trying to move away from pesticides, we are trying to move away from chemical growing systems, then what we need to do is we need to learn how to mimic nature in whatever our growing space is. There is a certain set of processes and principles by which nature operates. And if we can reproduce these in our gardens or in our terrace container gardens, then growing becomes much easier for us. And by this we mean that you need to think about how nature nourishes soil. And you can try and ensure that you replicate that in your garden also. So one of the things that we do is we improve soil texture. Quite often if you pick up your soil from a nursery, it will be red clay soil. While that is good soil, it needs to be changed a little bit in order to grow vegetables, especially. So we will incorporate organic matter in the form of coco peat or coco soil into this clay soil. So you may recall in the last session, we talked about 50, 25, 25 as being the proportions. 50% what soil you have, 25% of vermicompost and 25% of coco soil or coco peat. And that gets you to the almost ideal point in terms of the soil needed to grow your vegetables. Now of course, in addition to vermicompost, which I mentioned, you could also try out cow dung. It's a good substitute. If it is available to you, that's another good one to try out. And we also suggest, and this is limited to gardens, not so much to container gardens, but to gardens in the ground. You can include cycles of green manureing, which is a process by which you grow certain plants with the goal of improving the soil through that growing process and not really trying to harvest. So if there are folks who are growing in the gardens or on a larger space like a farm, drop us a message on telegram and we'll be able to give you a more detailed note on green manureing. Now the soil biology is something that is worth most of us understanding because there are many more things at play than we really imagine. If you look at this thing, this is by the FAO and it talks about soil being the foundation of nutrition. So if you want nutrient rich produce from your kitchen garden, then you want to take care to make sure that you are simulating many of the processes that nature uses to ensure that good nutrients get into the plants. So there are a lot of soil micronutrients and micronutrients which come into play and creating healthy soil will ensure that all of these are present also. And if you'll see over here, it talks about taking steps like keeping the soil surface covered to reduce erosion. It also talks about corporations, subjects that come into play when we are trying to grow in container gardens too. So this is a document that is available again, something we can send you a link to. It'll be put down in the resources folder which is accessible to you after the session. One big step that we've mentioned to you is really the process of utilizing mulch. And if you think about it, some of the most fertile soils that you and I will experience are actually in forests. For those of us who like to take a trek or have been to a sanctuary or walk through a forest, you will remember feeling the soft springy layer of leaf below you. Now this leaf litter or mulch is what leads to the forest soil being so fertile because leaves fall from the trees. They are incorporated into the soil. This increases the carbon in the soil which holds moisture for a much longer period of time and also transfers micronutrients which are pulled up by the roots of the big trees into the leaves and then dropped back into the soil. So a lot of the cycles of nature really kind of happen as a result of this mulch and this is something that we want to very happily copy into our growing. Now mulch has four or five very clear benefits which is why I would say in some senses it is the most powerful cheat you can use to be actually successful in your garden with less effort. The first thing that it does is because it becomes this sort of blanket that shades the soil from sunlight and from wind it holds moisture for a much longer period of time so you need to water less and your plants can go for long periods of time without additional watering. The second thing it does is it keeps alive very healthy populations of soil microbes which exist below the mulch and they act as the sort of chefs of your soil converting the food and nutrition that's present in it into a form that plants can more easily take up. Earthworms are another agent that work under the mulch also and it is this entire ecosystem that ends up happening within which creates living soil which is really beneficial for you and makes your life a lot easier. Mulch also eliminates weeds so you don't have to spend any time weeding because weeds will just not sprout through this mulch layer which is at least two inch thick even in a pot let alone in the garden where we may have it even thicker. So in addition to this the mulch will also reduce your soil temperature which will reduce the heat stress or the cold stress that your plants will feel. So whether it's winter in a very cold place say in the hills putting mulch will warm up the soil and therefore the plants experience less stress and if it's summer it keeps the soil cooler than the ambient temperature outside which again you know leads to plants experiencing less stress so their health is better so their immunity to pest and disease tends to be higher. So the next thing in terms of principles that we would want to copy from nature is diversity. Now healthy nature has great diversity and one of the things that tends to happen you know in farming or chemical based farming, large scale farming and also in our gardens is we forget about the diversity principle. We tend to grow only two or three things and as a result you know we have much less resistance to damage due to disease and pests. So if one pest comes in it will you know eliminate more than a third of your produce because this pest likes that particular thing that you've grown in a larger quantity and you know you have poor results. So what we suggest is is that ensuring that your garden has diversity you don't put clumps of the same thing together you try to space them out and create variety in order to confuse pests and to make sure that you are not affected to a great extent. Even if damage happens because of one pest it's limited to say maybe less than 20% of your crop even 10% of your crop. So if you look at the diagram over here what we would do is and while we've drawn beds in this case this would also apply to any pots we do we would mix them up so we would have leafy crops and then we would have a root vegetable like say beetroot in the winter season it doesn't work in summer. Then we would have a fruiting vegetable like say tomato growing next to that and then a herb crop next to that say basil or celery. You could have a bean crop in the next bed and you know while you don't have to follow this exactly the reason that we showed you the sequences that if you were to take one represented from each of these families and you can see the list below each of these you would end up with enough variety to make sure that the diversity principle works for you in your garden. So that's diversity. Now this diversity manifests as I said in outdoor gardens and also in indoor gardens. This is an example of a farm that we help set up in Bir in Himachal. Now you'll see there are jamun trees over here there's sunflower growing, there's bay leaf there is lettuce which is flowering on the right side of the screen corn growing over here, brinjals, pumpkin all of these growing together and sort of mixing up giving you enough diversity for your plate and also for pest resistance. Now the same diversity also applies indoors. So if you take the example of this particular garden you will see we have many things brinjal, kale, basil, Swiss chard, mustard greens and beetroot growing in this one garden itself. I think we have a chili plant at the back also. So borage is another thing that we've grown here. So essentially you will see that this is exactly how you end up arranging it even if you're growing in a balcony you don't put aside the diversity principle just because your space is different from an outdoor garden. Now being mindful of the seasons is really, really critical. You may want to grow some things in summer but if that's not conducive to the plant that you're trying to grow you're just going to have no results at all. Sometimes things will grow even out of season but the kind of productivity that you will have or fruiting will just not happen in a proper way. For example, a cabbage cannot form its head in warm weather. They need cool weather to sort of flourish. Now you will see over here that we have this planting guide for summer. These are things you can plant right now. We've talked about these in the previous session also and this is shared in the resources folder. Please feel free to download it from there so that you have a better sense of how to do your growing. It also includes a column which talks about how much of different things you should grow. It's just a suggestion on our part and depending on the space you have and the number of pots you want to have you can pick and choose from these. Make sure that you have at least four or five different things growing because otherwise then diversity won't really be achieved. Now soil microbes which I referred to earlier when we were talking about mulch are one of the most important sort of contributors to growing food organically. Now one of the key differences that we have to understand is that when you're growing organically it is a biological growing system. So all the interventions and connections and cycles that they have are in some sense related to the biology of the earth. Plant biology, soil biology, things like this. It's very different from a chemical system where urea is providing the nutrition and therefore you don't need nitrogen for example. Or you're putting in pesticides to deal with the pests so you don't need to create resilience in the system itself. So relative to organic growing the soils that you have in chemical farming are very different. Organic growing requires living soils and other soils don't work. In chemical growing that's not always the case. Sometimes even poor soils when amended with urea and supported by pesticides can be productive up for a period of time at least. Now optimal use of shade and sunlight is something we've discussed also but I'd like to mention it again. Some plants tolerate shade and heat and those are more versatile plants. They also give you a lot of freedom in terms of placing them and how you can grow them. Certain other plants are very particular. They need sunlight to grow and if left in the shade they will be either not productive at all or will actually not survive. They will continue to be weak and very unproductive. So we need to keep this in mind when planning for where we put what in a garden and especially in balcony is where you need to make sure that the sunnier balconies in your apartment are the ones in which you are attempting to grow these things. Vegetables, especially fruiting vegetables must have at least four or five hours