Sow What ?

People in their admiration for a colorful garden, vegetable patch, or bountiful harvest exclaim that the gardener is endowed with a Green Thumb.  An avid gardener will tell you the thumb and nails are anything but green with stains of the muddy earth and associated fragrances. Gardening or tending to a garden is a skill acquired like any other skill that involves education, training, and practice with many failures and successes with learning being a continuum- intuitive at that. It is not a talent one is born with. While a " G reen Thumb " compliment is well-meaning and most encouraging, I am overcome by a primordial longing to narrate the travails with weeds alongside non-sprouting seeds, Aphids making merry with the  Mealybugs, Ants, Rodents, and Monkeys in a jamboree, Curling leaves, falling-flowers, root rot, and what not! Green Thumb as such is no superpower or natural endowment and at best can be an inherent aptitude. Green Thumb is not what you are born with as is be...

It is the lone Potato somedays. A small bunch of Palak on other days. Two hundred grams of  Beans, Three Brinjals, Quarter kilogram of  Broad Beans or a Bonanza of a kilogram of  Tomato on many days. Quite a few days we harvest seeds. And every 45 days we harvest black gold or compost from our kitchen waste. Compost harvest 4 pots of black gold The happiness with each harvest and the contentment with the yield is the same  be it vegetables,seeds or compost. It is never about the quantity of harvest or yield. It is the promise of each seed that showed up. Here are a few harvest pictures, that never fail to inspire me on no-harvest days to keep calm and garden on. Palak seeds Seed Harvest For my pooja...