 Hi, good evening. I'm Karan and we also have Yogita here from Green Essentials and welcome to this session. Thanks for making the time to be here. I want to thank Hasgeek for helping us put this together. I think it would have been another decade before we tried it if it wasn't for them. And we hope that what we talk about here and what we try to explain here is useful to you. This session is titled Anyone Can Grow. And what we are going to do is we are going to start with a presentation for about 15-20 minutes where we're going to talk about several things. And then we'll move on to questions and answers that you may have wanting to clarify different things. So as I said, thank you for making the time to join us. We hope that this will be both informative and useful for you. All of us are stuck home and wondering to some extent what to do with our time. Also perhaps to another extent what kind of difficulties we are going to face over the next few weeks or maybe even months. I think there are certain implications that COVID-19 has for people who are very newly interested in gardening. One of the things that I think we need to ask ourselves is that are we going to face food uncertainty in a very personal way? And the question is, will we face this for the next seven days, the next three weeks or for three months? We also need to ask ourselves whether we should wait to act or whether we should try and do something quickly in order to mitigate the impact of any disruption to fresh fruits and vegetables. So these are the most important because these are the most likely to be disrupted. Non-perishable goods don't tend to have problems to the same extent, at least based on what we've seen in this past two weeks. And fresh food is something that at least in India most of us can't stay without. We can't do without our vegetables. If you take this example of a typical Indian family, most of the food that is consumed is fresh. And this contrast greatly with families in the West, for example, this American family, most of the food that they consume is processed food. It's non-perishable food, right? So very different challenges between us and them. Homegrown food is not an impossibility. For most people who have been doing this for a while, they will find that it's pretty easy to grow food. And once you get the hang of it, it can be pretty productive. And this is possible for small spaces, not just from big spaces. Now, the question is why act now? We are around, I think, two weeks in with one more week to go, hopefully. But signs are that this is going to get extended in the next couple of months. The first thing that we see is that we have a choice. Either we respond very proactively to the situation and do some things ourselves, or we choose to wait for someone else to come and rescue us to provide solutions for our food. The second thing of concern is the fact that the real food shortages may come afterwards. We may not have faced them yet. These are going to happen because food production has been paused. Farms haven't been tended to and so on. And the impact of this may be a month from now or two months from now. So what we are suggesting is that we should be growing in containers in sunny balconies, terraces and so on because these can be pretty productive. They can produce at least some amounts of the food that we enjoy eating. One of the things that Yogita has always said right from the time we started growing about 13 years ago is that anyone can grow. A common misconception is that it takes a very special kind of personality or people are born with this skill. It's not true. This is something that can be acquired, provided you are persistent enough and interested in doing this. So small growing places, as I said earlier, can be very productive. We believe the other benefit is that your health is a priority. You have very good organic food that you can grow at home and therefore it becomes a priority. And another benefit that you will have in addition to this will be that it allows you to have much fresher food, much more nutritious and flavorful food than you have been used to perhaps when you are buying vegetables on the market. But the key issue obviously that we are talking about right now is to avoid any great disruption to the access that we have to vegetables in the near term. So given the lockdown, there are certain constraints that we face. We can't go out shopping and or use Amazon to order the perfect inputs in. We cannot get soil, perhaps potting soil to grow. Seeds may be difficult to access. Even things like manure and so on is very difficult to get at this point in time. And we have no clarity on when these will be available. So we believe that you can move ahead despite these constraints. But we often find that a lot of people just feel uncertain because they don't have the knowledge. So people will say that I don't have a green thumb. Somebody will say that I can't possibly grow everything I need to eat. So what's the point? Or that I've got very little space to grow. So does it even make sense? Or perhaps I can't find the time either because work from home is turning out to be much more complicated than we thought or because you'd rather read a book or something like that. So we are suggesting that let's set aside these excuses because there is a real danger of food security for us down the line. So let's not get into all scramble. What we suggest very strongly is that we start with a very simple task and that simple task that we are trying to achieve is that we are trying to make sure that we take the first step that we can take right now. So they are different growing stages. Typically we start with seeds and nurseries. Then we move on to soil preparation, transplanting or sowing and growing and caring. Harvesting is of course the stage that we are waiting for and we then get to plan the next cycle. So these are the typical stages in a garden and we are going to take you through these stages one by one over the next few weeks. Now to begin with you have to decide what you have available around the house. So most of our households have very few seedlings that we can kind of seeds available with us. So what we are going to try and figure out is how can you without leaving your house or not going without going very far from your house actually address most of these issues. Yeah, sorry give us a moment. We're having a problem with the microphone. Yogita, can you hear? Yeah. Yeah, okay. So the question is what do you have around the house? I'll pass on to Yogita so she can talk about that. Okay, so actually when we were experiencing this lockdown I got a lot of questions people saying that you know how do I get seeds? Where do we grow? We are stuck at home. We can't even access that. So not only me but a lot of people have realized that there's a lot of stuff actually in your kitchen cupboard itself that if you just rummage through or even look through your racks you'll find stuff that you can grow. I've made a little collection of things that would be easy for people to pick out from their homes. The easiest and almost every house has rye or mustard. These germinate very quickly they grow into greens and they can add a nicely fig green to your plate in a short amount of time. Similarly with methi, methi seeds again easily available with most people at their homes. Even coriander seeds. Coriander seeds are also another popular thing. Remember coriander seeds are their compound seeds you have to crush them so that they split into two and then you sow them. You can soak them in water for a little while and that's how they grow. You can also use things like chilies. Remember the red chilies are not the green ones because in the red chilies whether they are dried like this or red fresh like this you slip them you remove the seed and use. The green ones are not mature so if you use seeds from the green chili they will not work. You can plant something like a tomato all you need to do is cut a slice of it take another slice that has seeds in it you know place it in your pot or in wherever you're going to raise the nursery. Put the soil start watering and each of those seeds will germinate into plants. Another exciting thing I found is just planting onions. Onions can be expensive but if you like onions and you have some extra lying around you basically put them in and they grow the greens and the greens are useful you won't get more onions but you will get the greens that can be snipped and they'll come back again. Another thing that is nice to have around the house is pudina. It's bought from the market but if you strip the bottom leaves and just leave a few leaves on the top and you plant a bunch of these just put them in a cup of water they will sprout roots and then they can be transplanted in the pot you want to grow in or you could even just directly strip the leaves put it in the pot and it will grow from there. Another recent example I tried my aunt bought me some popcorn to make for my daughter and I thought that you know as it was getting over I said perhaps I can just put some seeds in and see what happened and it took about three months the plants grew I harvested popcorn and I dried it thoroughly and I got more popcorn I harvested about maybe 750 grams from a few plants so that's almost a kilo of popcorn some I will eat and some I will put back into the soil. There are actually you know if you just stop and look around you'll find a number of other things you can use potatoes that have grown eyes you can put those in you can put a lot of the lentils but they have a much longer cycle you can try pumpkin you know most pumpkins come with seeds inside you dry those you can grow more pumpkin plants you need to have a lot of space though to grow that papaya similarly a good tasting papaya dry the seed and so all in all there's a lot you can find in your kitchen. Once you have all this together it's important to remember that what Karan had mentioned there are stages and right now we'll focus just on setting up your nursery you gather your seeds you gather containers and the first step is basically we get started with the