of direct sunlight as we've spoken about before and even other vegetables like leafy vegetables which are okay in semi shade still need to have brightness around and still need two or three hours of sunlight to be directly incident on them. Now we'll come to the issue of pests and I will kind of hand it over to Yogita to cover these and she will talk a little about how does one deal with pests in an organic system when you are not allowed to use things like pesticides, things that are unnatural and therefore different approaches need to be taken. So over to Yogita. Yeah, hi. You may be wondering that you know we still have we've gone almost 25 minutes and not yet gotten to the meat of attacking where and how to address pest and disease problems but really the largest part of addressing plant health is following a lot of these principles and the things that Karan has covered about diversity about soil health about you know a numerous it's like several pieces when they are arranged together they create an ecology and that ecology is a self-correcting system in which pests will not be 100% eliminated but their impact will be minimized. In any natural system you will find that is healthy and productive you will find that there are pests but the plants and the system is able to absorb those shocks or deal with them in a manner that you know you can still have productive yielding plants and they can address pest diseases, nutrition deficiencies and that kind of problem. So some of the approaches that we do follow and I will talk about this in some more detail but things like diversity Karan has covered trap crops. Now trap crops are basically decoys you can say you need to understand with most plants you need to know firstly what the pest is that is affecting your plant when you use a chemical it does not matter what the pest is it's like a carpet bomb you bomb everything and the good guys are dead the bad guys are dead and your plants are just about surviving hanging in there you know so when you understand who the pest is then you can have a more targeted and a more nuanced way of addressing the problem now for example beans attract a lot of acids there are other plants also like onions and things that can be attracted to acids now if I want to have a healthy onion crop I could plant a trap crop of beans next to it because that is something that acids prefer and they are likely to migrate to this particular plant and leave my main crop alone so trap cropping is like a decoy it's a commonly followed principle that organic growers use to distract pests crop rotation is again something that's really important the idea of crop rotation is that in our case in pots you don't plant the same type of plant in the same pot again and again for example if in a pot you've grown tomato and the plant has died out after 4-5 months do not plant tomato or any other plant from that family which would include brinjal, chili, capsicum even potatoes these are all from one family and you don't plant the same kind of crop because it will suck the same kind of nutrients out of that and it will keep the soils depleted and then because there will be lack of nutrition your plants will become more susceptible to pest attacks or diseases so crop rotation planting may be tomatoes now in this season in the next season perhaps beans in the season after that a leafy vegetable these kinds of rotations help keep the soil fresh and don't continuously take out the same type of nutrition from it Karan already mentioned the importance of selecting crops that are appropriate for the season and we have pheromone traps and lures which as soon as I get to this I will show you what that is it's basically used for insects it attracts the males of the particular kind of insects and it traps them and therefore it cuts the life cycle of a particular pest and it reduces the impact on your crop so this theory is the essence of controlling or having healthy plants is that plants that are not very healthy are just meant by nature not to survive and pests and diseases whether it's fungal, bacterial or viral they are meant to cull these out it is the natural cycle to eliminate crops or plants that are not healthy and so they are actually an indicator of a different problem we often look at a plant that is unhealthy and say there's something wrong with this and I need to fix this particular plant but we need to understand why is this particular pest here you need to go back a few steps and understand what is the condition in the soil in your environment that is making this plant susceptible to attack from a particular pest so really that is the bottom line treat pests and diseases as indicators of a larger or a more deeper problem rather than saying that okay here's the problem and what can I cure it with what spray what kind of you know there are all sorts of pesticides available that approach is very short term and it doesn't really address the root of the problem so yeah yeah so you can stop the share now and if you look at my table right here I've got a bunch of things several quivers in my arrow if you will I'll start with the spray now we have touched upon it but I will reiterate that when you grow food organically there are several things that you do to prevent the problem from occurring so prevention is much better than cure it is cheaper it is more effective and it is more long term so there are things you do preventively but once the problem occurs then there are a few things that are available that you can do to control the problem or to cure the problem when we go organically we try not to reach the point of cure we try to address as much as we can at the prevention level so that we don't have a lot because for some fungal viral sort of problems there is very little cure stuff available cure solutions are not ample if you've got a problem and you know you reach that point you just need to let that plant grow and start again and understand what's gone wrong and sort of fix it from there so I have a bunch of things here I'll start with say cow urine now cow urine is a very smelly very potent kind of liquid you always dilute it you never use it directly you can put about 100 to 120 ml in 1 liter of water and because of its strong odor it does two things it repels pests I mean if I smelled this I wouldn't want to go anywhere close by imagine pests that have a much stronger sense of smell would really get repels by this stuff or it masks the odor of things that are desirable to the pest so if something is a sweet like peas have a very sweet smelling flower it can mask the odor and the pests will get confused and they can't find it so preventively you can spray this once a month once a month on your plants if they are generally doing well if you think that there is a bit of a problem it can be more frequent once every 15 days it is quite effective you can also use sorry yeah well that too you can also use cow urine as a base to create other kind of sprays chili, garlic, ginger sprays a lot of these are things that are available in your kitchen and we'll share a document with you that has these recipes that you can sort of make at home and use on your plants there is some use for having a smoker in the family you can always bum a few cigarettes and empty it in your cow urine and let it sort of keep there overnight the nicotine from the cigarettes when sprayed in dilution actually helps keep a lot of the pests away and we'll cover some of them things like aphids things like white flies a lot of the sucking pests we find are repelled by a tobacco solution that has been made in cow urine it's like a double like a double whammy to them you can also spray things like chili, like I mentioned, chili, garlic, ginger you make these concoctions if you're at a farm you can actually you know there's a bunch of weeds that you collect and you sort of soak them overnight and you make sprays out of that a lot of the weeds actually do have pest repellent qualities also but again these are you can either do them preventively, just every 15 days once your crops have gone into the pot or you can wait and see when the problem occurs then you can sort of have it but usually it's late by the time the problem occurs there's a lot less that is possible to do another thing I have here is something called puncture gavya this is made from oh it smells mild actually not that bad it smells like a tabela it's got 5 products that come from a cow it's got cow dung, it's got cow urine which means it also acts as a plant tonic it's got dahi, it's got ghee and it's got milk and a bunch of other things like tender coconut and overripe bananas and all that and it's fermented, it's basically a microbial liquor and you add this to your soil in dilution or you can spray it as a foliar spray on your plants and it does two things it acts as a plant tonic but also because of the smells and because of the microbes that are present in it it builds the ability of the soil to be more resilient and it also repels pests through the action of masking odours and of strong chemicals yeah, it's also like a liquid fertilizer then I have something here that actually they are sticky trapped they are in different colours you can peel these off now the principle behind these sticky traps is I have a yellow one here I have a white one here and I have a blue one here now what the principle behind this is that different colours attract different pests so yellow ones would attract the acid the blue ones are useful to attract white flies and there is some overlap but you basically peel them and you dangle them in your garden at the level of the foliage of the plant and the pests do get attracted to it and they will sort of fly at it and they'll get stuck and they won't be able to go away so it's a very non-chemical way and eventually you can dispose this in your garbage bin but it's a chemical free way, it's a mechanical way to sort of attract pests and keep them at bay it also helps tell you what pests are around like there may be several things that will get attracted and you can sort of see and say ok it helps to identify what's going on in your garden and you can make these also, it's really easy just take any plastic sheet that is of a similar colour and you can just smear a sticky oil any vegetable oil and sort of dangle it there it becomes sticky in the sun and it serves the same purpose so you don't have to buy it, it can be easily made at home as well some of the other mechanical things that work is actually really useful this one this is a fruit fly trap now the principle behind this is that many insects are attracted to certain mating hormones or pheromones and a particular insect will be attracted to a particular pheromone only pheromone only, so you get different pheromone tracks I have one here, they come in packets like these this one is meant for the entire gourd family cucumber, karela, bottle gourd, pumpkin, musk melon that entire family gets affected by a particular kind of fruit fly some of you if you try growing it you will notice that when the fruit is small it will puncture the fruit it will leave a little mark there and the fruit doesn't really grow because the eggs are laid inside that puncture