 Okay, now the next thing once you've prepared your post is you've got to figure out the appropriate space for your garden. Now you could have, I mean in cities we don't really have the luxury of choice, we have whatever space we have. If there's a tall building in front of us too bad, if we are lucky you know it's a south or it's a west facing balcony and you'll be bathed in sunlight and you can consider yourself lucky. Typically the conditions would be full sun which means you get at least 5 to 6 hours of sunlight, direct sunlight on your pot, on your plant. Semi shade would be where you get between 3 to 4 hours of sunlight, it may be like an east facing balcony where you get the rising sun and the sun goes over after midday and then that fits. Or it could be a north facing balcony which typically would be in shade or if you have a really tall building in front of you then your balcony is shaded and you have good daylight but you don't have direct sunlight on your plants. So these are the 3 conditions under which you would go. We'll talk about what can also grow in shady balconies or terraces but pick a spot that is preferably either full sun or semi shade and we will talk about what can be grown in shady conditions. So yes, what can grow in the shade. Now, if you don't have a whole lot of sunlight, you will find that it limits what all you can grow. However, there are several things that you still could grow. You can try some leafy vegetables like arugula, spinach would also be palak, the regular palak would also sort of work. There is a kind of spinach called Brazillian spinach also known as Tissue Spinach. It actually enjoys a semi shade or pretty much a shaded condition and it grows profusely. You can just harvest the leaves and it propagates also very fast. Some of the roots that you can grow that are also useful. You can grow healthy leaves are also used in cooking. You can grow ginger, you can grow yam, you can grow collocasia. Collocasia is that herbies, the leaves are edible, the roots are edible. Some of the other things that are also easy to grow are black pepper. You have two kinds of black pepper, one is the wine that climbs on trees and the other is a bush pepper and for those of us who stay in flat, bush pepper is really a very productive plant. It does not create a wine, it does perfectly fine and shaded conditions and like a couple of pots, if they are healthy, you can pretty much get as much black pepper as you need for the year for a small family of say three or four people. Pineapple surprisingly grows really well in the shade. You can plant one pineapple plant for maybe like a 12 inch pot and this is the season now they will be producing. And of course many of you may have heard of microgreen. These don't need a whole lot of sunlight. They are short term crops that can be harvested quickly and so you don't really need sunlight for that and we will talk about that down the line as well. Most shooting vegetables do tend to struggle if there is no sunlight on them. So that must be kept in mind. Okay, now we sometimes hear this question and it's a very valid question that why should we transplant at all? Why don't we just let me put seeds into the pots or into the garden bed where we are growing. And it's actually you could do that but one of the main reasons to transplant is that we want to protect once the seed germinates that baby plant is actually susceptible to disease or to pest attack. In a typical city situation you may have pigeons that will come and pick away at the little tender leaves or rats or you could have any fungal problems and these would eventually die. So to prevent that from happening you grow them separately and you transplant healthy seedlings into pots. It's also a very efficient way to use time and water and seeds. If you put a whole lot of seeds all over sometimes you don't know what has germinated, what hasn't germinated. So it's a great way to conserve seeds only as many as you need. And really it helps you pick the healthiest of the lot and put out into your garden. And it also helps you get a head start. Now often in the rainy season, as we come to the end, September is always, you can never say when you'll get like a really heavy downpour. Last year it rained all the way till almost December. You put out seedlings and they're so little, you know, they're fragile that if you get a big bout of rain, they'll just flatten all your seedlings. So you can start them indoors in a shaded balcony or a sheltered balcony and when they are strong, like about three or four weeks old, you transplant out these plants and then they are much... they stand a greater chance of making it through that initial period and you can end up with a healthy garden pretty soon. So what can we sow directly? If not everything needs to go into a nursery, there are some seeds that can and should be actually sown directly, specifically root vegetables like carrots and radish. They don't like their roots disturbed. So if you make a nursery and you pull out and you transplant, you are bound to end up with an unhealthy plant. It will only produce leaves and you'll get no roots at the bottom. So root vegetables, make sure you put them directly where they are going to grow. Also, larger seeds like beans, I have some here, like these are beans over here, larger seeds like beans or any of the gourds, if you've seen a bottle gourd or a pumpkin seed, these are big, they are really tough seeds and they actually, because the size is bigger, they go much lower than the soil and therefore they stand a better chance against pest and disease and so they can be sort of sown directly also. Having said that, my preference is, as long as I can do a nursery with it, I will do a nursery and I will transplant a healthy seed. So