nursery so once I have a bunch of these seeds I'm going to go over to what containers can be used to grow the stuff in so most homes will have some you know take take out containers of different sizes you'll have perhaps an unused different box or something that is not required anymore these days whatever you know curds and things you buy you get containers of different sizes so all these can be used if you recently had a party at home you may have paper cups that are lying around so all these can be used to raise nurseries that is the first step and then once these plants are about three weeks or so old you will transplant them into pots which we will get to later and we'll talk about later but the first step is to grow the nurseries now remember one important thing these containers they must have holes at the bottom so that the water drains out with a paper cup it's easy you just take a ballpoint pen and prick it and you're ready to go but with these you need to just heat up a screwdriver poke about three to four holes so that the water drains very important another thing sometimes people do have old seeds lying in the house and they don't know what to do you can actually do a germination test in a paper towel just put 10 seeds in it moisten the towel roll it up stick it into a plastic bag and wait for about a week or so and just check every two three days to see how many of those have germinated it will give you a sense of whether the seeds are viable or not now I'll just quickly as an example show you what I would do with this chili over here the idea is that when you're sowing you break open this chili there's a bunch of seeds inside and obviously I don't need so many I am going to put like maybe eight five to eight seeds just literally sprinkle it on top and I have gone down and gotten some soil from my compound one of the big problems a lot of you might face who don't have soil at home is what do we do for soil so that's a hard one but just you know go down to your building or maybe you have an old pot that has some ornamentals growing in it get rid it's a good time to get rid of the ornamentals you use that soil let that be your starting point and there are ways that you can actually build good soil over time and we'll talk about that later and once you've put in your seeds literally with a handful more of soil just cover it up so that it's not visible and water it sprinkle it with light with with a light sprinkling of water and you're ready to go. So that's basically how you would plant a bunch of seeds different things to get started over to Karan. As Yogita has just said you know these are the case stages of actually putting together your kitchen garden and these nurseries become critical in the process because they allow you to get ahead start we are still a few days away from where we may be able to access pot soil and other things but in the meantime our nurseries can progress ahead up to the point we are ready to transplant right so ideally as Yogita said we propose we use these containers to grow the seedlings over the next 21 to 25 days and then we move on to having seedlings that we can actually transplant now please remember that if you look each of these pots has a lot of seedlings but eventually we will plant only one of these seedlings in each growing pot which is usually of a larger size quite often for most vegetables we tend to have 8 or 10 inch pots you know which we use to grow you would have noticed that there are a bunch of pots Yogita has sitting behind her on a counter and you know we have spinach there we have kale there we have some mustard greens and we have amaranth and all of these things are except for the amaranth are basically one plant growing in the pot yeah so what comes next now that you have got your seeds underway assuming you've gone found seeds and you have planted them in these little cups what you have to do next is wait you have tend to you have to tend to these plants carefully you have to make sure that they get sufficient light and you know wait for the point where they have about four to five leaves and are ready for transplant right so taking care of your nursery will occupy the next two or three weeks transplanting your seedlings will happen after that and we shall talk about it in a subsequent session you will need to work to get your soil right and make sure that it is ready for those young plants and can provide nutrition for them even as they grow and lastly of course you will be caring for the plants as they grow up to the point when they get to harvest right as you can see these plants can get very productive this is a bunch of pots that we have you know at our place which are providing us a lot of food at this point in time we have some Chinese cabbage we have some spinach in there and many other plants growing too now when we move ahead with this I just like you to keep in mind a few mistakes that we've seen a lot of new gardeners tend to make this is especially so in the nurseries right so people tend to sow their seeds too deep so what they will do is that they will put a whole fistful of seeds and dump it into the cup and everything will crowd together and you know sort of stifle the each other and so on right so you want to avoid doing this quite often if you have a small cup maybe just put two or three seedlings at the very most in it right if it's one of those paper cups Yogita was talking about then just one seed in each cup will do also the next thing is that you can't just keep the plants in the shade and expect them to grow most plants require sunlight in order to kick off their photosynthesis process and it's important that they therefore you know kind of get decent amounts of sunlight say three to four hours in the day at least right so if they get good light without too much heat that is an almost ideal situation for most seedlings overwatering of plants is another thing a lot of beginners tend to do so you have to be very careful that you avoid doing this if they are very young plants they can get battered down if your flow of water is too hard and you know the roots tend to rot if there's too much water too you can easily just touch your finger or push your finger a little below the level of the soil to check if there's moisture there's moisture don't water again and if it's dried out then you can water yeah you should have appropriate containers not too big and not too small in order to make sure that the plants have room to grow and have enough nutrients inside them and lastly you shouldn't grow too much of one thing this is a very common mistake that all of us make when we start growing that we will get all excited they have one thing work and then we've got only that one thing happening it's not too much fun to eat just the same thing every day and more importantly you tend to attract much more in terms of pests if you have a monoculture of sorts growing in your garden right so there are some garden hacks that I would say that you know you can incorporate once the plants are on their way I'm going to just ask Yogita to go ahead with and explain some of these you know fertility hacks if you can call them that current can I see the screen of the presentation so basically you know things like rice water when we washed rice all the water that we are draining off actually has quite a bit of nutrients and is useful for plants even anything that has been fermented good or great soil actually has a lot of microbes in it so we want to introduce microbes so things like curds whether they're gone sour or whatever you know just add a little water dilute it and put it distribute it amongst your pots if you make dosa batter at home that's an excellent you know fermented concoction once you scraped off everything then you can just you know again pour water and distribute it across your pots you know fish water for those of you who are non-veg that's amazing it really makes your leaves shine and it really goes a long way as far as nutrients go milk water if you've you know just finished milk from a vessel again just swirl the water around and pour it so these are actually all resources that we don't realize literally just we throw them down the drain it can be used to improve soil fertility eggshells tea leaves coffee grounds dried banana skin very high in magnesium eggshells would add calcium to your soil so all these actually that we tend to throw away can go back into your soil to enrich fertility and of course we can talk about this later at some point is that you need to start composting your waste your kitchen waste because therein lies a lot of nutrition and a lot of food for your plants coming straight out of your kitchen so and then some you know pest management strategies that you can employ when you're at home some of us who smoke will have cigarettes lying around just break open a couple of cigarettes in some water you spray that for you know to control different pests like aphids and things chili ginger garlic sprays sounds like the recipe but I mean I wouldn't like chili ginger garlic sprayed on me so imagine a little bug it sort of comments it and they leave and they go simple soap solutions they are also pretty effective and you know things like caterpillars just watch look at your plants and literally just pick and flick them and that's a great way to get rid of some kinds of insects on your plants so now that we've got a sense of what we need to do in the immediate future perhaps we could start you know as early as tomorrow we will also look a little further down the line and try to understand some of the things that you should start planning for or doing yogita mentioned composting your kitchen waste it just makes a lot of sense especially in a time when compost or you know cow dung or inputs like that are difficult to find the second thing I'd strongly suggest you do is actually see if you can use this time to collect in a bag perhaps dried leaves from your neighborhood maybe your compound or your street if you have the option to get out at least that far at some point in time these can be very useful for the growing purpose and we'll talk about it a little