Imaptiens Times

It’s been few months since I took a break from work. Ironically it’s even harder to see how time flies when you don’t have anything routine and engaging to do. I have taken to gardening in an almost obsessive sense to keep myself busy in some productive way. The results have been very surprising and taught me more than I think I have realised. I’ve almost made it a routine to first go and see my garden the moment I wake up, almost like how parents go and check on their kids. Watering, deweeding, fertilizing, repotting takes another good 2hrs of the morning time. Then reading about my plants on the net to find out why they aren’t flowering or what I can do against the aphid attack on my hibiscus keeps me hooked for a better part of the noon .

It’s not like gardening just became my hobby because I didn’t have anything else to do, It all started more than a year ago with some inspiration from geekgardener,a  blog I used to follow to know how gardens can be grown on terraces and how a balcony can be transformed into a kitchen garden. Though I had a small patch of land in my backyard, it was mostly used by my father as a landfill and dump for the vegetable and kitchen waste that was being generated. Well I can at least boast that we were into unconventional and natural composting long before it took off elsewhere . The muck and stench was keeping me away from entering the place even to experiment with my interest and I knew not where to start the clean-up process. After lot of preaching and coursing my father to stop the dumping, I was pleasantly surprised one day to return home to see a backyard almost like a clean slate. From that day began my gardening journey, one that has taught me so much about life and one that continues to do so every day..

Few weeks ago I decided to venture into growing flowers to add some colour to my otherwise very green garden. I had mostly been into vegetables, green etc. for almost a year, though I had managed to successfully have a very good hibiscus bloom,grooming it from a very young plant.

I drove to the nearby nursery lalbagh and in a jiffy picked up a few impatiens, dianthus, geraniums, and petunias. Mistaking the impatiens for vincas, I argued with the nursery in charge only to be later embarrassed  for my very limited knowledge of flowers. On returning home, my mom quickly pointed out that I was wrong. This was my first lesson learnt in the long list that was to follow. Having realised my mistake I quickly took to the net to understand how to take care of the plants I had purchased. Like all aspects of life, I must admit there is nothing to beat practical learning in gardening. No amount of reading and theory will help. Each situation is different and needs to be dealt differently. I have almost come to regard growing plants akin to bringing up children. Each one is unique and needs different attention and care.

Coming back to my plants, I successfully managed to repot all my plants into pots with organic compost which I thought would be a better and suitable media for them to grow. Though I Thought I had given each of them the same care, the results were dramatically different. One of the red petunia plants died in 3-4 days and I still am contemplating what went wrong. The purple one is thriving and flowering .The seeds of the same plant which I just sprinkled in the same pot have made their first appearance in the world. The impatiens are testing my patience and teaching me to keep the faith. Their settlement time into the new environment is taking longer than I expected and the falling buds are keeping me guessing if they need more or less of water, more or less of sunlight or is it that they are still adjusting to the initial transplant shock. The dianthus to my surprise turned out to be the sturdy one of the lot , settling in quickly and intermixing to produce new colour blooms.

So as it turns out in life, not everything in the garden will grow as you planned. Each plant grows at its own pace and  blooms at its own time. Above all what this has taught me is  to keep the faith and have patience. While the ones you bank on and are very sure about  may lead to disappointments, there will surely be an odd one to surprise you and catch your attention.