that's really how I go. Now Karan has already gone through the different growing stages that we have. We've already done the seeds and the nurseries, we've done the soil preparation. In the next session, we will cover transplanting and of course growing, taking care and harvesting and very importantly, planning the next cycle that will come thereafter. Here's a photo from my garden I took this morning. It's basically 12-inch pots with tomato plants that have been staked. They are in a pot, a semi-shaded pot. They get about three to four hours of sunlight but they're doing pretty well, very healthy and I just thought I'd share that with you all. Okay, over to Karan. Thank you, Abhi. So again, this is recapping something we talked about last time. Even as we are taking you through one stage of the garden, we need to start preparing for the next stage. So especially since our movements are restricted at this time, it makes a lot of sense for us to take certain steps to make sure we have the right inputs available when the time to transplant and the growing stage comes along. So I had mentioned this before. Start composting today if you didn't start last week. You're going to need compost. It's not going to be so easy to find. We know that it's expected that we will have a lot of stores coming open from the 20th of April. Agricultural supply stores have been included in this. We hope this will mean that you shall be able to access nutrients, soil itself, pots and seeds and so on more easily after that date. But in any case, it makes sense to start composting your kitchen waste and just feeding it to your garden. In addition, please try and collect some dry leaves. Yogita talked about mulch. I would say that it's probably the single most powerful thing to making growing your own food easy. So it just simplifies all your tasks as a gardener and saves you a lot of time and effort. So collect dry leaves from your compound, wherever you can find them. These can be of different sizes. Smaller is usually easier to handle. But even if you have larger leaves, that's great. You can break them into smaller bits and pieces and kind of apply them as mulch. Don't burn. A lot of pollution in the cities is due to burning of different types of waste amongst them leaf waste. So please don't, if you're in a colony which tends to burn on a regular basis, tell them not to use this resource deployed in the gardens and of course save yourself the pollution. This is how mulch is applied. In this particular case, you see we've used paddy straw as mulch. But the idea is just the same. Basically, we are trying to create a leafy blanket that covers our soil pretty much like you see in a forest. So if you walk into a forest, you will see the entire floor is covered by leaves dropped by the trees around. And this leaf litter is really the main reason that forests are forests and not deserts. If you didn't have all of this organic matter going into the soil, moisture being retained, microbial life being thick, you would not have such good soil in a forest. So borrowing this idea from nature in your garden makes a lot of sense even if you're growing in pots. Of course, it makes sense if you're growing in the soil also. Here are a few ideas. So looking ahead now, assuming that you will be able to access some seeds in your neighborhoods, whether it's in Goa, whether it's in Bombay, whether it's in Bangalore or any other part of the country, here are some things that we would suggest you plant now considering that we are sort of in the middle of the summer season for most places and heading into the monsoon also. So the monsoon is supposed to be, or at least the projection seemed to say it's going to be on time and it's going to be a healthy monsoon. So if that happens, these plants will kind of run through not only the summer but also through the monsoon. Malabar spinach is one type of spinach or Brazilian spinach, this can be grown at this time. Red amaranth or other types of amaranth can also be grown. They handle the heat reasonably well compared to some leafy greens. Cucurbits or gourds, this is a family that loves the warm weather which thrives in the heat and later on when the monsoon comes along also. Ladyfinger again is like gourds, they tend to love the warm weather. Fruit very quickly and become ready to harvest very quickly because of the warm weather. Long beans are also quite comfortable in the coming season as are chillies and brinjals. Brinjals especially are interesting because they can be very productive. If you just have a couple of pots of brinjals doing well you're probably going to have enough brinjals for yourself and the neighbors at the same time. These are fairly productive vegetables and some things that we would suggest that you grow in the coming months starting now from April and going through all the way to September or so on the coast which is when the monsoon tends to end and even beyond that. A quick summary of some of the things that we've talked about as Yogita has said, it is extremely important that you use the right size pots. If you use pots that are smaller than what is appropriate for the plant you're trying to grow that's going to lead to cramped root systems or cramped plants and that in turn is going to leave to plants that don't grow to be as productive as they might be and tend to have lower immunity also because they've not built up the capacity to produce food in the way that we want it to. Now the material of your growing containers can be of different kinds. Yogita mentioned ceramics, she mentioned terracotta, plastic and so on and so forth, grow bags and other kinds of containers. The material is actually a little less important. The size in our opinion is more important. Drainage is critical. A lot of