and the larvae develop in there and they consume all the nutrients and you will have misshapen, deformed fruits or the fruits will just rot and they will fall off when they are really tiny so in order to avoid this you use the lure in this it looks like a little cylinder like this and it is, you can smell it, it is a very mild smell but it is covered with this particular pheromone the way this works is there is a little container inside you plonk it in there, you close the lid and if you look at this there are tiny little holes here and here now you dangle this in your garden you could dangle it near the plants of concern or even a little away and basically these little fruit flies they enter through these holes and they just won't leave from that same hole they will try and find some other exit, they will keep going down and obviously they won't be able to get out so you will find that there is a whole collection of these dead fruit flies there and once every 15 days you can empty it out now the thing to remember is that the fruit flies that get in are the male flies usually that's what, because this is the mating hormone it thinks that the females are in there and a whole bunch of them just keep going in and once you have taken out all the males from the population the next generation pest falls drastically there is no reproduction happening so that's really one of the most effective things to use in a garden you also have another kind of fruit fly that affects fruits if you have fruit trees like chiku, mango, guava you will find a similar problem with them but the lure for that is different then there is another trap here this has got a lure that is as small as this you sort of put it into this little pin and you stick it at the top over here and you hang it now this is used mostly for brinjal this particular one, it's used for brinjal and it attracts the fruit and shoot border if you buy bengal in the market you will see that sometimes when you cut it it's got like a rotten patch inside or if you have been growing it you will find that the fruit has these black marks and they don't seem to grow very well these are fruit and shoot borers and they completely destroy the brinjal that's the one that they often target so if you hang these around and you know like something like this you need four to an acre so if you have a balcony, one of this is more than sufficient as with this, you can just have them hanging around it would look rather strange having all these things hanging around but they are very effective then there is something called rock phosphate it's a mineral that you add to soil where we stay in the Goa and the Konkan area where we stay in the Konkan Sarikin where we stay in the Konkan area the soils don't have a lot of phosphorus in it and that can lead to some nutritional deficiencies in your plants so it may not be available or this may not be a problem in your area if your soils have a higher content of phosphorus but in this part Bombay and Konkan and the Kerala you will find that this is quite useful to add I have a bag here of wood ash we have a bakery close by I go and I often collect wood ash from them because it's a wood fire down there and basically wood ash is a very effective pest repellent basically it has the smell of fire so a lot of pests detect that and they stay away from it also it is corrosive so if it gets onto a lot of these soft bodied pests it irritates them and they say let's avoid this area and they go elsewhere so wood ash is another very effective simple and it does not harm your plants or your soil in fact it contains some amount of potassium in it and it will actually add potassium to the soil which is a good and desirable thing then I have something here called trichoderma trichoderma viridae is basically a fungus a good fungus and it's in a talcum medium so it's in your talcum powder and they keep the stores of this fungus in the talcum there are many ways to use this and you can basically you know drench the roots of certain plants like tomatoes, brinjal, chilies that suffer a particular problem of fungal vision I'll just cover that in the subsequent slide now there's a lot of stuff that you know I can say for this do this for this do that it's endless we need to keep going back to the principle that we have to mimic nature and we have to do what we can to build great soil if soil is healthy your plants are healthy they are resilient and they're able to really combat a lot of the pest diseases that come there so I will move back to the presentation now you know here we have a photo from some of the pots that I've grown in the past there's a bunch of lettuces and we all aspire towards the garden a productive garden that looks like that and it boils down to largely growing the right plant in the right season in the best soil you can possibly create and as a gardener you are a steward of soil every day you need to be asking yourself what have I done for my soil today okay on to the next slide so you know to think about the problem of pests there are basically three categories you either have pests, you have disease and you have nutrition deficiencies that cause certain growth problems in your plants and no matter what you look at it will eventually come down to one of these three so I'll take examples of some of the pest problems you know I've taken about five very common pest problems that we see in our areas can you move to the next slide so one of the most commonly observed pests in our area is acid now these are really versatile guys they are small, they can be yellow, they can be black they can be green they are usually found on the underside of these and they are sucking pests there's a category of pests that basically you know suck the sap out of a plant they create what is called honeydew and ants are attracted to this as are viruses and fungus and they create secondary problems of soup, black soup, it's a fungus problem or it can also be an invitation for viruses to sort of make that their medium and grow and then there will be a secondary problem to your to your plants the plants that are usually affected by this are the mustard crop which include cabbages and mustard greens and rocket and broccoli and that whole family beans, they love beans you will find them growing along the stems along the flowers along the small young fruit as well you will see often that these are carried by ants so ants actually move these up and down the plants because their movement is really slow and they suck, they bring the honeydew out and these ants, you know they partake of that and that's the little thing they have going there there's a number of things you can do to prevent it make sure that you reduce congestion don't have too many plants together because if there is a lot of humid and hot environment and moist environment they get attracted to it and that's true for a lot of pest and disease problems we have yellow and white sticky tracks these can be fairly useful and effective and sprays like a neem oil spray in soap solution or a cow urine spray also deters and repels them these are things you can do preventively curatively once it's there simply a jet spray or water will dislodge them soap solution sprays chili garlic ginger sprays also can be effective but like I said we always aspire to a point where we don't reach the problem another common problem we see is that of a leaf miner leaf miners are basically you see on your leaves especially tomatoes maybe even cucumbers you see these squiggly lines basically leaf miners are larvae of different kinds of flies and they lay the eggs between the tissue of the leaves and the larvae they feed they may be feeding tunnels until they sort of escape from the leaf once they're mature and usually it is not that problematic unless it's a very widespread problem when you see it press or squish the leaves at the point of the tunnel so that the larvae gets squished inside you know remove all the leaves and destroy them so that you don't have successive generations coming up there are some natural predators for this I forgot to mention the ladybug, the praying mantis the spider these are some of the natural predators that come to a garden and take care of a lot of these pests so when we talk about creating an ecology we like to have a bunch of these fellows doing their rounds on the beach taking care of all the problems that seem to crop up so that balance needs to be there there are several things you can do to prevent it you know be vigilant that's one of the main things because the spread the minute you see a few of them just discard it so that it does not spread quickly mean oil sprays sort of help keep it under control if the problem has become too widespread okay moving on to mealy bugs again mealy bugs and white flies you can see you know the mealy bug is the image on the top left and the white flies are the little triangular fellows on the right they are also sucking pests they also create the same kind of problem they will take the sap out there will be honeydew or this sticky sweet substance that will attract fungus there will be mold problems and it so it's the primary problem are these guys and then they create secondary problems of fungus and viral infections tomatoes, gringos, beans, gods they love these crops and hibiscus yes in fact if you have a hibiscus plant even guava you'll find that they are really clustered around especially the mealy bugs they'll be clustered around them and you can use them as a great trap crop if you don't care for the hibiscus a whole lot you know cultivate healthy plants to prevent this problem from happening remove the affected parts that are there and avoid too much nitrogen when you give a plant too much of compost or manure or you know anything that is high in nitrogen it basically produces a lot of tender fresh new leaves and these are extremely attractive to several plants so you know just because a little as one of our friends says just because a little of something is good a lot isn't always better and that's very true in organic farming you know be measured in what you use how much you use of it that really helps a lot neem is a standard thing that is useful for a lot of them another fungus a good fungus like trichoderma some of these are varia basania it's basically a parasite and if you get it in a powder form or a liquid form it can be sprayed in your garden it is parasitic and it will kill a lot of these bugs several of them white flies and mealy bugs included another common problem we have is that of caterpillars moving on to the next one now caterpillars are basically larvae of different kinds of butterflies and moths and there are numerous ones that you'll find this is one it's called the cabbage looper because it sort of loops and walks around there are army worms, there are cut worms there are a number of them and it's good to get familiar with what it is that is there some of them feed only at night so you know if you're spraying stuff in the daytime it's going to be of no help it's life trapped at night that will attract them and sort of get them down so you have to know what the fellow is to have a more targeted sort of approach to controlling it they affect