Curry Plant- 2 Months
Another Angle!
"How big in a year?"..
Curry Plant- A year old
Another Angle To Celebrate The Senior From Last Year
Not So Big in a Year, But Edible! ;)Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Curry Plant / कड़ी पत्ता
Curry Plant- 2 MonthsAnother Angle!"How big in a year?"..
Curry Plant- A year oldAnother Angle To Celebrate The Senior From Last YearNot So Big in a Year, But Edible! ;)
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Growing Potatoes at Home
Potatoes are one of the easiest veggies that can be grown at home. Potato plants are fast in growth and require less care, and this makes it quite satisfying for the newer gardeners. Potatoes can be grown both in pots and open ground. But since it's a root vegetable we're talking about, which will surely need lots of nutrition from soil and manure, it's better to plant in open. If you're a plant lover and want to grow something 'rather useful' this time or you're just a complete newbie, growing potatoes is going to be really suitable for you as a gardener. And once you have collected your crop in your basket, it's time to throw a party with french fries made of home grown potatoes and beer!
By using the simple instructions given in this article, growing potatoes will be easy and fun. Growing potatoes at home is an experience in itself. You will enjoy every moment of it- from cutting a potato, seeding it to digging out the fruit of your hard work.
Growing Conditions
Growing potatoes requires temperatures between 9C to 24C and a well drained soil. And when to plant? Well, you should plan your plantation about 2-3 weeks before the last anticipated date of frost for great going. Soil mixed adequately with manure and moderately pressed is ideal for growing potatoes. Preparing the soil prior to seeding potato buds or say potato pieces is ideal. You should mix 1 or 2 parts of good quality garden soil with 1 part of organic manure. Use a spade for this.
Varieties
There are a few different varieties of potatoes. Russet, Round White, Long White, Yellow, Red-Blue mixed, and Purple are a few varieties easily distinguishable as their names suggest. Among these, the Yellow, the Red, the Russet and the Round White types are available throughout the year. Moreover, the Russet is the most commonly used variety in the US. Make sure that the variety you choose to grow your potatoes out of, must have clearly visible eyes. Eyes on potatoes are tiny pits or buds or even tiny, light colored baby stems. New potato plants grow from these buds. As a starter, beginning your potato growing with the Russet kind is a good idea.
Potato Plant
A potato plant consists of wide, textured leaves with a thick, bright green stem. Potato plants may grow up to 3 feet (36 inches) and have flowers of varying colors with yellow stamens.
Fertilizers
Since potatoes come under root vegetables, our fertilizers need to focus on roots more than leaves. A general rule for choosing the right kind of fertilizer for your plant is- potassium for roots and nitrogen for leaves. If you want good sized potatoes and are feeding your plants with a nitrogen based fertilizer, expect healthy and bigger leaves and tiny (which means almost useless!) potatoes. So ask for potassium based fertilizers at a garden shop.
Now The Potato Work
---------------------
Cutting out the buds
After you're done with closely observing a potato for the presence of buds or 'eyes', you need to think about your potato pieces in such a way that each piece has at least one eye, and that too located somewhere in the middle of each piece. You should be able to extract 2-3 or even more pieces from an average sized potato easily. Once the pieces are cut successfully, leave them at a dry indoor spot for a few hours or at most a day. This heals the surfaces of your potato cut-outs.
Choosing location
The spot that you choose for growing potatoes should have ample sunlight. If we talk about going one step further from basics, you can make sure that the garden in your soil is slightly acidic in nature. There are various PH-test kits easily available in the garden shops to test the PH of soil. These are easy to use. Although, you shouldn't get disappointed if your soil requires slight adjustments. In this case, to make your soil more acidic, you can use elemental sulfur, iron sulfate, aluminum sulfate, organic mulches etc. but it's a slow process and may take several weeks or months and rapid treatments. Not to worry even then, your potatoes this time will adapt to the recovering soil and next time you can be a better farmer!
Planting the pieces
Planting potato pieces is fun. Growing good potatoes requires seeding them about 4 inches deep and about 20-22 inches apart from each other. They should be loosely covered with soil. When you place your potato cut-outs in the ground, make sure that their eyes are facing upwards. The inner part of a potato grows roots and the stem grows from the eye. One eye on a potato means one plant.