people tend to kill plants by watering too much and we have to be mindful of ensuring. We have to understand that the plants don't drink water. They just want soil moisture so they can sip at it a little bit from time to time. Those are the conditions we want to create. We don't want to overwater and cause more disease also in addition to humming the plants. Great soil is the key to good harvest. If the soil is well made, Yogita gave you a simple recipe that really creates healthy soil. Sometimes we will take that recipe and modify it a little bit. We may add a little bit of rock phosphate to it in terms of nutrients. But that recipe can work with almost any kind of soil. It can be very average soil in your compound downstairs and what you can do is you can actually go to it. You mix it in with the cocoa peat and the compost and you have very good soil to grow, fruits, vegetables, herbs, whatever it is you're trying to grow. Lastly, sunlight, even more than soil perhaps is the key ingredient for growing plants that produce food. While many of us may have shaded balconies, unfortunately, most of the things we like to eat do require well lit conditions. Semi-shaded is great for leafy vegetables. Full sun is preferred by fruiting vegetables. By and large, most things that we are familiar with eating as vegetables tend to prefer fairly brightly lit conditions and direct sunlight at least for some part of the day. An example of things that we can grow and that grow well, you'll see pots that we have. In this case, these are 10-inch pots with spinach growing in them. You'll notice there's just a single plant in most of these. Any multiple plants, I think one of the pots has two plants. That's absolutely accidental. It shouldn't be the case. One plant is completely sufficient. In the corner, you may also see a little frilly edged leaf. That's a KL plant so it can grow in the same type of pots and give you a lot of leaves to harvest. That brings us pretty much to the end of what we have planned to talk about today. I'd just like to give you a quick sense of the next session. As I said, we are going to have five sessions in all, taking you through the different stages of growing. Session three is about transplanting your seedlings into containers. We are expecting that in another 10 days or so, maybe at the most another two weeks or so, your seedlings will be ready for transplant. We will show you how this can be done a little ahead of time. We will also help you get a sense of how much to grow, of which things depending on how productive they are. For example, I said brinjals. If you have a couple, they are very productive. If you end up growing like 10 brinjal plants, you are going to be swamped with brinjal and never want to eat that vegetable again. You need to just plan your garden to make sure that you are growing the right quantities of different things. What we will also do very quickly is cover growing microgreens. There is a lot of interest in growing them and therefore we will talk about it. As Yogeta said, also it doesn't require much light to grow. Even if you have a shaded balcony, pretty much in about 12 to 15 days, you can have a harvest of microgreens and keep the cycle growing. I would like to point out though that you have to have abundant amounts of seeds to grow these microgreens, so please plan for this accordingly. Now, as for this session, even for the subsequent sessions, if you would like to register, please just go to hasgeek.com. The link is right here and this is what you can use to get to the sign up page. Thank you so much for joining us. We wish you all the best in your garden. I am Karan and Yogeta is here too. You can write to us at info at greenessentials.in. We can also continue this conversation on Slack. If you are familiar with the tool, it's a great place for you to ask questions and for us to be able to answer them. There is a Slack channel that has geek a setup called friends.hasgeek.com. Just click on this link and it will help you sign up and have access to that channel. If you are having problems, you can post photos up there and we'll respond about what exactly you try to diagnose the problem and also provide solutions for it. If you had good experiences with growing your nurseries at this point, please take photographs, share them with us. It will be fun for us to see also as for other people who have joined this session. I'll stop now and kind of ask for questions that you may have so that Yogeta and I can answer them. We'll just take a minute while the hasgeek team can kind of figure out or queue up the different questions that have been asked. In case you haven't asked any questions and would like to do so now, I'll just say again you need to go to this Q&A tab which will be at the bottom of your screen in the Zoom interface and you can type in your questions over there. We'll kick off this AMA now. Ask away please. We have a few questions which have already come in. Those who want to ask, please ask in the Q&A tab. The first question comes from Amit. He asks if there's a drawing calendar for what to plant in each month in different areas of India, South, etc. He says he's already started putting the different calendar for them so he has to go. Okay. What I would say is that yes, we can create calendars. In fact, we are working on them. I think we should be done by them by this weekend. While we have coastal calendars and we have a bit for Bangalore, we were also creating another one for the North so we'll put those together and share those in a sub-follower email. Let me just give you some very broad guidelines for the coming season. You would have seen that I mentioned certain plants that we could put down. I'll just go back to that slide right now just to make it a reminder. One