you know various crops depending on which one these are the image down is that of a it's a kale leaf it's got nicely you know eaten up patches inside and you'll find sometimes if you look on the underside small little wormy looking thing but actually caterpillars in clusters you know they create a lot of damage there preventive measures one of the main things you can do is if you see one just pick it and flick it it's a really simple mechanical thing to do nothing to spray, nothing to worry about on your plant it is effective of course it needs you to be vigilant and timely with your intervention bird purches are great and even if you have a bird feeder that's a good way to attract birds in your garden and they are superb pest managers they'll come, they'll pick up these caterpillars and they'll sort of you know take care of half your problem if you do have a whole lot of them chili garlic ginger sprays work, neem oil work we may have heard of BT cotton and BT it actually comes from a particular bacteria called bacillus thurigenesis and basically what this does is that once you spray it, if the caterpillar ingests it it produces a protein that kills them so it's very different from BT and GMO and that can be another discussion but basically it is a biological control method that if you spray it takes care of a lot of things like caterpillars and a bunch of other pests ok moving on to the next one we have thrips thrips is a tiny winged insect it affects chilies, onions, strawberries, citrus very commonly tomatoes also ladybugs and lace wings are the natural predators for these guys you know if there are some leaves that are badly affected remove them, destroy them the yellow and blue sticky traps are pretty effective for controlling these and again neem oil is good I am talking about Bacania which I just spoke about is pretty effective against these salons and wood ash is also something that can deter them coming around and you know breeding in that area ok I will move on to some of the diseases and there is a whole lot of them but like I said it comes down to under the category of disease you can either have a fungal problem you can have a bacterial problem or you can have a virus problem sorry not to mention viruses this is of the right time but plants also get affected by viruses and it's not as drastic as we are going through right now but with viruses there is very less you can do once it happens once your plant has been affected but I will cover those as well but one of the common problems we see is that of fungal wilt it affects tomatoes it affects ginger, it affects chilies basically the fungus grows it constricts the passage of food up and down the plant and the plant just builds it seems like you have not watered it and that's pretty much the end of your plant the transfer of this happens through spores that can go through the wind or if you flow through water so you need to you know make sure that you are watchful of this problem if a plant has it remove it destroy it I mentioned trichoderma verde that's one of the good fungals is that if it's populated if it's populated your soil it will prevent the fungal wilt causing bacteria from or fungal from growing in the soil I will get on to the next one there is quite a few to cover mildew now mildew can be of you know quite a few types but the most commonly occurring once you see is powdery mildew that's the top image you see there is a fine coating of powder very common in cucumber and different kinds of cucumber bits or even the second one that's below there which is the downy mildew that produces these yellow spots and basically what this is this is fungal growth it comes because you have either a very congested growing space ventilation is poor there is insufficient sunlight it's continuously humid and moist so those are things you must avoid once you have it you can do a spray of a baking soda you know one tablespoon to a liter of water that being alkaline changes the pH of the you know of the area of the leaves and all that and it prevents the growth of the fungal in that area so that's the thing you can do to sort of prevent it but cut, remove badly infected bits and just get rid of them now here is one that is about nutrition deficiency calcium and rot I think last time someone asked us about tomato and they said that there is a you know a spot on the tomato that looks like it's rotting now this is not fungal, not bacterial this is actually a deficiency of calcium in the soil now what happens is you do have calcium in the soil but if your soil is inconsistently moist like sometimes there's too much water sometimes it's dry for long periods tomatoes can suffer problems like they can have tomato or a spot on it that looks watery you can't really do much once this is there, this is there the fruit looks unsightly you can cut off the bits but if you're growing commercially then nobody would buy fruit like that so that's a big problem but in your own home, in from your own garden just slice off the bits and you can use the rest of the tomato but make sure that you're watering your soil consistently, not over watering but just watering it consistently because like goat manure because what that does is doesn't give too much nitrogen sometimes it's not so much the lack of calcium as it is the presence of excess nitrogen that can also create this imbalance in the plants I've covered quite a few there and I could keep going on about this pest and that disease and this fungus and that virus but the bottom line is build resilient plants by building good soil so I'm going to hand over to Karan to take it off take it up from there Thanks Yogita so you know we've taken a fair bit of time I think to get to this point because there's been a lot to cover but given that so many of you had questions about pest and disease in particular we thought it would be good to go into some details so that you have a sense how to solve these now we've created a table which helps you identify many of the problems and suggest solutions for them this will be a document that we will also upload to the resource folder which is on the Google Drive so if you just look at the anyone can grow page on Hasgreek you will find a link to that folder we will probably also send it in a summary email that we send over to you right so there are some things to keep in mind in the context of managing pest and disease and I'd like to just you know go over these again to summarize it the first thing really really important and I absolutely understand why it feels like this is counter intuitive when we started out we would also obsess about pest and disease but you realize after a little bit of growing that you know we gave it sometimes too much attention and therefore I would suggest that we should stop obsessing about diseases and pests we should what we should do is we should make every effort to manage the environment within which our plants are growing in order to you know just prevent the occurrence of these diseases and pests you cannot completely eliminate them as Yogita said it's you know a part of the cycle of nature also so we have to accept it and we have to treat it as a symptom of something else being wrong and that is what we have to try and address in the long term lastly you need to really as a gardener I think one of the greatest skills that you can have and the greatest skills that you can develop is the ability to observe very closely to understand and you know see notice and understand things that are happening in your garden spotting pests earlier identifying pests earlier and making sure that you are able to come up with the particular solution for that problem either as a cure immediately or like Yogita was mentioned as a preventive measure to be implemented in the next season right now quick summary of everything that we talked about in this session the first thing that we have tried to talk about and try to stress and I think we've been talking about this right through the different sessions is that soil health is a huge part of ensuring so you know as as gardeners we have to understand that nature does most of the work for us or at least nature should be doing most of the work for us and our job is not into getting the way of nature but to assist it when necessary so soil health especially in pots is something that we can influence to a great extent and that's something each of us should kind of focus on and when you solve that particular problem you have healthy strong plants so you have strong seedlings healthy seedlings going into healthy soil building up their you know their growth I mean their size in terms of growth and things like that and their food reserves and immunity and therefore being productive for us the second thing is I would say more than half of us tend to over water our plants and this very over watering causes fungal diseases these are but this is particularly true in the coastal parts where humidity tends to be high like at this time of the year we probably have 80% you know humidity in places like Bombay in places like Cochin Chennai or even Goa and that you know that humidity combined with over watering is a perfect recipe for fungal disaster mulching is a very powerful tool and if you don't take anything else away from this session I would say that you should take away the idea that mulching is something that you must do in your garden and you can usually find mulch leaves in your compound or in your neighborhood these are usually burnt just adding to pollution in our cities and these can be used productively in your garden just collect them and put them into your pots make it a 2 inch layer that covers your soil diversity is something you must ensure in order to have protection again press diversity leads to more sort of resilient ecosystems and this is better for the health and well being of your plants and lastly or in a sense firstly you want to take preventive action well before time to avoid pests when you do experience them you do the best you can cure but you then incorporate a new practice in for the next season so that that same pest does not occur quite often you may have a pest in your balcony that I do not extreme experience at all in my garden so it's impossible to cover every single pest and make sure you know you have a remedy for it that brings us pretty much to the end of this session I'd like to first talk a little bit about the session that we had going to have next week as I mentioned earlier this is the last session of this five part series which I hope you have found informative I hope you found it useful this will be on Thursday which is the 7th of May and what we shall cover in that session will be the proper time and way in which you can harvest your vegetables how you can plan your next crop and make sure that you have seedlings ready at the right time when one cycle of you know crop ends we shall also talk about growing fruits in pots which is something that many of us don't even consider possible but it is very possible to do you know you can have a larger pots maybe 18 inch that's one and a half foot of two foot size or 20 inch pots and you can grow trees fruit trees in them for the next 5-10 years with a lot