The more chilled the weather gets, the more eager I am to plant as much as possible, because I know, this is not going to last long. Our Winters used to start in late September and stay until late February, but unfortunately with the impact of global warming and pollution on climate, it's now barely a little over a month, starting December and continuing till late January. So that gives a 50 days window and a plant needs at least a month to grow and flower - you can't do much magic on that.
So with all the eagerness making me more anxious, I decided to plant some inca on the open spaces that we have and visited the nursery. Before visiting I gave a call to the Supervisor to save my time, and he confirmed that inca saplings are available. But unfortunately when I reached there, the saplings were so small that, it was difficult to hold them even. It looked like the supervisor did not verify with ground staffs, and I requested to not do this in future, because it takes half of my day, forget the fuel cost. Of late, I am trying to accept the fact that most people are casual, and I have to be very specific asking them again and again, and still be prepared to accept ground realities. And because of high demand, they have increased the price of these saplings - 8₹ per plant however small it might be. When the season started, they were being sold at 3₹, so that indicates there are still many garden lovers exhausting their capacity. Unless you have prepared very good loose soil, survival of very small plants is bleak, wasting all the money and effort.
And since this is a govt nursery, they prepare a lot of pots to beautify places as ordered. You can see the huge area they have in the heart of city - only because it's a forest department affair. Selling saplings is small business for them - so they don't care if you buy or not. However I still go to this place first, because their quality is good. And since I wanted to bring them on that day, I decided to take a little more pain going to another private nursery, but I did not want to come empty handed, so decided to buy few white inca saplings, costing 25₹ each (That's a lot, but we usually don't get white inca saplings, so thought to try this season) - gardening is always an experiment.
This private nursery is very small compared to the previous one, but they had better saplings at 5₹, straight 37% savings, realizing my fuel cost.
I brought 60 saplings, and out of that, there were still few very small ones, which we still planted with hope. They won't give you only the big ones.
These little ones will take one more week to mature. Some more photographs from this place :
Heavily fed with chemical fertilizers, these plants will not survive for a long time, but winter is a big business for them. These are brought from Kolkata and sold here.
So with this, we have covered the inner empty circle and a long patch, that was made ready beforehand. This is going to be my last purchase of saplings from the nursery for this season. And to prevent people step on these small saplings, I had to put some markers - nobody cares how they grow, all they are interested is to take flowers, which hurts me a lot. Unless you plant a tree, you won't understand the sentiment and feelings of a gardener.
Looked around for sticks, and thankfully a carpenter was working on our premises for someone and I collected these left over materials to mark the area to prevent over stepping. A lot of care is needed from here, and feels like I have become the official part time gardener of our society, but no guilt doing a good job. Someone asked me there are 100 flats in our society, making close to 500 people living in the society, why I alone am behind the garden - and my answer was simple - probably it's a gift given by the almighty to very few ? They all love to come here, spend some time to see and feel it, take selfies here, bees are also here now, what else I need....People spend a lot of money and effort for what they like - the goal of everything that we do is Happiness, so I would continue to do what gives me inner happiness.
Before I wind up this post, some more photos from my garden -
Because of scarcity of time, I was spraying some medicines on these plants in late evening and a kid thought there is a ghost in the garden - it was so much fun.
Red, Orange, Yellow - which one you like most ?
And this one is multi color - see how it evolves.
Starts as yellow and ends up being red - nature is amazing. I am going to collect the seed of this one this year. Few more macros of natural colors :
Think this is the end of this season ? The very next day, another idea popped in my mind for the garden, fueling another concept, more to come on that.....gardening never ends.
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