Seedling care
When seedlings grow about 5-6 inches in height, pour and spread a layer of soil mixed with compost till the lowest leaves' height. It's okay if one or two lower leaves of each plant get fully or partially covered with the soil mixture while doing this. This layering gives extra nutrients to the plants as the stages of growth beyond this point require them to have more food. As said earlier, potato plants are very speedy in growth and require little care, which is why growing potatoes is quite exciting for new or even mature gardeners.
---------------------
Time to harvest
It takes at least and usually about 90 or so days from the day of plantation for potatoes to be ready for harvesting. Once the plants have bloomed after this period, you can either wait the flowers to age and die out or harvest right away. Dig carefully around the plant and holding the plant from the bottom of its stem, pull it out gently. You can use a garden fork, trowel or just bare hands. Be patient and search every nook and corner in the ground. You should expect the deeper potatoes to be even 18 inches in the ground.
Once you're done, wash your potatoes and supply them to your kitchen!
By using the simple instructions given in this article, growing potatoes will be easy and fun. Growing potatoes at home is an experience in itself. You will enjoy every moment of it- from cutting a potato, seeding it to digging out the fruit of your hard work.
Growing Conditions
Growing potatoes requires temperatures between 9C to 24C and a well drained soil. And when to plant? Well, you should plan your plantation about 2-3 weeks before the last anticipated date of frost for great going. Soil mixed adequately with manure and moderately pressed is ideal for growing potatoes. Preparing the soil prior to seeding potato buds or say potato pieces is ideal. You should mix 1 or 2 parts of good quality garden soil with 1 part of organic manure. Use a spade for this.
Varieties
There are a few different varieties of potatoes. Russet, Round White, Long White, Yellow, Red-Blue mixed, and Purple are a few varieties easily distinguishable as their names suggest. Among these, the Yellow, the Red, the Russet and the Round White types are available throughout the year. Moreover, the Russet is the most commonly used variety in the US. Make sure that the variety you choose to grow your potatoes out of, must have clearly visible eyes. Eyes on potatoes are tiny pits or buds or even tiny, light colored baby stems. New potato plants grow from these buds. As a starter, beginning your potato growing with the Russet kind is a good idea.
Potato Plant
A potato plant consists of wide, textured leaves with a thick, bright green stem. Potato plants may grow up to 3 feet (36 inches) and have flowers of varying colors with yellow stamens.
Fertilizers
Since potatoes come under root vegetables, our fertilizers need to focus on roots more than leaves. A general rule for choosing the right kind of fertilizer for your plant is- potassium for roots and nitrogen for leaves. If you want good sized potatoes and are feeding your plants with a nitrogen based fertilizer, expect healthy and bigger leaves and tiny (which means almost useless!) potatoes. So ask for potassium based fertilizers at a garden shop.
Now The Potato Work
---------------------
Cutting out the buds
After you're done with closely observing a potato for the presence of buds or 'eyes', you need to think about your potato pieces in such a way that each piece has at least one eye, and that too located somewhere in the middle of each piece. You should be able to extract 2-3 or even more pieces from an average sized potato easily. Once the pieces are cut successfully, leave them at a dry indoor spot for a few hours or at most a day. This heals the surfaces of your potato cut-outs.
Choosing location
The spot that you choose for growing potatoes should have ample sunlight. If we talk about going one step further from basics, you can make sure that the garden in your soil is slightly acidic in nature. There are various PH-test kits easily available in the garden shops to test the PH of soil. These are easy to use. Although, you shouldn't get disappointed if your soil requires slight adjustments. In this case, to make your soil more acidic, you can use elemental sulfur, iron sulfate, aluminum sulfate, organic mulches etc. but it's a slow process and may take several weeks or months and rapid treatments. Not to worry even then, your potatoes this time will adapt to the recovering soil and next time you can be a better farmer!
Planting the pieces
Planting potato pieces is fun. Growing good potatoes requires seeding them about 4 inches deep and about 20-22 inches apart from each other. They should be loosely covered with soil. When you place your potato cut-outs in the ground, make sure that their eyes are facing upwards. The inner part of a potato grows roots and the stem grows from the eye. One eye on a potato means one plant.