of productivity of fruits right so this I think is something that we'll cover also for friends who you may want to give the link to register for this session please note the link is hasgeek.com slash green dash green dash essentials slash anyone can grow series you'll see the link right here at the bottom since you've already used it most likely to sign up you know you would already be familiar for it this is also where you will be able to access the past editions of or other the past you know editions of this series the videos are up over there and the different resources that we are you know providing as part of this also again I hope you know this has been an interesting session for you what I'm going to do is I'm going to just ask Amok to run a couple of polls to share a couple of polls with you for which we'd like your feedback Amok is it possible to do the first polls yeah okay so you know it'd be great to know how many of you are actually joining us for the first time and how many you know have been there for the past sessions I'll just wait for half a minute while the remaining people can let us know so a lot of you joining us for the first time as a reminder you can view the past sessions over the last four weeks now this is the fourth session and the fifth one would be coming on 7th May okay there's a second poll if you can kind of answer for us this will give us a sense of you know how much you've actually grown and for those of us who are joining us for the second or third time what kind of progress you've made oh several of you seem to have seedlings underway that's good to know for those who haven't started it would be great if you can start early perhaps in this on this weekend itself simply because you know the seasons will change from June onwards when the monsoons will come along right so thanks for those responses there's a third poll also Amok which after this we can probably thanks so much for this feedback because it gives us a lot of guidance on what we should cover and you know how we should sort of do this okay excellent so just moving on from here I just wanted to mention that a lot of you can you know get on to this group that we've created on telegram telegram is something like whatsapp it's a messaging app but it's a little more powerful in terms of helping us share information with you and you know interact with you the link to do this is t.me slash anyone can grow so if you type this into your browser and click on it it will take you to a place where you can sign up and actually access the interactive chat room that we are using you know for these sessions as a follow up for these sessions if you have more questions that you come across you know it would be great to kind of hear from you and if you can share examples of what you are doing we can probably help with more guidance you know thank you for being a part of this session and I just wanted to mention that we can be reached also on info at green essentials dot in the address may not be very visible on your screen so as repeated it's info at the rate green essentials dot in you can send in your emails here too if you have some questions but the best way place to be interact would be on telegram t.me slash anyone can grow so what we do next is that we will have a quick sort of Q&A session I can see there are a lot of questions that have been sent in I'll ask has geek to just let us know what these questions are I think Anish will be helping us with this that was a very interesting session so we have a bunch of questions on various topics I'm going to go from topic to topic we have questions on watering soil and pest management and diseases so I'll go in that order I'll start off with watering the soil watering the plants so Ashish Navar asks what is the optimum amount of water required for various plants is there any resource that can be used so if you have plants in a pot then I would say you water it deeply so that the water emerges from the bottom of the container so the entire pot the entire column of soil there is wet the reason for that is that the roots will grow nice and deep and you'll have a well rooted plant in that pot and then you water next when you see that the soil looks dry and how do you find that out either you see but don't just see the surface the surface will usually look just about an inch under and if the soil is moist then you can skip a day skip two days so I just a minute while you with the yeah yeah so you like right now I water my summer but it's very humid so the soil doesn't dry up as fast and some of the pots that I've been raising my nurseries I've been watering them once every third week they continue to stay and hold the moisture for a long time so the indicator is that you need to see how wet your soil is and the same thing is true for a garden as well if it seems moist just skip it don't water again otherwise you will create that high humidity continuously and there will be fungal problems from there I hope that answers your question so just adding to what Yogita just said the first thing is that a lot depends on the nature of your soil if you remember we talked about adding cocopeat in so when you got cocopeated holds moisture for a much longer period of time right so that's one of the reasons why Yogita will have to water less also Yogitas pots are mulched heavily so for that reason water stays for a longer period of time so again you know you will have to learn to judge this a little bit and as Yogita said the best way is to poke your finger in and look for soil moisture you're not supposed to have a wet soil you're supposed to have moist soil so that's one thing that you should kind of keep in mind right and the other thing that you should keep in mind is that if you see algae or moss growing on the surface of the soil it's an indication that most likely you're over watering right or that drainage in that particular pot for some reason is improper so you can check the drainage if the drainage is fine then just cut down the watering until that you know goes away because if there's no excess water it's not going to form on the surface of the soil got it so moving on to questions on soil and soil health we have a question from Pankaj he asks is there any procedure that you can follow for preparing a healthy organic culture of bacteria in the soil so the first thing is that because since we leave most of us I mean it depends in which city you are or what kind of climatic location you are but for the most part in India we've got tropical climates now tropical climates are always rich in microbes in any case so you don't have to worry about specific microbes being added to the soil all you need to do is create an environment where they can thrive so I would say that the first thing to do in order to allow your soil microbes to thrive is to mulch your soil that will immediately create a conducive environment along with the moisture that it holds for them to propagate and grow now suppose you don't have soils that are rich in these kind of microbes Yogita gave you the example of Panchukavya that stinky bottle she had on her table basically if you recall she mentioned that it has many different 5 different types of things from the cow like milk curd, cow dung, cow urine and so on and basically what it is is it's like an Ayurvedic cocktail for plants which is very rich in microbes so if I were to feel that my soil is a little depleted what I would do is that I would just make a solution of this you have to put just about 30 ml in a liter of water that's like a 0.03% you know solution and I would add it into the soil like a liquid fertilizer and then I would cover it with mulch above because there would be no point adding in those microbes if I'm going to let them die by not mulching the sunlight is going to sterilize them so very soon you will find that the populations of microbes in your soil will also revive and there is enough diversity of microbial populations in that concoction that your soil will be much better right so I hope that Yogita wants to just add to that another thing like if you don't have access to Panchukavya I find that my pots are very close to the kitchen I often have curds that have become too sour and you don't want to eat it so you just dilute that with water and pour it distributed amongst all your plants you get excellent lactobacillus into it then if you have milk you know just swirl the milk container put that that will also attract more lactobacillus and it will sort of create that culture there anything that you think has micro and can get into your soil it don't throw it away from your kitchen dilute it in water and just you know distribute it amongst your plants that will build a variety of different kinds of microbes in your soil you know if you part your soil and yeah even if you eat non-veg and you are cleaning fish the fish water the rice water all these stimulate the growth of microbes I was going to say sometimes when you part your soil and you see that inside the soil there is like this white stuff inside fuzzy white stuff sometimes people freak out seeing it but that's excellent that's like fungal mycelium inside and you want your soil to look like that so you know be happy if you see that it's not bad it's not a problem if you're unsure what it is send us a photo and we'll tell you whether it's the good stuff or the bad stuff okay so I think that's quite clear the there is speaking of fungal mycelium we have a question from Pallavi she asks she has some kind of white fungus growing on her soil and the plant slowly just tends to rot the root of the plant tends to rot and die away so what exactly is happening and what should she do about it so Pallavi two parts one is that it would be great to have a photograph so if you're able to post a photograph to the telegram group that would let us be very sure that the problem you're facing is something that we are identifying correctly right having said that root rot can happen for multiple reasons right so one example I am just taking an example not directly linked to the fungus kind of thing that she's described but one example is the soil has some things called nematodes okay so it's it works in an interesting way and this is a common problem for example in tomatoes it is also a common problem I think in bananas so what happens is these nematodes are sort of microscopic creatures in the soil you cannot see them and what they do is that they create you know damage in the roots so the simple I mean the sign of the problem sorry yeah yeah so they create colonies on the roots which create blockages in the roots and they affect the ability of the roots to pick up nutrients and pass them up to the stem and other parts of the plant right so more or less what happens is the food or the nutrition and water supply of the plants goes off and the plant can go from being very healthy to suddenly just collapsing and the only way you will know is when you pull out the plant and you look at the roots and you find all these clumps or nodules on the roots below right so this is one kind of root rot that can happen there are other fungal related root rots also which could be possibly the reason that she is facing this