bit later and you know it's it's a much better thing to use without wasting rather than just burning leaves which is what ends up happening a lot of the time also creating pollution of course right so the reason that we are asking you to create these leaves is they can be used as mulch you basically will set up your pots once the plants are ready to transplant and you will want to protect the soil with mulch layer which is about two to three inches of these leaves so if you can look at the image over here you will see the soil is not visible it's completely protected from the from the sunlight and you know that keeps the soil better it retains moisture for a longer period of time and it also completely eliminates the need for weeding so unless you like to work three or four times as hard as you really want to be working it's just much simpler if you just do mulch in the garden right now quick summary to the session today the first thing that we are proposing is just get started now don't hold on and wait to see what happens because you know in a best-case scenario you will have more food which is better tasting and more nutritious along with what food you are able to get from the regular sauces the worst-case scenario it will hold you in good stead in case perishable vegetables become difficult to get in the days to come what you need to do is be patient yourself you need to allow your garden and your skills to evolve slowly as we proceed right this is something you're new at you're not expected to be a genius at it immediately just hold on and become now use what's available be innovative and or rather be resourceful in terms of looking around to see which things you can easily use yoghita has mentioned many things that we look at as waste you know which can act as nutrients for the plants and should be used in that way so so just try and accumulate these things and if they are easy to access go out and get them if they are you know in your house then even better persist with the growing you may have struggles at the beginning but we will try and address many of these questions or problems that you face in subsequent sessions for which we'll be doing in about a week from now next Thursday will be the next session right and remember we all make mistakes especially when we are gardening and yoghita and I between the two of us have probably killed more plants than everybody else on this you know webinar ever so we would have killed these plants of course over 13 years but don't mind if you lose a few plants it's it's not really the end of the world so speaking of the session next week what we want to have next week is a session on troubleshooting your nurseries so you would have started these nurseries and they would have hopefully germinated and you would then want to know how you can solve problems that may occur with them so we'll help with that and we'll also talk about getting your pots prepared and ready for transplanting so you need to find the right containers perhaps drill holes in them to make sure the drainage is proper you know fill them up with soil that you can find handy right and get them ready for growing and yes never forget cover them with mulch so as soon as you've put the soil in you have to cover it with mulch right this session will be on Thursday the 16th of April so you know do join us if you've found this particular session has got you started to register there's a link there to the has geek site same page that you went to to sign up for this session please go there and sign up for the session thank you so much we've finished pretty much the main section we'll have questions and answers after this if you want to write into us you can write to info at green essentials.in and you can also sign up for this software called Slack which will allow us to hear your questions and answers the url is friends.hasgeek.com so just go up there sign up and put up your questions and we should be able to answer many of your questions too right I think we'll just pause and take questions now so if some of you have sent your questions in there is one question in the chat actually how do you get rid of white insects on chili plants okay so usually it depends what the insect is but usually the white insects could be white flies or they could be aphids but check your humidity levels if your soil is too wet it'll attract these bugs so make sure you're not over watering make sure your plant is in a nice sunny spot and if you do have a lot of them just take a simple soap spray spray and with your fingers just get rid of them another way is to make a simple meadow solution it's sticky you spray it it sort of gets onto the wings of the white flies and it and they fall off as the meadow dries so that's a simple way to tackle it we have one more question it's my strawberry plants produced flowers but never converted into fruits you know why that happens okay so I'll answer that question now what typically the question is at what point they produce flowers right so you may have a situation in which your strawberry plants have produced flowers a little later because when the weather has turned hot and that will have some impact on the amount of fruit that you will produce one interesting to think to note about strawberry plants is if you feed them too well then they produce a lot of leaf and not so much in terms of flowers itself right the second thing that could sort of reduce the amount of fruiting that you have with strawberry maybe the soil nutrition at the later stages also so what we do is we frequently add liquid nutrients I guess in the lockdown it would be plants like sorry it would be nutrients like fish manure and so on liquid fish manure that you could put in we tend to use when things are normal we tend to use something called pranchagavya or jivamrut and tend to spray the plants with these so the next questions what is the right time to harvest beetroot okay so good question the first thing what is the right time to grow beetroots now beetroot is a winter crop so if you if you don't have cool weather you will not have you will have a lot of leaves but you will not have a lot of root form right so typically beetroot will take about two and a half to three months in order to form its root and the best way to kind of figure it out is to poke your fingers right at the base with of the leaves and feel how big the root is without actually pulling it out so with radish beetroot and even carrots that's what we tend to do in order to get a sense of size that's when we would harvest the beet when it's of a reasonable size can I add something yeah okay so the other thing is a lot of the root vegetables they tend to jump out of the soil or pop out of the soil so as a regular thing when you are growing just make sure you mound around the base of the plant so whatever it is whether it's an onion whether it's a radish or it's a beetroot it's not exposed if it's exposed it tends to get over mature very fast it'll become fibrous and it won't be fun so just make sure you mound the soil around it and just the leaves are visible and not the root itself uh the next questions my building has garden will that be from seaman bawa okay so basically I am assuming that there is a patch of of soil that that is available within the complex itself can you grow there certainly you can grow there you can grow in the ground you can grow in pots personally quite often we find especially for people new to it it's a little easier to do it in pots because the soil is sort of isolated from the rest of you know of the garden but at the same time growing in a garden is equally you know sort of productive you can have get very good results there and you know most of our growing has been in gardens since we have the luxury a lot of space in goa relative to what is available in a city say like bank law I'll add one more thing just make sure that you have enough sunlight there if it's under the shade of a tree and it's a dense shaded densely shaded area you'll have a hard time growing many of the vegetables sunlight is important like a minimum of four hours of sunlight is is is good to have we have a few more questions in chat how to sorry could you just repeat that please how do you treat leaf curl on chili and bell pepper plants these are existing gardeners these are not new gardeners but okay you want to take that yeah leaf curl is actually a fungal problem and you know conditions that promote fungal problems are if there is continues or too much dampness in the soil so I think one of the problems a lot of gardeners face is unintentionally is that they do tend to over water water when the soil looks dry don't just water every day because it's something you think that needs to be done now that's a preventive thing having said that you've supposed done some of the preventive things adding good microbes to the soil so that the soil builds its ability to you know deal with the bad microbes that are there would help so you could add regularly a little bit of sour curd you can add milk when when available if you can buy panchagavya from the market that usually helps also maybe adding a little bit of baking soda to your soil will make your soil a little more alkaline assuming your soil is not alkaline if you're on the coast of India your soil tends to be more acidic and that sort of is preferred by by micro so if you add a little bit of baking soda it makes the soil more neutral and reduces the incidence of fungal issues but try to do more of the preventive stuff so you don't end up with the problem assuming you have leaf curl just populate your soil with good microbes given the restrictions that should help so just adding to what yoghita said you know prevention is really the keyword one of the things that we have to realize that is different between an organic system of growing something we suggest because I mean that's what we've been doing for a long period of time and had good results with is that in a curative system like if you look at most chemical growing systems they emphasize the cure to a great extent that's what's really led to the proliferation of pesticides and