family that grows well right now are the Cucurbits. The Cucurbits means different types of gourds. It means cucumbers. It could be bitter gourd, karela. It could be rich gourd. It could be a pumpkin. It could be any of this family really. Bottle gourd. So many others that grow and are nutritious for this time of the year. A lot of these you should put down. Look at it as a family. The Cucurbit or the gourd family and most of those will do well. They are also native. Most of these are native to India so they do well in these conditions. The warm conditions and then the monsoon coming a little further down the line. The second family that is pretty comfortable is what I would call the Solinaceous family. So this is chili. Brinjal, both of which you see here. Tomatoes also, though they won't do so well once the monsoon comes around. Tomatoes are a little susceptible to fungal diseases and high humidity and water availability tends to cause that. The next family that you want to grow is the beans, not the French beans but the long beans. The French beans prefer cooler weather but the long beans and the cluster beans do well even on warmer climates which is what we are experiencing now and will for the next couple of months. So that's something else that you should grow. Other than this, Ladyfinger loves the heat again and should be planted right now. Will grow for you for the next four or five months and produce quite a bit also. Leafy vegetables tend to struggle a little bit like lettuce for example which just won't grow at this time of the year. Many of the mustards will also experience aphids especially when humidity gets a little high. So we tend to limit the amount of leafy greens that we grow at these times but still you can grow red hammer ant. You can also grow arugula to some extent or rocket as a leafy vegetable. You can grow Malabar spinach which is a very wine like growing kind of leafy vegetable. These are things that you can look to grow in this coming season. As I said, we will create more detail calendars and put them up in the next summer email that we send out to you. You should be able to access them for your region. We have a few questions from Joy Dorsch. The first one is about the plants that he has tried growing in his balcony. Most of his seedlings have turned out to be very curvy. Is that because of the sunlight or is that something? Yes. We call them leggy. When the stem is not firm and therefore they tend to be bending over usually towards the light. They tend to be a little weak. I'm not sure how your house is but if you have a sunnier or even a ledge or something like that, perhaps a window on the other side you will immediately see. If you just leave it out there for a week you will suddenly see that these perk up and do very well. If a neighbor on the other side can just hold the seedlings for you they will be good healthy seedlings by the time you get to the end of the three week period which most seedlings take to get ready. Okay. The next question is again from Joy. He asks if there is any watering method to follow if one is traveling for a few days and they are not able to water the plants themselves. Okay. Yogita, would you want to take this one? One second. I just need to activate Yogita's There are different things you can do when you are traveling. If you are traveling for three or four days there are ways in which you can address that many pots come with a little base plate and if you have a slightly larger base plate like even this big steel plate you can fill it with water and the water through capillary action will sort of keep going up at the root level the soil and the roots will sort of be able to access that water you may fill it up till I don't know maybe half way through this plate or something but you need several of such plates to put your pots in and they would last typically three or four days but if you are going out for a longer period it may be difficult and that is a challenge that many of us who live in flat have either we can then leave a key with a friend who can come and do the watering or a neighbor or something like that but that is one way once I had done this it's a little intensive but it works you get these saline drip bags and there is a if you don't have a needle of course you remove the needle but you can set the dripper basically it becomes a drip thing so you leave a bag full of they usually are 500 ml or whatever and you can have that slowly drip at the root level but it's not something you can scale up tremendously otherwise your house will look like a hospital you could also my grandmother used to do this she would take a cloth and she would sort of put that in a big bucket of water or she had strips of slightly thickish cottony cloth and she dipped them in the bucket of water and the bucket would be slightly at an elevation and then she sort of puts them under a little bit of the soil for a while so again through that capillary action there would be a sort of flow created and you would get a little moisture there there are many things you can try you could if the plant is like a fruiting tree even put it in your bathroom and leave the tap on very little so that drop by drop by drop it happens it may not like the fact that there is no sunlight but at least it will get water and if you are back in 3-4 days you can quickly bring it back out so there are a few things you can do but if you have gone for a long period then you have got to sort of make arrangements like you would for a pet for someone to come and walk away from that I just like to add to this and I would like to say that if you notice the soil that we have created by adding cocopeat we have considerably sort of increased the carrying capacity the water holding capacity of the soil so this