problem but it would help really to have a photograph so that we can identify it correctly and suggest what she can do okay we have a couple of questions related to fertilizers or additives to the soil one the first question is from Kora Bhatia the question is regarding Panchagavya to water ratio and frequency in which it should be added and the second question is from Sunila she asks how much of rock phosphate should be added to the soil okay so Panchagavya can be added in a 3% solution basically is that in 1 liter of water put in 30 ml of half a peg if you will in water dilute it and you can put it in a spray bottle like this and you can spray your plants or you can water the soil if you are using a sprayer remember to strain it because you may find particles of cow dung floating in it and it can clog the spray nozzle so that and the frequency with which you know if you think the soil isn't very good then you can initially add it once every 15 days maybe for 3 or 4 applications and then after that you know once a month you will have sufficient remember plants growing in pots are limited to the extent that they have food based on the size of the pot so if you have a larger container obviously there will be more nutrients available and you will have to add nutrients to it less frequently if you have smaller containers then you will have to regularly add that unlike growing in the garden where there is a certain ecology that takes over and you sort of multiply and build on their own and do it more frequently in pots regarding the rock phosphate rock phosphate I would put in so a little bit about rock phosphate is basically a mineral dust or rock dust it is good for creating healthy cellular growth for the kinds of flowering and you know when the plants are blooming it is a very slow release kind of nutrients it doesn't get it is not soluble in water and will not get washed away in the rain you know the nitrogen that is available from cow dung and different kinds of manures so once you add this if you add I would add about this is a kilo one kilo I would mix it with about a 40 kilo bag of compost I am staying in a garden and spread it over 10 square meters now that is the ratio in the land but if you are adding it to a pot I would say 1 teaspoon is sufficient and the point is that once you add it you can put it for a couple of seasons you don't have to add couple of seasons I mean like maybe a year or two you don't need to add it again and again but the critical thing about this is that if you have rock phosphate in your soil and you don't have a healthy microbial population this will not be available to your plants there are certain bacteria that are solubilized or basically make phosphorus into a form that is available to the plants so mulching is very critical by using this that's why we mix it with compost because compost has its own set of microbes or you can add a little bit of puncture to it add it together with the rock phosphate and mulch so that the bacteria population continues to thrive and they are like current said the chef they cook and they keep feeding the plants what is there in the soil so that's the other important thing to keep in mind I will just add to that you know Yogita referred to the fact that one needs to have the right size of pot so just for people who have joined in this session itself I'd like to point out that we've discussed the appropriate sizes of pots for different plants earlier there is also a table in the same presentation and in the earlier session that you can look at which tells you what size of pot you should have for which plant yeah okay moving on to the next set of questions we have a couple of questions on mulch and how to use it um we have an attendee who asks if excess mulch causes results in excess hydrogen in the soil we also have another question from Joy he says he's been collecting leaves from the neighborhood for mulch he's asking if he risks introducing pests and bugs if he does not check the leaves carefully um okay the first question was whether excess mulch produces hydrogen I am not familiar with nitrogen nitrogen it does not produce extra nitrogen you know anything that first decomposes in fact does the opposite it takes nitrogen out before giving it in but mulch as a top layer does not really do that it will slowly decompose and it will slowly get added to your soil so I don't think that there is a problem of excess nitrogen or reduction in nitrogen levels in the soil and remember you need to put in dry mulch if you put in like grass clippings that are fresh and green what can happen for example is that they will start decomposing when it's fresh it will go through the process of decomposition um it will get squelchy it may get matted and that's where it can create pathogens that will multiply and then that can affect your plant so you need to watch out for not don't use fresh leaves and fresh grass clippings and things just use dry stuff now you need to watch whether um you are bringing in you know pathogens or pests into your garden from other places um I would say there is a danger of that happening but um you know healthy resilient soils can handle a bit of it so there is a lot of stuff everywhere and I would the benefits that mulch provides far outweighs the slight risk of getting something from outside if you are concerned about it you can spread it out in the sun for a little while and let it sort of um cook if you will or get um slightly disinfected in the sun that will maybe take care of a lot of the um the either pests or disease that may be there and then use it don't bring it in and directly use it if that's a concern just put it out in the sun spread it let it dry out basically crisp and then you can add it I think that should prevent um problems of that type I'd also act that what you can perhaps do is be a little selected of where you get the mulch from in the sense that you know usually it's just swept up from the concrete in a garden or something you're not likely to have any major you know pathogens over there that's very unlikely you know if you have dank you know wet kind of moist corners that those may be the places where you have it so if it's a relatively dry and coming from a place which seems relatively clean you really won't have any issues okay we have a couple more questions on mulch and the amount of mulch to use Devaki us she sort of had to get rid of some soil that was in a pot and add some more soil to it so she was asking and the previous soil already had some mulch in it she asked if she needs to provide more mulch to the new soil covering and there's another question on YouTube where somebody is asking if they should they have about 2 inches of mulch that they've given should they make it lesser or is it sufficient to answer Devaki's question the mulch has to be on top if you have some soil in your pot and you're adding fresh soil to it I would put it on top of the mulch like I'm not able to understand what you've done but if you are adding fresh soil to it and if your soil is there the simple rule is you should not be able to see your soil if you can see your soil you don't have enough mulch so basically if you're adding fresh soil or adding compost to your pot remove the dry leaves put them aside do your mixing in your soil whatever set it level it and put the mulch back on top and answer the second question 2 inches of mulch is perfect it's great 2 inches will make sure that you can't see your soil so that's good remember mulch will decompose over time so you will have to keep topping it up keep a steady supply of mulch handy in a bag or something that you can always reach out for and top up the mulch when you see I'll just add a couple of things to that if we were growing in a garden outdoors we may put in as much as 3 inch layer or even 4 inch layer of mulch because there tends to be more breeze and it can get blown away and you know it's also a larger space and it compacts so we may do that in a pot 2 inches is you know kind of all you can manage that's one the second thing is for mulch you can remember you can take something like dry grass clippings you can take you know even weeds we've used as long as they are not flowering then yeah and as soon as the roots as long as the roots are clipped off and the what we do is that sometimes you may end up with like large leaves for example I think a common city tree is the Badam tree which has these very thick leaves that decompose slowly and they're also very large so what you would do is that you would just break down the leaves into smaller leaves just to make them more manageable you know especially when it's in pots it's very difficult to arrange bigger leaves just break them down into smaller pieces and you know they will do the job also if possible try and make sure you have a mix of leaves again following the diversity principle and saying that you know each of these trees probably has roots to different levels and brings up different minerals right so if you are able to do that but if not that's not a big problem either again I think we mentioned it in the past work with what you have and you know I mean if some things are just too inconvenient don't worry work with the things that are easily accessible to you. Okay so now we are just moving on to some kind of soil additives that improve the health of the soil questions on these we have a question on YouTube where this person is asking if Epsom salt increases the micronutrient absorption in the soil we have another question from Devaki regarding this she asks if micronutrient absorption can be used for all kinds of leafy vegetables and fruiting vegetables apart from just fruiting trees so the first question which is related to the use of Epsom salts so very frankly I'll have to look that up because it's not something that we use regularly now we know that this is commonly recommended in many places but one of the principles we try to follow is you know what is good enough is good enough and there is no point trying to make absolutely the perfect mix because the effort and the cost involved in doing that is too high so we found that even with the nutrients that we mentioned we've had extremely productive results and we've never had to resort to you know something that is very specific like I'll give you examples of things like this a lot of people will tell us that they'll use pearlite or vermiculite they'll add that to the soil there is this blue rock dust that is also added to the soil there are many other little little little kind of micronutrients that are added to the soil frankly we've not bothered with these and you know there's a parallel thing so since we run a garden store we have a lot of people coming up with all kinds of very innovative bio which have secret special formulae and what not some will say that they've got CKL and this and that and everything and personally we've just found that you know it's it becomes a little bit of over engineering right so sorry that I can't give you the answer immediately if you can join the telegram group and kind of you know just send this message in there I'll try and answer that question after a little bit of research that's one part of it the second