so on right so in an organic system you try and implement different kinds of very preventive measures and and these kind of ensure that your plants have an environment in which they can flourish so that's really the goal when you're looking at it you don't try to take too much curative action really okay next question what are the best vegetables to grow this season okay okay so yogi you want to take that okay so obviously the coming months are going to be pretty warm so the categories of vegetables usually are all the beans you have the long beans locally they're called iril virvir basically they're the yard long beans they're available in two colors over here the seeds are around I know the green one the red one you can grow french bean also will grow you can grow cluster beans chitki mitki goar so these are the beans you can grow all kinds of gourds you can grow bitter gourd you can grow karela sorry bitter gourd is karela sponge gourd kumpan du di the bottle gourd you can grow cucumbers you can grow sponge gourd I said um what is rich gourd I guess rich gourd that's the other one you can grow so the beans the gourds um and then you can grow tomatoes actually tomatoes if you're in goa by the time you hit flowering and fruiting the rains will come so don't bother with tomatoes but you can grow brinjals you can grow chilies you can grow corn corn can grow 12 months of the year in goa you can um lady finger I guess we would ask that's a that's an important one and some of these will actually see you right through the rains if you plant now and your brinjal gets productive by the time the rains come you will have you know production right through the rain so these are some of the things you can start out with right now okay next question um last year in April my berries and guava gave a lot of fruits but for the past six months it's not been fruiting what might be the reason these are berries in berries in guava is what Sneha Shah has mentioned um nothing specific okay guava uh what kind of berries um maybe I'll just I'll just clarify that and something not a problem maybe we'll just another one yeah yeah um the next question how do you understand what better would support which crop okay so good question uh let's try and kind of understand the three seasons a little better right some of this is stuff that we sort of know but it's at the periphery I think of our knowledge or rather our memory and therefore we tend to get confused about it the fact that you get all vegetables at all the times of the year and the supermarket doesn't help right it makes it confusing the first thing what requires cold weather so those are things that you would only grew in the winter there's a family that we call crucifers this is cauliflower cabbage broccoli things like that right now these require cold water in order to form uh sorry cold weather in order to form a head okay uh these wouldn't grow in summer and very unlikely to grow in the monsoons too especially in a place like goa in a place like bangalore where you have now I know warmer summers but still more moderate weather you could extend the season like you could have cabbages all the way up till march perhaps whereas in goa after february you're very like unlikely to have that now the second family of things that only grow in winter are the root vegetables so if anything is growing under the ground it more or less requires cold weather to grow sweeter and it requires cold weather to grow larger right so you may have you may grow in a coastal place like you know you may go outside Chennai and say that I want to grow carrots you're going to have very small carrots unless the weather gets unusually cold whereas if you're in a cooler place a cool or you know someplace moon hour and so on you would see that you get a lot more carrots over there so this is this is the second category of thing that you know grows best in that weather so if you consider the winter the reason I mentioned it first is more or less the widest category of edible food that we are used to eating grows actually in winter so every other category of food except you may have sometimes trouble with lady finger sometimes tends to grow well in the winter season when you can come to summer all the crucifers they go away all the root vegetables go away and you need semi shade even to grow many leafy vegetables so especially if they are from the mustard family so just to give you an example of leafy vegetables which are from the mustard family it may be something like pak choy you know that's an asian green it may be something like mustard greens which you know we eat in different parts different types in different parts of the year you of course won't be able to grow things like lettuce lettuce especially likes only cool climates and and therefore is best grown in when the temperatures are sort of somewhere near 20 degrees or so you will also find that other leafy vegetables that tend to get aphids as it gets warmer so this is the mustard family of leafy vegetables so those should be grown if they are to a smaller extent and they should be grown in semi shaded environments in the monsoon one of the things that is most difficult to grow you can also grow tomatoes all fruiting vegetables do well in the summer so the gourds the tomatoes and even the beans they tend to do very well in these you know in the summer season in the monsoon season your challenge will be to grow if you have a if you're in a place with heavy rains like the coast of India typically sort of experiences then a lot of the leafy leaf vegetables get pounded too much and the leaves you know get damaged so it's not a lot of fun to grow them but in theory you know if you're in a balcony they can be grown that's not a problem right one thing that really becomes difficult to grow or rather a couple of things that get really become difficult to grow in the monsoon are number one tomatoes extremely difficult I mean you're just almost 80% likely to fail because it'll catch some kind of fungal disease which tomato in particular is more susceptible to you will also have struggled to grow things like certain Mediterranean herbs you know rosemary thyme so on and so forth they don't like too much humidity either and don't like too much water either so that's just you know a snapshot what we can do is that we will share with you you know in a follow-up mail maybe tomorrow or day after you know a few sort of seasonal planting charts which make it easier to figure out what can grow when chats are relevant to the course film yes yes but we can adapt them okay next question how do you know when root vegetables like ginger and turmeric are ready for harvest okay so um ginger is also turmeric they are usually six month crops um turmeric also can be longer a year or so but to check for any of these you will probably plant them either in a pot and you could start by you know filling a pot like this with soil all the way there and you take a few of the the the fingers of ginger just put maybe two or three in the plant will grow it'll take a minimum of six months so the plant will grow it'll produce a lot of leaves and towards the end of those six months you'll find that the leaves are automatically wilting so that sort of is the point where the the the rhizomes have multiplied they've gone to um like the size they will and the plant above the ground will will you can remove the the roots you can harvest take what you want and leave a few back refresh the soil put a few more back and then that can be your next crop so to know when it's ready again with most root vegetables just dig your finger inside move a bit of the soil and you'll see that oh that's a really big root or that's a small one so that's that's the way to check but by and large six months is the minimum as with garlic also um Varun asks about uh the problem of having folded leaves in lemon plants um and a white powdery substance on the leaves uh how do you get rid of it can you say that again please uh a white powdery substance on the on the leaves and folded leaves on lemon bones how do you get rid of that again looks fun yeah it looks like it's fungal if it's really dense the lemon plant the first thing would be to prune it off create good air circulation that would help um don't water the leaves constantly i think that's another thing people often end up doing is when they're watering a plant they'll drench it from head to toe um someone put it really well once they said when you're thirsty you don't jump into a swimming pool to drink you just have a glass of water so just give the the soil the water you know drench the soil well but don't keep wetting the the entire plant you will just cause more fungal problems india is a humid country in general so you know try not to soap the whole plant all the time uh leaf curling could be there are different insects that just you know roll leaves and they lay their eggs inside um if it's not a very big plant find those leaves pluck it and just get rid of it so that you're probably getting rid of their home and hopefully the babies that will come thereafter um but again fungal problems means check humidity levels make sure it's sunny enough there's good ventilation air circulation even within the plant not just outside so if it's too dense prune it and create more air going through that should help okay uh here's a question from amdika abhame um i live in a society where i have access to a small patch in the common area garden it has a small slope uh i have planted a row of brinjal slap saplings at the top a row of chilies and a row of tomatoes at the bottom of the slope is this arrangement okay where should i place potatoes next okay so um if i was i would probably put the tomatoes at the top because they require the least amount of water i would also put the potatoes further up because in general root vegetables don't like to have a lot of water either see if you're growing on a slope most of your water and moisture is going to slide down to the bottom and that's really what you're trying to design for right so so i would say if i was to grow them these two would be at the top and the chilies