Gardening is very costly. If you own a garden then you will definitely admit this. But most importantly it is very difficult to keep all of your plants healthy. Many experts say this plant needs that, that plant needs this. Shopkeepers will say that don’t use that rather use this. Everybody say according to their convenience. As a result, gardeners are confused and then forced to manage their garden whatever they have in terms of knowledge & products. There are many types of NPK fertilizers, micronutrients, fungicides, insecticides, PGR etc available in the market. But all those are not available in the local market. So it becomes very hard to develop a garden of healthy & happy plants. That is why I started to prefer natural gardening.
The difference between farming & gardening is that you have only one or two types of vegetables/fruits in your farmyard. But there are almost every possible types of plant in a 5-year-old garden. Many gardeners also include flowering plants to vegetable plants and vegetable plants to fruit plants. So it is almost impossible to keep your plants healthy with one or two products for fertilizer & pesticides. Apart from that nowadays there are so many specialist products available in the market which gives gardeners nothing but a headache.
What to apply to which plants and when?
This makes gardening super complicated and costly. Gardeners lost the fun in gardening because nowadays it becomes almost rocket science.
I believe plants are part of nature and nature does not need much human intervention. In fact, it does not need any human assistance if you grow plants on the ground and stay away from the land. One year after that you will see there is a jungle and all plants a super healthy. Haha! Is this not true?
But as you are growing this with a goal so we have to intervene but not much. We can even follow techniques of natural farming in gardening. I started following natural gardening during this pandemic situation and growing my vegetables.
I am happy that I adopted the natural gardening method. Now my plants are healthy when I am spending less.
Inputs for natural gardening
- Fertilizers: Use 25% compost & a handful of neem cake in every pot for every type of plant. One month after planting a plant in the pot, I start applying liquid fertilizer prepared with mustard cake/groundnut cake thrice a month.
- Micronutrients & PGR: Extracts of fermented lentils work well as micronutrients. Extracts of fermented fruit also work well as a plant growth regulator. Jaggery is used to make fermentation faster. I will discuss the method that I follow in detail in near future. I prefer to apply micronutrients & PGR once a month each.
- Insecticides: I prepare any of these homemade natural insecticides for the whole season. Those are – dashparni ark; neemastra; agniastra; Brahmastra. Those are easy to make. I generally prepare dashaprni ark at a time for the whole season. It is not just a good insecticide but also works well for fungus & bacteria. I apply it thrice a month.
- Fungicides: one-month-old buttermilk works great as a fungicide. I keep a piece of copper in the buttermilk for a month and then use it for the whole season. It is a good fungicide. But at the same time, it works well as an insecticide too. I apply it almost after every 10 days.
It makes gardening super simple and helped me to do gardening with minimum knowledge and maximum benefits. Now I can say I know nothing about gardening but still getting plenty of homegrown flowers/vegetables/fruits.
In case you know so many things and an expert in gardening/farming, you are also ready to spend money and apart from all, you want to get more than a plant can produce naturally. Then you should definitely follow modern methods of gardening/farming.
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