soil will do much better for you than the typical red clayy soil that you get for many nurseries or in which your plants normally come so if you take the example of the 3-4 days that Yogita was suggesting I think you would be able to carry pretty well through 3 or 4 days as long as you water deeply and well before you left the second tool that we have kind of used to address this issue and which will serve you well remember a time I think that we were away for almost 3 weeks and we had Basil continue to do well in that period of time simply because the soil was very well mulched so if you mulch the soil you leave this blanket of 2 inches or so of leaf waste on top of your soil it prevents the wind from blowing away the moisture and retains moisture for a much longer period of time so think of these as also improvements which will help you in those situations okay coming on to the next question if we are transplanting using cuttings instead of seedlings what are the steps that we have to follow would you like to take I think one of the things we need to get right is that you should take the right cutting some plants will only propagate if the cutting is goody for example Mulberry you will have a goody stem and then a fresh green shoot if you try and root the green shoot nothing will happen and that is true for many plants so you know a quick search online for the specific plants that you are trying to propagate via cutting will tell you what kind of a cutting you should take also if you see any cutting you will find like on your finger you have these lines you have points that are called nodes now the node is from where either a shoot appears or a root appears typically what I do is I make sure that when I am rooting a cutting I put at least two nodes in the soil so that there is a greater chance if you have a longer stem and it is possible you can even put three nodes that just increases the chances of the root coming out from one of those three nodes and then you need to have maybe two or three nodes on top I typically tend to strip the leaves for example if it is pudina or common market mint I strip all the bottom leaves I just leave like maybe four or five leaves on the top and then I directly root it in soil you can also root some of these things in water but I found that soil is just as effective and it saves you one step so directly goes into a moist pot and you keep watering it regularly and it sort of propagates from there so cuttings are a great way to propagate plants and it is sort of a shortcut you don't have to go through the whole cycle it also reminds me if you are going tomatoes you will have like the main tomato stem you will have a branch that will come through and often between the main stem and the branch you will have another like a tertiary thing poking out if you allow it to grow it sort of distributes the food and you don't want that normally you end up pinching that but if you allow it to grow to say I don't know maybe four inches or so five inches or so you break it and you root it you immediately get another tomato plant so that saves you 21 days or 28 days of sowing and germinating and then transplanting you can straight off start a new plant from those shoots that come in the middle so that's a tip I thought you might find interesting okay the next question is about the plant growing sort of sprouting coriander seeds and chillies so Devaki had tried sprouting a few seeds in tissue paper inside a plastic food container sprinkling a little water every two to three days but it just would not sprout what could be the reasons behind this I think Karan you are on yeah so the first reason this could happen is because for some reason the quality of the seeds that you have is not very good maybe there are seeds that have been kept for a while and therefore have lost their vitality they do not germinate typically if you got the description I mean just hearing the description of what you have done it should have sprouted by this amount of time usually it will take between five to maybe eight days to sprout and not much more than that that is the most likely thing as far as I can see in the case of coriander however I just like to point out something else coriander seeds are usually more hardy than the example of chili that you said simply because it is like a compound seed it actually has two compartments and you have seeds in each of those compartments but one of the things is because it has such in a sense robust packaging what you have to do is you have to actually take the seeds put them maybe in a hanky in a cloth of some sort then you fold the cloth over and then you rub and press them over so that the packaging actually cracks so the pods kind of open up and the seeds come out and then those seeds are easier to germinate so I am not sure whether you did that for the coriander but that could be one other reason why it does not work I would also like to point out at this time that there is a good way to keep your seeds that is to ensure that your seeds are sort of you know doing well for a longer period of time first thing is that seeds don't like being stored in the heat and sunlight so for sure you want to put them in the shadiest portion of your house now depending where you are located sometimes we have a lot of humidity example being either the east or the west coast of India coastal regions have high humidity through a good part of the year and experience the monsoons when of course they are at their highest you know these can really undermine the quality of your seeds so what we do is we take our seeds we put them in a sort of a small self-sealing packet I will just take an example and show you something like this I am not sure if I am showing up as the spotlight video but hopefully now you