would come further down from there the brinjals which don't mind a lot chilies and brinjals actually they handle quite a bit of water without getting into problems they thrive in the monsoons for example in a coastal place also and therefore should they should be completely fine in that situation uh you have to make sure however that i mean just just going off each of those different crops requires good some good amounts of sunlight and therefore you need to make sure that it's not as if that the lower part of the slope is very shaded and so on and so forth after the cucumber plant starts flowering uh what are the tips to help it through I see in most situations you really don't have to do anything further right simply because if you reach the point of flowering it is going to proceed into fruiting thereafter one of the things that can happen is that you have falling of flowers happening at that point in time right so you have flowers form and you know they fall and therefore you don't end up having fruit and usually you know flowers that are falling means a lack of potash right so you have to make sure that your soil is rich in potash I think yoghita gave an example other than even magnesium I think even banana leaves would help a lot in terms of bringing that to your soil um and that that's a good additive to put in over there in addition to this I would say that you you you can have a second kind of problem at this point which is that in cucumber what you typically see first what is more apparent is the male flower but the male flower is not going to turn into a fruit right you will see certain other flowers which kind of have a bump behind them so you have the flower and just behind you know where the stem kind of forms there's a little bit of a bump that forms and that is the female flower which is going to become the fruit right so you want to make sure that you maybe if they are touching the ground and if if water is you know kind of following on them you want to make sure that they are kind of raised off the ground a little bit and so that the fruits grow on to stay but by and large you shouldn't have problems unless your soil is acidic or something like that and you end up with only male flowers and not a lot of female flowers okay next question from Kora Bhagya how do you grow watermelon on a terrace garden Yogi you want to take that yeah watermelon melon pumpkins ash gourd these are from the gourd family they are huge ramblers and they require a lot of place to move like to run just grow what you could do is if you can create like if you have maybe two pots large pots if you have I don't know say like an 18 inch or a 20 inch pot you can keep them maybe 10 feet apart and you use bamboo to create a trellis so that you connect the two pots like if you have two pots like this the same size you'll put maybe two sticks here you'll put two sticks here and you'll create a frame like a trellis and you let the plant sort of twine on that so it's above the ground when the fruit comes it's a really heavy fruit you get these net net bags that you know when you buy a basketball you you often get the basketball in that net bag so when a fruit is formed you sort of put it into the net bag and you tie the net bag to the scaffolding that you've created so that the weight is distributed normally these plants are really strong you can have like a seven eight kilo ash god hanging from a vine and the vine does not break but this is just to give it additional support you can you know sort of put it into the basket tie it up and it'll help the fruit stay on so you have to just you know innovatively think of different kinds of trellises that you can utilize on your terrace to give it space to run and you can go watermelon on the terrace i know my uncle in Bombay he grows them in pots he lets the the the vines just ramble and when the fruit is formed he puts it in the pot that's closest to it so he's i think just he couldn't be bothered to make the trellises and all that he just lets the wine go wherever it's going and when the fruit is there he'll just like if that's a pot he'll just lift the fruit and put it there and then it's growing in some other it could be like a lemon plant or whatever but the the fruit is sitting in that pot and it's growing and that's also fine so just think creatively it's possible and just to add to that i mean in case you don't have a terrace but you have say a balcony you know a lot of balconies especially in cities end up having those i don't know whether to say lovely or ugly box grills you know those those metal grills that are made for safety so quite often what you can do is you can get the plant to actually grow on those because you don't have a lot of space for them to ramble so you let them climb up and they'll be fine use the same bags like Yogita was suggesting the net bags in order to hold the fruit so that it doesn't fall or get damaged we have a question from Varun i'm just going to allow them to talk on chat hi Varun Varun are you able to hear me could you check if your mic's on i guess he's muted and we're not able to unmute him for some reason okay we can move to that next later this is a question from Ketan he asks is if sunlight is available from a transparent roof sheet is it enough to grow oh yes transparent roof sheets are actually wonderful especially if especially if you're sort of staying in a place where there is a lot of rain now for a place example where you know we get about three meters of rain every year if we didn't have transparent roof sheets we wouldn't be able to raise our nurseries our nurseries for example has a transparent roof have a transparent roof and that provides protection from the rain and also sufficient light for things to grow well so yes it can work well if you are really finding that things are very warm and sunny you may want to cover that transparent roof sheet with a little bit of that green shade net which most of us would have seen right it's used on farms in order to eliminate at least sometimes it's 50 percent of the sunlight it could be a higher grade also but that's typically in the summer rest of the year it's perfect for growing we have a question from Devaki she has how do you get red or red weaver hands in the garden specifically like on quad trees okay so you basically need to find their nest and they keep making these nests again and again you'll find that these red weaver ants they'll take leaves and they'll sort of glue them together and they'll have their nests inside and if it's a really tall tree and you can't get to them then that may be a problem but if the tree is shorter the only way to do it is to cut the nest off and discard it another way sometimes what people do is they either hang like an animal's bone from the tree and the ants tend to get attracted to it and then they sort of cut the bone drop it to the ground and they set the thing on fire with it's fairly violent and a drastic way to do it but if you've ever climbed a tree trying to get mangoes and these are big trees and you've been attacked by black fire the red fire ants you could get angry enough to want to do that to them but the best way is just you know find where their nest is because anything you spray it'll deter them for a little while they will disperse and whether it's cow urine or whether it is a chili garlic ginger spray or whatever it is that you use it will distract them or disturb their path for a little while but they will come back so you have to get to their nest and remove the nest from where it is that's that's the way we found that works so you will see I mean just to add to what Yogita said again and coming back to that principle of prevention being better than cure how we handle a lot of bests is that we try to basically make them uncomfortable in our garden ideally I mean well I'm not sure whether ideally is the right word you want them to go to your neighbor's garden so you don't have to deal with them right so essentially if you discomfort them by either moving their nest or creating an unpleasant set of circumstances that they don't like these bests will kind of move away and that's exactly what you want okay she has another question regarding planting different vegetables in a single pot could you suggest some combinations that can work okay so this is a controversial topic I think everybody I mean if they just did a simple Google search and they would find a hundred different sort of companion planting combinations that people sort of promote right we haven't found that we are particularly hard and fast about these things we worry more about you know how we can put together things that work in complementary ways when related to I mean in the way that they use light so just to take an example we wouldn't grow two types of root vegetables together if we are growing a root vegetable then we would you know have rows between the root vegetable I mean for example if you had a row of radish then you may want to have a row in between that is a taller plant because the radish gets very you know very it has very thick foliage once it grows out right so in that way the radish which is a fast grower gets all the sunlight it needs and this taller plant taken just to take an example perhaps a brinjal can get the sunlight it needs because it's towering over the radish and so on and so forth so I I don't think that there are any clear you know formulae that we would use in order to say always plant this with this but for example other combinations that work are you can have basil and tomatoes now the strong smell of the basil tends to make sure that less insects tends to cause less interest insects to come around for the tomatoes also right there are other examples that you can do cabbage for example with spinach and that would work pretty well also so I wouldn't say that we have very hard and fast kind of suggestions about what you put with what I think that you just try to make sure that you don't put too many of the same family together so it is I mean radish for example is a mustard so I would not be very eager to put radish along with mustard greens just to take an