Harvests and other joys

The most exciting parts of vegetable gardening for me are at right at the beginning when the seeds germinate and the lovely new green plant comes up, and then later when it's HARVEST time :). This was my first harvest of greens (not counting coriander) and I was just so thrilled !!

All set to make Palak Morkuzhambu which I've never tried before but need to give respect to my home grown palak and try something radically new with it ;).





My first transplant - the squash/zucchini is doing quite well, especially the one I put in a big cement pot. One big problem with this plant though is that it is very susceptible to the leaf borer attacks as it has a hollow stem :(. Been trying my best to control using only organic methods, keeping fingers crossed! Learning more about insect pests than I ever have about the ones that attack humans though ;).

 

The beans has been climbing on beautifully to the trellis behind it. Much to my surprize I hardly had to guide it at all, it just naturally reached out and clung to the support!

That is the female zucchini flower (did not know such intimate details until I started growing gourds ;)). All gourds have male and female flowers, in which the female flowers develop into the fruit (or on top of it like in this case). If they are not pollinated naturally by the insects flying around in your garden, you can pollinate it by hand. Think I see enough insects, bees flying around in my garden, else I will need to stand over them in the nighttime(that's when the flowers open up!) with a brush in hand ;). Imagine the sight! 

Oh I am so kicked with this one. The idea came originally from hubby to reuse this old shelf for plants. So in the style of the planter boxes, we used a plasticky sack material for the lining, made holes and tadaah ! Those are okra saplings, just come up from seed, about a week old.