can see this I will stop sharing yeah okay so can you see this packet you know so if you see we take a self-sealing bag like this and one thing that we try to do is we try to squeeze out all the air before we seal it off so in that way air with moisture is not trapped inside and the seeds will stay for a longer period of time now what we will typically do is let's suppose I have about five or six seeds packets like this we will put it in a larger self-sealing bag and we will seal that off too and we will put it in the refrigerator typically near the door not towards the back of the refrigerator or you know in the crisper tray or the especially not in the freezer right so you just want to keep it somewhere near the door where the temperature is not too low and where the humidity is likely to be less and we found that seeds will stay for a couple of years even you know if they are stored well in this way so hopefully that's a tip for the future that can be useful as I said if you use seeds that you brought from some layer they may have gotten older or perhaps if these were seeds that you harvested from what was lying around the kitchen they were not particularly effective that seems to be the major reason why I think I mean that seems to be the reason why they have not worked well for you we have one last question in the Q&A tab are there any thumb rules for when to water and how much are you okay? you would like take that as a thumb rule I mean busy city people water when you get time but try and be consistent it's like a pet like to be fed at the same time more or less on a daily basis if you are watering baby if your soil is able to hold water you don't need to water baby so here is what I do this is you've seen how I prepare soil I can typically skip a day because the soil holds enough water because of all the organic matter that's gone in and because of the mulch so I don't water every day it is ideal to water in the second half of the day you water in the evening that water remains in the soil through the evening through the night and up to the morning when the sun comes up and it starts the drying process if I water first thing in the morning even if it's early by the time the sun is up and it's 10 and 11 the water starts evaporating the function of water and soil is basically to have the interchange of nutrients and all the minerals that are there that's what the water is used for so if it's there longer it means that the plant can do that on a more frequent basis so that's one thing the other thing is when you water water deeply don't just water the top and just you know the top 2 inches of the soil will get wet and then again you have to water so if you water deeply if you water this so that you see the water coming out from the bottom of the container what that means is that the entire column of soil is moist it also encourages then the roots to grow all the way from the bottom a common thing that happens with brinjal plants is that once the fruit come the plant becomes pretty heavy on top and if it's not well rooted your plant will just tend to peel over and then you've got to stake it and that's the problem in itself because you may end up poking the roots and that kind of thing so when you water water deeply it's pressurable to water in the evening so that the water stays there longer and most importantly check the foil you know check and see if it looks moist keep a day don't just water every day because you think you need to water every day check and see if the soil and your plant will tell you like here this plant is looking nice and perky if it's needed water it would be all droopy and it would look sad so it will sort of indicate as well you don't have to always wait for them to droop but you'll get a sense of it those are like indicators to see so check put your finger in if it feels moist totally skip a day skip 2 days if you you know if it's a during the monsoons you'll find that even though you are at the edge of our shelter balcony it'll catch the spray and you may find that you don't need to water for 3 days at the time so that's also good I hope that answers your question okay I think we've answered all the questions that have come in if anybody else has any questions please do share it on YouTube, Facebook on the zoom link we have a bit more time to take questions or if you would like to share your experiences growing please raise your hand in the participants panel and you can share your experiences so this is pretty much the end of our session for today and I hope you found it useful perhaps we can just put up the poll about how useful you found it and it would be great if you can respond okay so this is a poll which asks about what it is that you would like to learn I'd really appreciate it if you can take the time to record your sort of feedback here because we'd be interested in looking at it and deciding what we should cover in subsequent sessions or what to give more time and attention to certainly thanks I can see several of you have given your feedback to us we have one more question in chat that's just coming Viraj, ask if you could speak a little bit about the best that affect some of the plans that you've talked about today okay so I'll answer that in two or three parts first thing if we are doing the right things vis-a-vis the environment we create for our plants and if you are doing things the right things are related to our soil and the care of the plants then frankly pests are just a footnote now I know it's something that most most new gardeners are really worried about pests and about disease and you know it's quite disheartening to see when your plants that you've tended to suddenly seem to fall a sort of victim to some kind of problem and you know keel over or die or just do