example just to add to that one of the things you should consider is that put plants that have similar water requirements together so what I mean by that is that if leafy vegetables like a lot of water then don't put them particularly together with tomatoes that don't like too much water they are okay with having a little less water or I once planted lettuce and onions together and the and you know after four months when I harvested the onions the the right way to harvest onions once they are done is you just stop watering and you let the leaves dry up completely on top and what that does is it you know sends all the juices down into the bulb and so that you have really nice juicy bulb but if you harvest while it's still you know being watered and the leaves are fresh then that juice does not sort of go back into the the bulb itself so if I had planted lettuce together with onions and they did fine as long as you know it was getting water but then when the time came to harvest the onions I could not stop watering the bed because there was still lettuce is there so that sort of that kind of planning if you have then it then I think many combinations of things will work so similar water requirements and if it's a pot then similar sunlight requirement so that if something needs a little less sunlight you can move all of them in the shade and you know one of them won't suffer on account of that movement so I suppose those two things should be considered. Here's a question from Amitabh. We've planted zucchini it's flowering but it has leaf mine. So it depends on the extent of the problem so what typically happens is we've noticed that in cities you know we have higher incidences of leaf miner simply because you know there is there are not many places that this insect has to go and lay its eggs so let me explain what the leaf miner does basically when the leaf is young an egg has been laid by the insect in the leaf and then this when it's born the lava kind of comes out and it moves laterally to find the edge of the leaf and exit right so wherever it goes burrowing through looking for the edge of the leaf that's where you see this white line that that happens now if it is very light like it's it's it's only bothering about 10 percent of the leaves I really wouldn't worry about it but if it's gotten to the extent where it's more than that like it's 25 30 percent of the leaves then one of the things that you can do is that you can you know sort of make in order to prevent that what you can do is to sprinkle wood ash on the leaves okay so wood ashes basically if you've seen the woody stems of bushes you gather a few of these woody stems little sticks and so on you burn them and that ash can be sprinkled on the leaves itself what this does is it makes it unpleasant for the you know for the insect that is the parent insect and therefore it will not you know sort of lay its eggs in such an environment right now if you already have that the best thing to do is to actually cut off the badly affected leaves before it the damage goes too far and just you know go and drop it into the compost pile or something like that so that it's faster far away from the garden okay I'll just add one more thing to it like a five percent neem spray would also help in water neem doesn't obviously dilute neem oil will not be diluted in water will not mix in water so either add a little bit of soap or a teaspoon of alcohol it will then dissolve so one teaspoon or five ml in one liter of water with a little bit of soap or alcohol and you can spray that also cut like he said cut and remove and throw the leaves the worst infected ones the worst infected ones and one of the main things to remember like we could endlessly answer questions about what happens if you have this and what happens if we have that and how do you deal with that pest and that disease the bottom line is that you have to have great soil if you have great healthy soil you will have great healthy plants that will be resilient that will have the ability to fight attacks from pests and from different kinds of diseases that may come its way so what a lot of the things we are telling you is like actually who are to do this who are to do this and that's okay in the short term but in the long term as a gardener your main job is just to look after and to build and to maintain great soil you're like the custodian of great soil that's all if you do that you have done 75% of your job so so you have healthy in order to have healthy plants focus on building and maintaining good soil that is really your primary job as a gardener. Okay here's a question from Komal he says he has a mint plant which has fungus growing on the soil he wants to know if it's over watered or he also asks if it's better to water the plant in the night. Okay so it's Yogita's favorite plant it is the reason she started gardening in the first place absolutely I think it's a letter answer this much. No so fungus on the soil may not always be bad I don't know what it looks like is the plant looking unhealthy or is the plant still healthy so if the plant is healthy and there's fungus on the soil we want to have good fungus in the soil so I don't know what kind of fungus it is but if your plant is looking healthy don't know anything about it just make sure you're not over watering if you mean if there is the green algae kind of stuff on the soil then that means you are over watering all your the drainage from your container isn't good enough so the water is not coming out and so with you know clay soil it's holding water too long and you are watering too frequently so there's this green algae thing that's forming so that is a problem about whether you should water at night it is a good idea to water after the sun is gone simply because once you water that water stays in the soil much longer like if you water in the evening at around six or so you'll have the water stay in the soil all the way till about 10 11 o'clock when the sun really picks up and starts evaporating but if you water in the morning say at six o'clock in the morning or seven o'clock in the morning by the time the sun is up in four hours your soil will already start drying so if you water in the evening you will find that water stays longer and is available for plant processes for a longer period of time so yeah it's a good idea to water in the next question is from Sarita are there any leafy vegetables like spinach or amaranth that can be grown in summer both can be grown in summer so I mean if you just see I mean in the image behind yoghita for example she's got spinach on the left and she's got amaranth on the right and these pots have been you know out in the open at this time of the year right both growing fairly well I would suggest however if possible try and ensure that you you know kind of have a little bit of a semi shaded section as it gets so you know dappled shade from trees could perhaps be the best place to put it or at least a space where for a certain time there is good light but not direct sunlight don't grow it in a dark corner but in a semi shaded corner what's there you don't get the hottest part of the sunlight maybe between 12 and 4 or 12 and 3 that's really the the warmest time of the day there's a lot of questions coming from gardeners in Mumbai asking if the uncertain weather in Mumbai actually creates a problem for growing plants and what are the best plants to grow there? I'm okay so uncertain weather I think this year has been a little strange ever since before the monsoon on this coast on the west coast the monsoon was a little early in coming and a little late going the cool weather came only in January perhaps after the 10th of Jan and surprisingly I think it's still cool in the mornings in you know in Goa and therefore I'm I'm sure in Bombay also so I would say that this has been a stranger and it can be a little confusing but for the most part I think what needs to be grown in different seasons is pretty much similar whether you are there in Bombay or in any other coastal city on the west coast even to some extent on the east coast right because you have similar conditions of humidity and heat to deal with so no no no particularly you know different things that we would suggest to grow as Yogita said at this time of the year gods will do well this is in the summer and heading into the monsoon brinjals will do well you know chilies will do well ladyfinger will do well beans will do well these are the families from which I would choose in terms of the leafy greens the greens which have a little bit thicker leaves tend to do a little bit better whereas the ones that you know have extremely thin leaves don't you know enjoy it as much okay we have a question from Sneha Shah I'm going to allow her to ask sure Sneha can you hear us sorry that wasn't very clear in her audience not working maybe come back to her later yeah I think we'll do that I think she had the question about the babies and the guava yeah I think so why did you producing well see uh fruiting trees produce when they are fed well and they are able to store food to make flowers to make fruit so one of the things is that you need to make sure that he is uh my question was uh my um the very plants are not fruiting the one which wasn't it is fruiting yeah so what I understood of your question is that the the trees in the pots are fruiting and the ones in the ground aren't if that's your question it could be many reasons but just you know check and see if you are fertilizing them equally sometimes we just take it for granted that ha jameen may it will figure out it's khanapina it's not like that they need to be fed as well and guavas particularly actually they can be fruiting pretty much throughout the year um you know with each at least or at least three times a year you can get a crop with guava and with chikus so just you know make sure that your soil is well fed that's that's what I can figure out from your problem and sunlight and sunlight sufficient sunlight yes um okay uh here's the next question from devaki my amaran plant is growing very tall though I get uh good large leaves it's potted in a