Terrace gardening has become a quite popular nowadays. In urban India, houses doesn't have space for lawns and yards to start a garden.
Here comes the option of terrace gardening. Grow your vegetables, flowers, herbs etc. That gives you independence from buying vegetables from other vendors, make your home environment healthy and aesthetic.
An engineer by profession, Kusini Jyothi Priyanka is a resident of Bhadrachalam, Telangana grows 20 varieties of seasonal flowers, and a broad variety of vegetables in 700 pots on her 600 sq ft terrace.
A nature lover and an avid urban gardener, Kusini Jyothi says “When you like a flower, you pluck it. But, when you love it, you water it daily and let it flourish,”.
On her 600 sq ft terrace, she is growing 20 varieties of seasonal flowers in 700 flower pots.
Her deep passion for growing plants, consistent efforts, and dedication helped her to raise and manage the plants.
Today, taking care of her garden has become her full time job, Priyanka says that she would rather do this than anything else.
How it started :
Priyanka was passionate about gardening since her childhood. Her mother use to grow many plants such as mangoes, custard apple, guava, pomegranate in their backyard and today they have grown into large, healthy trees.
“After I completed my engineering degree, in 2015, I moved to Hyderabad to work with a corporate company. During my time there, my lifestyle turned stressful. I would work until the late hours, not eat healthily, and skip meals. In 2018, I decided to move back to my hometown and take care of my health.
The first step I took on that journey was to eat healthy and nutritious food. To do that, I decided to grow my vegetables,” says Priyanka.
That year only, to grow tomatoes she bought 30 flower pots and saplings from a nursery near her home.
“I made a potting mix with garden soil, cocopeat, cow dung, vermicompost and rice husk, which adds nutrition to the soil and enables water retention. Within a few months, most of the flower pots had tomatoes growing in them, and I not only used it for cooking all my meals that month but also shared it with my neighbours for free. I started growing tomatoes because I wanted to start with growing something simple.”
After being successful in her first experiment, she decided to grow other vegetables and in the next few months, she got 100 pots to grow cabbage, tomatoes, ladyfingers, cauliflower, ginger, brinjal, capsicum, peas, turmeric, some leafy greens, and more.
Growing flowers :
Though her vegetable garden was a success, and she had started to eat healthily, Priyanka wanted to add more colours to the terrace. She always enjoyed looking at pretty flowers. If it were on the side of the road or in someone’s wedding, she would pluck a few and try to identify the name of it.
“At one wedding, I came across very exotic flowers. After looking it up online, I learnt that it was a white exotic lily. By this time, I had an entire list of flowers I wanted to grow such as Amazon lily, oriental lily, freesias, frangipani and more. But, these saplings or flower bulbs were not available at the local nurseries. So I went online and sourced it from a vendor in Delhi who was selling a variety of flowers. I planted each variety in a minimum of 15 pots, and within the next six months, I had around 700 flower pots on my terrace” says Priyanka.
The 9-inch pots are placed close to each other so space is never an issue for her.The pots are kept in a systematic manner, with enough space for her to walk alongside them. A total of 20 varieties of flowers which includes lilies, marigolds, jasmine, chrysanthemums, orchids, and more are being grown in her garden.
It takes around eight hours of hard work to maintain her garden. Her day begins at 4 AM so that she can watch her flowers bloom, and enjoy the sun rise. Then she spends about one hour watering her plants and talking to them.
I do not have the funds to install a drip irrigation system, so I water the plants using a mug and a big bucket. But I never feel tired. In the evening, I have tea or coffee with my plants and again spend a few hours admiring the flowers and checking for any pests or insects. I consider myself very lucky because till now there have been no infections on any of my plants,” says Priyanka when asked about whether she uses any organic pesticides or insecticides for her plants or not.
Sharing the flowers :
Priyanka regularly shares pictures of her garden on her social accounts. Seeing her flowers, many of her followers would ask if they could get a few propagations or bulbs of the flowers growing in her garden.
Priyanka would carefully take a bulb, pack it along with coco peat in a newspaper and send it across through a courier service. The price of the bulb totally depends on the type of the flower, weight of the package and the delivery charges. Many people have grown healthy blooms using the propagations of her flowers.
Priyanka believes that every human is sent on the earth with a purpose, and hers is to grow healthy food, beautiful flowers, and share that with others fellow beings.
Today, she claims she has 1000 number of plants on her terrace , and she plans to expand her garden by adding hanging pots and developing a vertical garden.
Credits : thebetterindia.com