a poo early right I'd like to then go on to say that yes in an organic system we do have to deal with pests as with any other system but our approach is very different if you look at chemical based pest management that typically means using poison to kill whatever pest you're experiencing the type of poison is fairly generic in the sense it tends to be the same irrespective of the pest that you're dealing with right so that that's a sort of a if I can call it well it seems the wrong word to use when you're using poison but it is a curative approach right now what we try to do in organic growing systems is we try to have a less not a curative but a preventive approach to growing the first thing that you do in terms of design of your garden is make sure that you don't grow too much of one thing so diversity is one principle that we kind of address and I would like to point out that we will talk about this in detail in subsequent sessions which is why I'm going to just go over it very briefly the second thing that we try to do is we after ensuring diversity is we try to get a sense of which pest we are likely to experience so I give you an example on the disease side where I said fungal diseases are very common in places along the coast or any place with high humidity right so that's one kind of thing when this kind of combination of heat and humidity like warm weather and humidity happens the most common pest you will experience is what we call aphids okay so these are little sucking pests which happen under the leaf they usually typically at the you know on the underside of the leaf and they don't have wings they don't move around sometimes you will also see ants while the ants don't harm your plant at all they kind of use these sucking pests to extract the sap and consume it themselves right so so aphids are one problem and the way to deal with them would be to not congest your space if you stick too many plants too close together humidity tends to get trapped inside those kind of spaces and you will have more incidence of aphids so that's one way to deal with them another technique that we use is to repel insects purely by creating unpleasant circumstances for them so it's like when you don't want a neighbor to come over right you just make sure that he knows that he's not welcome and if you have a nice strong overpowering smell it works for a lot of insects because they have very sensitive olfactory systems right so cow urine which is really stinky I don't know how many of you have used it is brilliant to do that in a way neem is another one it's a very bitter kind of a taste and smell so that tends to be a deterrent too quite often we will use wood ash which is the smell I mean the burning texture and smell of ash will deter a lot of pests right but remember that in organic systems you don't just blanket apply these you first try and observe and see which pest is it that I am I am kind of experiencing and then respond based on that a couple of other common pests that we one may sort of experience so with the gods there are these kind of cucumber beetles that tend to be very common or fruit flies a certain kind of fruit flies cucumber fruit flies that are common now the cucumber beetles can tend to be the fruit fly I think is the more common and therefore I'll talk about that it tends to lay an egg inside the fruit when it's very small when the flower is becoming a fruit and then as the fruit grows this tends to hatch the egg hatches and the larvae tends to do something in terms of sort of causing a problem so the larvae will then sort of hatch and eat its way out and therefore spoil the fruit itself okay so we we use different systems basically they are called pheromone traps LDOs they are used to deal with these and reduce populations of this nature then another common pest is something called thrips now thrips looks like a tiny like fluorescent green mosquito which is usually on the plants on you know at dawn and dusk when the the light is low that's when you can usually see it through the day you may not notice it but basically what it does is it seems to scrape the surface of the leaves of plants like lady finger brinjal which we talked about also perhaps chili and the texture of the leaf becomes very it looks very scarred and bumpy and that's really that affects you know how much processing of food the leaf can do and therefore the health of the plant itself so these are common press in order to deal with thrips we use sticky traps quite often there is a blue colored sticky trap which attracts thrips there is a yellow colored sticky traps which also can deal with affids so we just use different tools at different times right we will in future once we've explained many of the techniques of handling pests organically also create a I mean share with you a sheet that we have which describes many of the solutions sorry for the long-winded answer but it's a complicated question when it comes to organic growth we have one more question actually from Debra Kee so she started growing mustard and fenugreek seedlings after the last week's session she is asking how deep the plant what for transplant should be so mustard being a leshy vegetable I think an 8 inch pot depth should be fine maybe I would not transplant maybe I would let it be where it is and you know as they grow because maybe firstly is a more or less a winter crop I don't know where you are and what your climate is right now but let them grow to pretty much I would say like a microgreen or maybe a little older and then I would harvest it so it is really tender messy because if it's very warm it will grow it will germinate it will come to the point of microgreen and then it will sort of start yellowing or it will you know collapse so don't transplant messy let