potting tray but I see your amaran plant is nice and bushy how do I get such bushy amaran harvest so actually that is many plants in that one pot and um I usually like the amaranth tender so I tend to cluster and plant them together I keep snipping the plants harvesting them and then they grow back but I think um uh one of the ways which we also sometimes do is literally put like one plant in a tenon size pot like this it'll grow nice and big and the thing is every time you harvest every time you cut it it forces the plant to branch and that's true for many leafy vegetables um also true for herbs like basil so I don't know how frequently you're harvesting it but if you don't frequently harvest it'll grow tall and they'll just have one main stem but if you cut it at the top then it'll branch from there and then each time you snip the other plant uh the other side branches it'll you know grow bushy from there and that's one way to sort of get it to be really um nice and bushy but in there there must be I don't know at least about 35 40 plants but I like the leaves nice and tender so that's why I just plant it um very densely so as Yogeta said it depends how you like to eat amaranth and that's different for different people uh some of them who like to cook it like are okay with the little older leaves and some who want to have the leaves virtually raw or very lightly cooked maybe want younger leaves like Yogeta has kind of grown over here uh so the next question is from our tunnel what soil can be used in the in a nursery that is for sprouting seeds and is sprouting in eggshells a good idea okay so in terms of nurseries first is what you would do if in ideal circumstances but if you see many of the things we mentioned during the early part of this session um you know we've talked about these because we are in an unusual set of circumstances and in an ideal world how we raise seedlings in our nursery is we use a mix of about 50 percent vermicompost and 50 percent cocoa soil uh cocoa soil or cocoa peat is something which is it's like the dust from coconut husk right and it's great because it's it's fairly sterile number one so you don't need to use any mud or dirt in order to you know have your medium it's it's rich in organic matter so it actually soaks up moisture and holds it there and keeps it available for the young seedlings right it's like a child having six weeds in a day something like that you know so easy availability of water whenever the little plant needs it the second part of it which is where the nutrients come from is you know vermicompost again we use vermicompost and not cow dung or compost because since the since since it's basically been digested by the enzymes of earthworms you end up with no issues related to seeds leftover or pathogens and other things like that and and these you know make it easier to grow also um i think you could also i mean if you're short of compost at this point in time you might try 70% cocoa soil and 30% compost vermicompost and that would be all okay also right however given the circumstances we have now i would say that you know you pretty much use whatever you have so if you can take up a lot of uh you know soil scrape up some soil and this is a beautiful part about doing nurseries you don't need to have a lot of soil to start a nursery so if you went and scraped up some soil from the neighborhood from the garden and you mixed in you know a little bit of nutrients in it you you can go a pretty long way you will have good seedlings no problems and then maybe when inputs are available you can shift to using cocoa soil and compost so i just reiterate that it is okay to start with whatever you have right now you have another two to three weeks to transplant these plants so you have time to figure out your soil to improve whatever soil you've got to maybe you know uh if things open up to lay your hands on compost where you can start composting at home and you can get compost in um it takes at least about i would say two to three months but whatever you do have time to get your soil started and we'll talk about ways in which we can do that in the next session but you know just start your seedlings don't worry about what am i going to do for soil and i need so much of it you have two three weeks to plan for that so do get going okay uh i think this is the question that varun wanted to ask he's asked it like about two three times um he has a patch of land which has no direct sunlight uh he asked that you can start growing vegetables and what kind of vegetables can you grow so there are limitations uh to what you can grow in shady places uh there are a set of shade tolerant plants but most vegetables uh again i'm not sure what how dense its shade is you know if it's a very dense shade then vegetables are very unlikely but there are other things that are food that you can grow for example from an earlier question if you were growing ginger or you were going haldi those are things that you can grow in the shade uh we've sorry black pepper oh yeah black pepper is another example pineapples tapioca yam or suran you know so colocasia these are different things that you can grow um in the shade itself and and they will be fine uh i think what you may end up having to do is just look for places where there are little pockets of light even amongst the shaded space and that's where you will be able to try leafy vegetables they are more likely to do fine even when the light levels are a little lower but fruiting vegetables and fruit trees they'll acquire you know a lot of sunlight at least four hours of sunlight five hours of sunlight in order to be productive so tomatoes and all wouldn't really work they bring all chilies and so on not so well yeah um amita asks what panchagabia is and if it's a manure of some kind yeah so panchagabia is actually made from it's a it's a microbial concoction that is made by fermenting together five products that you get from the cow so they put in milk they put in dahi they put in ghee they put in cow dung and cow urine and to supercharge that they will put in um jaggery and a little bit of besan and uh you know override bananas and you know just food for the microbes and they put in they inoculated with a handful of soil from a nice dark corner of your garden or anyone's garden that's got probably a lot of microbes in it and they let it ferment for about three weeks and in that period the microbes just multiply and you'll have the microbes uh so amongst others there is lactobacillus which is found in milk and these are actually very good for your soil so it becomes a liquid fertilizer you don't use it directly once it's made and the recipes are available very easily online you just do a search for panchagabia you'll get all the proportions and how to make it um you dilute it in a 30 solution and uh you can oh sorry a three percent solution and you spray it on your plants you can use it as a foliar spray or you can water the soil the roots with it and if you do it for a lot of these annual plants once in every 15 days or even once a month it adds a good um those of uh it adds a kick to your soil it gives the the plant some tonic that they need as they do i'd like to add that uh you know the recipe is easy to find but finding the cow dung and cow urine in most city cities may take a bit of work okay so first depends on the season so ladyfinger probably grows fastest in the summer you know it loves the heat and you can have them in as little as two two months i think sometimes even six to eight weeks you you know have ladyfinger happening um brinjals a little more than two months i would say at least two months going closer to two and a half three right two and a half months is what i would say would be the average time for brinjals they handle the heat fine they handle the monsoon fine and they are okay since our cold is not very you know very harsh they are okay in cool weather also just to add to that um it's a bit of a tricky thing when to harvest the bindi and i've gotten it wrong a lot in the beginning but you know you you see the bindi it'll be that small and then it'll be that small and then suddenly you say that oh this has become too fibrous and i can't harvest or i can harvest it but it'll not be fun to you so it'll take a little bit of getting to know it the the typical test even when we go to buy bindi is that when you snap the tip it it breaks with a nice crisp sound rather than if it just like you know falls over and it doesn't break away then it is over right it becomes fibrous and you can't eat it and similarly with brinjal they're going they're going they're going and you don't know and suddenly they're just too seedy inside and you can't eat them so um with brinjals you know just see as they are growing the point where you find that they are growing no more in size and don't let that period last too long like the minute you see it's getting bigger and bigger and now it's sort of stabilized also know the variety you're growing some are long some are small and round some are large the bharta type so know the variety that you're growing and then you will have a sense that yeah it's okay i can take it out and with bindi you will get the first few wrong either it'll be too early and you'll say oh if i'd waited it could have become much longer and that would have been better or it would be too late so get a few of them wrong and you will figure out how this is the the time when i need to optimally harvest it the other one that's tricky is corn the first few times you always end up doing the corn in a way where you this the seed the the kind of pieces haven't formed yet so that's one common one to get wrong we have a question on composting at home um given the current constraints what is the best way to compost at home and will it smell or should be kept on the terrace so composting smells only when it goes wrong and there's a chance that you will get it wrong until you get the hang of it if the initial bits you know people tend to make mistakes uh given the current circumstances you i mean if you can i mean like you could try something like three paint buckets example