question was about Givamrit yeah Givamrit is great it's given us a very good results with flowering and fruiting you know so really really good in that sense I would say that it is you know Panjikavya or Givamrit both do a great job personally I find Panjikavya is best used on the soil but can also be used as a foliar spray Givamrit Yogita will be using more in the soil or in the soil okay mostly in the soil so again right in over there just to you know water to the root zone though I suppose you can apply it as a foliar spray also but that effect tends to go away quicker okay I think that's about it when it comes to soil questions on soil we'll move on to questions on pests and diseases a few of them are already been covered but I think they are like failed attempts at remedying the issue so maybe I can sort of go through them quickly we have a question from Tanvi she says that her tomato nigganda plants were infected by mealybugs and she used fermented rice water solution and neem oil but it hasn't completely worked she wants some advice on how to deal with it she asks if changing the soil completely will help yeah I think we'll just finish that question and then move on to the rest you know usually and this takes us back you need to look at what exactly is going on with that plant it's not just about what you have sprayed and it hasn't worked and very often you'll spray something and it will not work and you'll spray something else and it will still not work and you've got to really get to the root of the problem and it could simply be something as small as your plants isn't getting enough sunlight like is your tomato plant getting 5 to 6 hours of sunlight Rajini gandha I have very little experience with ornamentals so I'm not familiar but I imagine because it's a flowering plant also like small sunlight are you growing it in the right kind of environment is it too humid there is it you know too much growing in that one area where it is all overcrowded so it's not about what you have sprayed because that is literally the tip of the iceberg or the last kind of the last effort there's all this stuff which we spoke about earlier and you know it are all those parameters being met because the plant dying is an indication of something that is not happening or something that is happening that runs far beyond just that one instance over there so that treat it not as an end but as an indicator of what is happening so it's hard for me to give a specific answer to that that okay you have these mealy bugs and your plants have died because of it mealy bugs love moist environment mealy bugs love you know shaded areas to grow so you know look at the place where your plants are growing and see if you can bring about any change on both parameters and that may you know help having healthier plants in the future so you know just taking what Yogita said and maybe putting it in a little bit of a different order the first thing I would look at is that have I created too wet and humid environment you know for mealy bugs and that could be either because I'm watering too much so you should think about that a little bit the second thing maybe like Yogita said it's a very shaded environment and a lot of you know humidity tends to be trapped there is my plant too dense can I prune it and reduce the size of the you know the canopy are you giving it too much nitrogen for example too much fertilizer which is creating the environment I'm just talking about it in terms of steps so maybe you can move it out to a sunny area where there is better air circulation and that will have better results to you you know is there another plant nearby which is the source like we gave the example of shoe flower for example or hibiscus which tends to be the magnet is this bringing the mealy bugs into your environment and creating those problems I'm not sure I think in the last session somebody said a neighbor's plant for instance was contributing to a lot of mealy bugs in their garden so those are the things that I would address first because unless you address those issues that are causing the problem cures will be either less effective or not effective at all because the problem will keep coming back so we have a couple of questions on red ants and termites in kitchen garden Joy has a bunch of small red ants around his kitchen garden he has if it's something to worry about we also have a question on YouTube from Alka Tandon she says she has a lot of termites around in her kitchen garden that looks something like the muck and seems to not let any plants grow in the garden yeah she has what has to be done in this case so there are I learned recently actually we have this 11 year old boy called Ethan who comes and spends time at our store and he is really calls himself the ants guy and he identified 30 different kinds of ants just in our store garden and I thought there were ants there were red ants and black ants and white ants and that's it but it seems that there are so many kinds of ants there are ants that fly there are ants that you know whatever there's a whole bunch of them so you need to actually know a little bit more about what the ant is but you know to give a shorter answer observe just look at your plant and see how your plant is doing like there are some ants that just don't do anything they just go up and down in the soil they'll do their thing and they won't worry your plant at all so if that's the case I once had I'm trying to remember what was growing in it was some leafy vegetables and it was in the balcony and this was during summer now ants like moist environment so the soil is nice and moist they come from under the pot and they are down like they just stay somewhere at the lower portion of the pot they have colonies they'll have you know the eggs that they'll have all over there and every time I would water the plant they would all come out from the bottom they'd wait for the water to drain out and then once the water dried out they all go back in so I noticed that they were not really harming the plant in any way it may be you get freaked out seeing arey from the ants are coming and going and I don't like it and I want to do something about it but you know if you have a garden you'll have ants and you just need to observe and see whether it's causing any damage if it is causing damage then it's of concern to you like if it's moving around aphids and things then you may want to say okay I need to deter those particular ants otherwise not needed so just coming back to you know what I think there are two questions one about ants and one about white ants let me say this first ants are part of the ecosystem right no matter what you do especially if you are in for instance coastal areas and not in temperate areas you cannot get rid of ants as you with I said you got 30 different types of ants and they are part of the ecosystem in fact they are insisting in many assisting in many ways because they are breaking out organic matter which then gets incorporated into the soil improving the quality of your soil right the role that they may be playing could be secondary roles we have talked about aphids a little earlier and they are bringing aphids in to kind of suck the pests and all but you know ants are not typically the primary villains in your garden that's number one now this also goes for white ants which in my opinion are much misunderstood now white ants tend to eat matter or attack matter which is either dead or dying so you know I mean it is one thing for it to attack for instance the door frame in your house that's because it's dead wood and you know it does it but in terms of a living plant its cellular structure is so different that the they typically cannot really sort of they cannot consume the material that a living plant is made of right so this is an important consideration to keep in mind many times we do not like these creatures for reasons other than what is you know their their main kind of function within the garden so it's not that they are harming your plants but they seem to be around and sometimes there is a circumstantial evidence against them so that's how they kind of get caught and we tend to you know sort of feel that they may be causing problems for the most part I don't think we have to worry about them and you know they can go about their business without interfering in what we are trying to do Okay the next question set of questions are on cockroaches and rats in balcony gardens we have a question on YouTube asked the the attendee asks if there is any way of getting rid of cockroaches from the balcony garden also Neha seems to have a very health conscious rat who eats only spinach and salad greens she asks if there are any suggestions on how to keep the rats away Okay so I mean see both of these issues usually will a cockroaches especially cockroaches are very urban phenomenon and you know it's more to do with conditions in your neighborhood you know maybe garbage some distance away or whatever I think that cockroaches you deal with completely differently than this like I have never seen cockroaches being there because of a garden okay so that's that's one part of the answer so you deal with them like I have to deal with them every once in a while which is all it requires is a chapel and you deal with them you know for those people who don't like to intervene in that way I don't have any you know immediate suggestions to sort of offer okay then comes the issues of rats and mice and they can be quite problematic now again the question is how are they coming in quite often I remember having a house in which you know the rat would actually climb up the drain pipe and come up like three floors up you know so that can be quite a challenge now in terms of rats in general the most effective way we found of dealing with them are actually rat traps and I'll give you the example because we have these different kinds of compost and soils you know we will frequently have rats wandering their way in our store is also outside the city so it's you know a less urban kind of place so you'll have a mouse or a rat coming in and you know the rat trap is like magic literally you put it down and you sometimes you can just put a little bag of compost or soil over there and that works as a lure they come for it they cobble at it they're trapped in the rat and then you take it for a long ride to your least favorite neighborhood to the city and get rid of it you know a lot of people actually kill them we can't get ourselves to do that so we just you know go three villages away and release the rat over there yeah so I really think that in the context of an apartment and you know also where you may have other pests you don't want to use many of the rat poisons and other things even though these are available I really think the most effective way of dealing with it is either by adopting a good female cat Yogita insists that the males are too lazy to be useful and or on the other side you know you just have a rat trap these I would say are the best so so when in the organic way of thinking we would say you don't have a rat problem you have a cat deficiency so that's really how we look at it okay we have another question from Devaki