it grow in the container it is and you could have multiple containers of matey matey grows really faster you could have several small ones and you can slip them and harvest and once you slip and harvest it will not come back so you will have to put down more matey tea but an 8 inch pot that is the size of this pot for a mustard would be fine this is also a mustard I have growing in here actually it's in a dahi container it's growing quite well and I just put it in a ceramic container so it looks quite pretty you know but yeah you will recycle containers like that and you can have several plants single single plants growing in each of these even in an 8 inch pot I would put only one because when these plants become full size their spread would be almost a foot so if you cannot put two plants they will compete at the root level for nutrition and they will not be as productive so one plant per 8 inch pot or even like that's a smaller one can do but this gives it's full potential of growth I will just ask for you to put up the last poll folks we'd like some feedback did you find this useful have we done a good job was it worth your while so if you can just rate us on the session from 5 to 1 depending on your experience in this I'd be grateful while we wait for results to come in I'll also mention a couple of other resources that may be helpful first about 3-4 years ago I think we started the seed store it's an online store where you can buy vegetable seeds we started it because people will keep asking us where you could get good seeds if you I mean we're not able to ship right now but assuming in the next week or two courier services start working well perhaps may onwards you can go to the site search for different types of seeds you may be interested in and try growing them too we focus a lot on germination rates because I mean that was the first thing that we were sort of disturbed by when we first started growing we also have grown most of the things that we offer here for at least 5 to 8 years so we know that they work very well in Indian climates not just in warmer climates but all across India so I just wanted to point that out as a resource that you may find useful right some of you may need you know advice on how to grow that is more involved maybe you'd like to have one to one conversations or things like that my phone number is here just whatsapp me and we can get in touch and perhaps we can set up a system for us to sort of regularly guide you in a more close way than it's possible through a session through this so please do get in touch with me if you would do that that pretty much brings us to the current we have a couple more questions that have come in Satish from Bangalore asks how do you deal with leaf miners on tomato plants okay yes a common pest that I should have mentioned I think we answered this to some extent in the last session so Satish leaf miner first let's just understand it it's an insect that we see more in the cities it lays an egg in your leaf and once this egg hatches the insect the young insect tries to exit the leaf but doesn't do it vertically it does it horizontally so it goes in this crazy winding sort of path trying to reach the edge of the leaf through which it can exit right the leaf also provides it certain amount of food in that period of time so the best way to deal with it is not after the egg is already hatched it's before the egg is even laid right so what we want to do is we want to have preventive sprinklings of either neem or neem diluted or potash or other sorry wood ash which we can sprinkle on the leaves which makes it unpleasant and you can use diluted cow urine also just remember when we say sprays typically we mean a 10% solution which means you take say neem oil or something like that and you actually diluted in water where one liter of water would have about 100 ml of neem oil just not that you need those quantities but perhaps you need just 100 ml so you would use 10 ml of neem oil right so that's the best way to deal with neem miner to actually prevent the laying of the egg itself by making the leaves a little bit inhospitable for the insect he also asked if you will be speaking about hydroponics at any time in the series I'm sorry hydroponics is a little out of our area of experience while we are very familiar with the hydroponic systems and while we have a lot of friends who are involved in it since our focus had always been on organic growing and hydroponics to the greatest extent requires certain chemical nutrients we never adopted that system so I'm sorry but we know a lot about the biology of the plants you can use for hydroponics but the growing system itself is something that we probably wouldn't be the best people to ask I think that's very much okay great so thanks so much this brings us to the end of the session thanks for those of you who have taken the time to be here I hope it was useful I hope you learned something from it and I hope you can use this knowledge in the coming weeks we will have another session just going back to what I told you on the 23rd of April which is the next Thursday and what we'd be covering is transplanting of seedlings into containers we talk about how much to grow enough what and also about growing microgreens so we can also in the questions Q&A section at the end address any new situations that you've come up with I think Devaki had many questions from the last session so as you move ahead and you have more questions we'd be happy to answer them in the next session also thank you so much for your time everybody and thanks so much Amog Anish, Zainab for all the help organizing this session you've made it quite easy for us and it's been great fun to do thanks everyone hope to see you next week again thank you Karan bye bye