and you could use those to compost it may be the easiest thing to sort of find at this point in time a couple of principles that you know you need to keep in mind for most basic home composting first of all a lot of people ask us whether they need to have worms compost and you don't really need worms i i don't think you want to take the effort to raise worms in order to do your composting the simple you know decom aerobic this decomposition is good enough um what you what you have to watch out for is basically two things number one is there two the right amount of water in your compost right so typically your vegetables as they decompose they release a lot of water and that means that the compost while gets too wet this eliminates the air from the compost pile and that's what creates the smell it's also what creates the perfect environment for maggots maggots to breed so people will see worms coming out of their compost and get completely freaked out so what you need to do is to add in dry matter it could be you know if you can get some dry leaves or soda or cocoa soil or in this in this situation if i was really hard up i would even take studied newspaper even though that has small amounts of inks in it and soak up all the excess moisture so that the composting process proceeds properly and so that you don't have problems of smell and maggots right the second thing is to make sure that your pile is turned over regularly that is that you are introducing air into the pile so this is the other thing people will do they'll keep on piling stuff in and the bottom parts you know are really not getting any air so you just want to use a couple of sticks or if you have maybe you know like a couple of garden tools that hand tools those can be used to oh yeah that for yeah or the bigger one that belongs in the garden and you can basically uh you know use these to turn the bottom up and so on yeah so if you turn the pile over and make sure there is air introduced air can be produced just twice in a week in terms of the dry matter it should be put in as you are putting in the waste itself if you're putting in like a mug full of kitchen waste then put in a mug full of dry matter to soak up that excess moisture i think you're done with questions but before we end this i had someone who has been making vegetables in his backyard for the past six months reached out to me today so i thought i'll let him talk share his experiences for five minutes and then you can end so this is to essentially bring out everyone in the community uh essentially share their experiences sure that would be amazing that's amitesh and his five they grow it together amitesh you're on you can unmute yourself hello hi you can hear me yeah hi my name is tanishka and it was like a very very good presentation here and it's like so i feel so happy to listen to so many people who have been like growing veggies and for us it has been a very new experience actually so we shifted to this place and we have a huge backyard it's like 2000 square feet of the space that we have uh am i am i audible yes yeah yeah so uh so we have like this huge space and we started experimenting with like growing veggies and just to just to like set a little give a give a little background so i'm just like you guys or all of you guys i was like completely no vice before before this these six months and i've never like uh except from my school projects where i grew like the rajma plant for the science project i had never grown anything by myself so it was very new experience but uh my parents had visited me here and we started growing we started like very small we we started with the coriander seeds and then later on um we we saw we've shown some like the winter veggies spinach methi um and soya then then we took the next step we grew garlic so it's like uh almost ready for the harvest if i can like switch on my video then i could have shown you guys the garden i've given you guys the garden tour but i guess if it's possible then we can do that the video i don't know i don't think we can do that now but in one of the next sessions we'll certainly try to answer okay yeah so so that's a little story and um when i started doing that then we again like lot of confidence that we can um um we can take this little further than we started growing lot of tomatoes and now the garden is full of tomatoes brinjal uh we have already shown the summer veggies which is like all the garden family cucumber kakdi um and bindi uh we also have like a huge tangerine tree and we have started uh growing fruits as well so leechi uh pomegranate santra uh sorry uh we stay in anoida okay okay it's like it's like in the center of study but we are privileged or lucky that way because we got the space and i think we will consider ours is lucky that in the center of the city we have uh got this huge space to grow all these veggies so that's that's a that's truly a blessing actually and also your parents are the best kind of bad influence i can see since they've got you started on this no no that's a good influence actually so my father he has a farming background uh my i have like farming roots but i i was never into farming myself so he has a lot of experience and uh he he loves doing that he even now also he he does that um even when he's retired uh he kind of keeps on doing it uh entire day so his schedule is like he'll get up in the morning and for next four five hours he'll be on the farm doing things by himself and then he's all tired and the rest for the rest for the entire of the day so he started me with this and um and he's like a mentor to me whenever i face any problem so i just call him up and ask him that uh this is the problem i'm having and he also tells me that you should water this plant this much or this is the time that you should grow this kind of veggie so um i think uh two of my very helpful resources my father and the next is youtube obviously uh and also with the composting so i was hearing a lot of things that you guys were saying so um we have actually anything that comes out of our kitchen goes into our garden every every last bit of thing it goes into our garden this is the practice that uh we have actually uh we have been practicing this from last six months and uh you feel really good about it at the end because um you're not you are actually decreasing the waste as well as it's going uh into something very good so uh we don't need to get the compost and fertilizers from outside because we are creating it ourselves and initially we started with the pit so um we had this pit in the backyard and uh the problem with it was that we had to turn it over regularly so now um i was following this youtube channel self-sufficient me so he's a great guy he's from australia and he shared this tip in one of his um uh youtube videos so he said that just dig a hole anywhere in the garden where you are growing something or where you are preparing the bed and um throwing your kitchen waste there and um just dump the soil over that and you don't have to worry about turning it over and you are just creating the bed in itself it's a very very good tip that he gave and we have been following that and you won't believe it that like few days back i did the same thing and i am seeing uh few some of these sprouts there maybe by mistake i threw some uh fruit seed i think it must be watermelon or something and they have sprouted wonderful wonderful so it sounds really amazing you've got a good thing going i think for the next six months um for the last six months and i think it's caught you and it's going to pull you by the nose and you're going to be going in this direction for a while i think yeah and also like uh now i've been very enthusiastic about it so initially it just started as a side project or hobby sort of thing but i think it grows on you with time it's quite addictive yeah when you when you harvest something of your own and then uh when you cook it uh it's a it's an altogether very different experience not just with the taste but also it's a very humbling experience in the way that you know that a lot of effort goes into it and you really cherish that absolutely somebody once said after all the hard work the food tastes better automatically yeah yeah um but obviously there's a lot of difference in the veggies that we buy from the market because obviously they reach us after like nine nine to ten days of harvesting and this is just fresh from the ground you pluck it and you you just cook it so obviously the taste is good but then again uh as you said the hard work in terms of the food right like so i lived at this institute called the Sambhavna Institute in Himachal it's near Palampur so i stayed there for a week or so so it's entirely organic they grow their own food they have their own eggs you have compost you it's a hilly slope so you have different veggies on the slopes it's and the fresh food so you cook it's a community kitchen you you you cook there yourself uh i really want to make my garden now uh now that i hear you on that note i will interject and i will ask Karan and Yogitha to finish if they want to and we can continue at friends.haskeek.com which will redirect you to our slack channel uh Yogitha and Karan will be there i'll try to bring Tanishka and Amitish as well so that there there is an active set of people who's all who's there available to answer your queries and i hope to see a lot of pics with lots of images yep yep thank you for that yeah thanks i think it makes sense for us to do this on slack because i'm worried about our phones blowing up which they seem to have been doing for the last week or 10 days since this lockdown sort of started uh thanks so much for all the help doing this i hope all of you found it useful and i hope you will join us again next week on thursday uh when we go ahead with this um yeah and if you want more help you can get in touch we have my number up over there just whatsapp me and i'll try and help as much as we can yeah great thanks so much everybody thanks for making this happen all the best to you and please take care of yourselves be well be occupied yeah great thanks everyone