Seedling care
When seedlings grow about 5-6 inches in height, pour and spread a layer of soil mixed with compost till the lowest leaves' height. It's okay if one or two lower leaves of each plant get fully or partially covered with the soil mixture while doing this. This layering gives extra nutrients to the plants as the stages of growth beyond this point require them to have more food. As said earlier, potato plants are very speedy in growth and require little care, which is why growing potatoes is quite exciting for new or even mature gardeners.
---------------------
Time to harvest
It takes at least and usually about 90 or so days from the day of plantation for potatoes to be ready for harvesting. Once the plants have bloomed after this period, you can either wait the flowers to age and die out or harvest right away. Dig carefully around the plant and holding the plant from the bottom of its stem, pull it out gently. You can use a garden fork, trowel or just bare hands. Be patient and search every nook and corner in the ground. You should expect the deeper potatoes to be even 18 inches in the ground.
Once you're done, wash your potatoes and supply them to your kitchen!
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Are you one of those people who find plants amazing and feel blessed to search something silly and basic to get cute, blissful pictures in return?! I am! In love with plants, and google..! ;) :D
Monday, March 22, 2010
Sprout Sprout!!
There's nothing as awesomatic and exciting as a little sprout, trying to resemble its fellow giant plants! Once you have successfully let a seed pop out, you can show off on your own terms! ;)
Sweet Pea Sprout- About a week old
Well, my show off session began there! :D
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Starting a mini nursery!
Homemade Seedling Tray
Since in average sized houses like ours in Delhi, soil and pots are a luxury, its better to play with lesser soil first before shifting the seedlings to bigger pots. While going through many websites I hopped upon the idea of seedling trays. Before I set up my own seedling tray I was working on my seedlings in half cut 2l coke bottles, which was messy of course- 1 or two seedlings getting lost and found in small messed up rooms over and over again. I hadn't been lucky enough to see seedling trays in a few great of nurseries in Delhi, but was lucky enough to find a big tray lying on the top of our old unused TV and a long piece of sponge from a sofa makeover session a couple of months back. So I built one.
Kidney Bean Seedling- about 2 weeks oldMy seedling tray has space for 15. Each square that I cut in the sponge is 3 inches in length. 500ml Soft drink bottles fit just as good as beer cans. Later on I figured why half cut beer cans are far far better than coke bottles. Bottles are funky shaped by the bottoms, they really mess up the roots of seedlings while transferring them in pots. Beer cans, on the other hand, are straight cylindrical in shape so the whole plant comes out with no damage in a single shake. And of course, if the tin cans can hold beer for years, they will surely have no problems with just a little wet soil. Although how drunk do the plants become in beer cans- I am not sure!
Seedling trays help in keeping an eye on all the seedlings at the same time and of course, making it easier to organize your kid plants. I had 6 beer cans when I made my seedling tray. Of course, I had loads of empty beer cans in the store but before the idea of beer cans struck me, I had already cut many soft drink bottles. But then on, I decided, beer cans and beer cans only! They are very easy on the roots of the seedlings.
Seedling trays help in keeping an eye on all the seedlings at the same time and of course, making it easier to organize your kid plants. I had 6 beer cans when I made my seedling tray. Of course, I had loads of empty beer cans in the store but before the idea of beer cans struck me, I had already cut many soft drink bottles. But then on, I decided, beer cans and beer cans only! They are very easy on the roots of the seedlings.
The name "Paudhonwala" for a blog
Deciding a title for a blog and finding it very much available just for you on the web can be a matter of constant frustration or vague luck. I have had the whole idea of a specifically pre-planned blog dropped entirely many a times. People are creative, people are too many. Names are not available. Coming up of a title in your head in the form of a sign from God to grabbing it on the web is next to a miracle. Lately I have been a lot into plants, seeds, manure and so on. So much that my brother in law calls me a kisaan (which in Hindi means 'farmer'), one of my girlfriends just called me paudhon waaley a couple of days back out of early morning affection one can say! Well, that's more or less, from where the title comes.
In this blog I am going to talk about whatever I grow, whatever I get killed by sun or water or insects or monsters or whatever. My aim is to discuss in full detail the stages of my plants and seedlings.
In this blog I am going to talk about whatever I grow, whatever I get killed by sun or water or insects or monsters or whatever. My aim is to discuss in full detail the stages of my plants and seedlings.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
