This Sunday I ventured into our "garden". As such it is a wasteland of weeds and stones, but in my mind, it 's a luscious tropical grden filled with all the flowers I love - not for me the exotic orchids or vapid anthurium, I intend it to be a "native" garden with hibiscus, ixora, angelic nanthyarvattam, kadukkan, jasmine and so on. And of course - the rose in its various avatars like this one below...
or one like this too...
Now I have a "War of the Roses" in my garden! But these flowers are sort of "ready made" because I got them from the flower nursery already flowering - I just took them out of the pots and planted them. They pale before this one little shoot below...
Can you even see it? I brought four cuttings from a climbing rose from my mother-in-law's place and planted it there almost two months ago. Although the monsoon and I tended them, they didn't do anything till last week when this tiny bud started coming out. I had almost uprooted the cuttings, but they were still green, which I took as a good sign. Now I am glad I didn't throw them away.
So I continue to buy and borrow plants from wherever I can and keep planting them in the area that I have set aside for my garden and keep clearing the weeds each time I plant something too. No point in clearing large areas in this rain, when weeds sprout the moment I turn my back. The only "weed" I spare is the lovely thumba ...
I know very well that it's a weed just like the rest, but for some reason I love this tiny little flower. If I were Captain Von Trapp, I would surely sing about the thumba rather than about the edelweiss.
Hey, here's a pic of our pumpkin seedlings - atleast, one of the healthy ones. Yep, we have spinach and ladyfingers too. But I won't bore you with pics of all that.
If you now have a picture of a happy gardener gladly mucking about in her garden, I am very sorry to disappoint you. Planting and weeding are not my favorite parts of gardening! For one, I am allergic to soil and have to wear protective gloves and shoes to avoid contact. This would not be a problem in a foreign country where such appurtenances are a matter of routine. But here, in a village in Kerala - they certainly look odd. So I have to make a choice between looking odd and having itchy, oozing pustules on my feet and hands. You can guess which I choose. This combined with all the stooping, digging and sweating, do not make planting a happy experience. But I love watching those tiny little shoots coming out of the soil. And I keep dreaming about the flowers... Aren't these the things that keep all gardeners going?
While I was doing all this hard work, we had a heavy downpour and when I got in, the rest of my family jumped into our yard for an impromptu rain dance - our two-year old was in his birthday suit! For obvious reasons, I will not post the pictures (yes, I did take them)! But it was fun watching them having fun. They (including the biggest kid, my husband) jumped in all the puddles they could find and had mud in their hair when they got in. MY job was to see that they were bathed and dried properly and dosed with Vit C afterwards!
Do tell me your gardening experiences and what you are planting this rainy season...
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