she asked she has a brinjal plant that flowered for the first time this week but the flower just wilted away in a day and there was no fruits so she's asking what problem could be there could be a couple of things it could be that there are no pollinators around so you didn't get pollinated though I think it's a self pollinated flower so that shouldn't have been the problem could also be that your soil is deficient in potassium and potassium rather a deficiency of potassium can cause premature falling of flowers of fruit a quick and easy way to add potassium into your soil is by adding a little bit of wood ash which you can get from any baker that does baking or I don't know where you are but you should be able to get wood ash from someone who runs with the mood maybe that will be more of charcoal ash or just burn you know get a little bit of don't burn leaves because the potassium content in that is a lot less but just woody bits if you just burn a bit of it collect the ash and put it in the soil don't use too much because it changes the pH of the soil considerably so in a pot that's about like a 10 inch pot or a 12 inch pot you can add a couple of table spoons that should be enough if you happen to live by the sea you can take a walk and collect up some seaweed wash it nicely so that the salt is out and you can just either let the seaweed dry on your soil and eventually decompose in the soil or you can actually make like a seaweed liquid sort of tonic just leave it in water for several days and use that water for your plants seaweed is also pretty high in potassium so that way I think you should be able to address the problem would ash be in the cookies I know we have gone longer than we anticipated but you know happy to sort of answer the questions as best we can yeah hi I just had some problems with connectivity we have a couple questions on coco peat and compost vermicompost we have a question on youtube Peter asks where you can find vermicompost and coco peat in Goa we have a question from Reena who asks if coco peat can be used for tube gardening like in the pictures that you had shown in the presentation and we have another question from Akansha she says it's quite difficult to find vermicompost or any kind of manure during lockdown is there any home made nutrient solution that can be used on the plant instead okay so I will answer the first question which is that in terms of availability of coco peat and vermicompost in Goa it's fairly easily accessible most nurseries will tend to have it I'm not sure where Peter is located for instance in the north we have our store in Sukur it's also available at other gardening stores in Giri and other places like that in the south I guess east west these are different places that may have vermicompost and coco peat most garden stores will have it in terms of the second question using coco peat as the medium in those pipes, those kind of pipe gardens yes certainly here's the medium, you're not going to use soil there it's going to be a blend of coco peat and vermicompost I think you could get away with 70, 30 or 50, 50 you can 50, 50 in leafy vegetables is better because that extra punch kind of gives you a lot of vegetative growth and more leaf production since you have a smaller volume of soil you may want to try 50, 50 vermicompost and coco peat for those pipes the third question was with regards to coco peat as I'm sorry could you just run that by me the last question regarding having a home compost yes okay how do you manage for nutrients while we are locked down okay okay so the first thing is that the best way to do it is to compost your own kitchen waste right so it takes a little bit of time but you can start getting your compost within a few weeks itself right if you accelerate the process of composting and home compost composting makes the most sense because of that now assuming that you don't have this at this point and obviously it will take a while before you can get started with it mulching is the second process which is progressively sort of adding nutrients to your soil right so you add dry leaves into your into your soil and definitely over your soil as it decomposes it brings more organic matter in and it gets nutrients in the third way you can do it is I don't know whether you you know you have fish and meats and things like that but if they are actually if you're discarded you know fish or cleaned off fish or something is actually kept in water solution and actually fermented for with jaggery for a short period of time then what happens is it's going to smell like hell so you make sure that you have it inside a closed container but I think it should take what about 18 days or so 15 days or so before it is really rich liquid nutrient yeah you will have to dilute and use this do not use this straight off it is simply too strong I think about 10% should be fine 10 to 12% concentration maximum of 15% that's the range in which you should use this so you put in about 100 to 150 ml in 1 litre of water and that would be the right kind of way to use it I'll Yogita just wants to add a few things so you can also use things like rice water, curd water milk water anything water you boil potatoes and there's water lying around it'll have some nutrients on the potato in it add that in so it's a continuous process it's not a one time thing that you do it's something that like I'm washing the dishes where the plants are so every time I see something that I feel oh this could be useful just swirl the container and continuously you'll find that you are building up the microbes in the soil and like Karan said the mulch you add dry leaves to your soil that also increases the organic matter that is where all the microbes try so those are the things you can also do okay we have a question from Satish he asks if it's safe to use STP treated water for vegetable gardens okay there is the theory and there is the practice because STP also it all depends on how well that treatment is actually working so unless you're confident that it's operating very well where you know the usually you need to test the output of these and make sure that it's in a certain range I would avoid it but if you are sure that you know the quality is up there in terms of what is being actually collected afterwards then yes it can be used like we know we for instance had a client in fact a hotel that was actually using it to grow vegetables organically and it was absolutely fine but it was fine because they had complete control over and very closely monitored the output from the STP itself right so I mean I hope that answers the question that's the best that I can see at this point in time okay we just have a couple more questions we've overshot time by quite a bit but just last couple of questions we have a question about mites or chiggers that are growing on plants basically like red coloured mites is there any way of stopping these and also a question from Shamim on YouTube he says he has a white Courtney film in the underside of its chili plants which are tending to spread to other powdered plants how do you prevent these okay the mites I'm not sure are you used to words I wasn't sure what the second word is what he referred to as chiggers okay I'm not familiar with that word but spider mites are a problem and I don't know if that's what you have spider mites have a very fine webbing under the leaves and they can be pretty destructive you know if it's a big plant I would say a neem oil spray usually is helpful you can even do things like Bavaria, Basania but if that's difficult to get at this point you could go to any chemist they'll have neem oil that's available you know it's added to hair oil for lice or whatever just take pure neem oil dilute it 5 ml to a liter of water but first dilute it in a soap solution otherwise it will not mix this water that should help with spider mites if these are the same things that you're talking about but if you send us a photo on telegram and on the telegram app we should be able to identify and get back to see with a more specific solution the next question was about it was about it was from Shamim he says he has a white film growing it could be more slightly neeliba and again check I mean what is the plant what are the ideal conditions that this plant likes is there too much humidity are you overfeeding your plants is there not enough sunlight check on that mealy bugs can be dislodged they don't have wings so they can be dislodged with a jet spray they have less likely to come back and or a neem spray that would also help Bavaria basania which I mentioned that would also help most likely it sounds like what's known as woolly aphids or mealy bugs are called woolly aphids they look like this little fluffy cottony kind of things usually found on the underside of leaves and chili is prone to it so make sure it's getting enough sunlight that should be one of the things you should troubleshoot about that is sunlight sufficient or not okay so we have a few other questions but I think they are mostly repeats of topics that we've already dealt with I suggest all these people to ask these questions in the telegram group the link to the telegram group is posted on the slide you can see the slide here it's t.me slash anyone can grow so feel free to post photographs and ask your questions on this channel and Karan and Yogita will be happy to answer them that's it for the questions thanks Karan, thanks Yogita it was a very interesting session and so I think there's one more poll that we'd like Amok to run which is about how people have found the session how useful have they found it it would be great to have your feedback and get a sense of whether this has been productive to you as I said there are a few resources that we will post there is a excel sheet or a table that we've created which helps you kind of identify the different kinds of problems and make sure that you find solutions for them ok so while we wait I'd just like to mention that you can find a lot of we are hoping that you can find a lot of seeds at the vegetable seeds at the seed store or in we do have a lot of seeds there but it really depends on how couriers open up over the next couple of weeks I think it may depend on access in each different city from what we hear Bombay may be not so easy for a little while but perhaps Bangalore will be a little easier so just have a look see if you find something interesting to grow and we'd be happy to provide that to you if you're looking for more advice more involved advice on what you can do in your garden get in touch with me my number is here and we've also given you our email address which is info at GreenEssentials.in so I'm sorry if some things went suddenly dark we seem to have lost power at exactly the right time so thank you so much for joining us thanks again Anish thanks Amogh, thanks Zainab for all the help in organizing this and making sure that it runs smoothly I'm really grateful that you folks have made the time to join and look forward to seeing you next week that's on the 7th I think of May again a Thursday for the last part of this session join us on telegram if you'd like to know something before then bye from Yogita and me in Goa