Everyone wants their home to have a patch of lush greenery and colorful flowers, whether it's a balcony, or the tiniest patio, or in their yard.
Everyone wants their home to have a patch of lush greenery and colorful flowers, whether it's a balcony, or the tiniest patio, or in their yard.
Getting involved in gardening, makes you watch plants grow, work in the dirt, teach your children to care and respect nature. It's a good exercise and stress relieving activity, good for your health, provides you the required vitamin D, boosts immunity (the bacteria in the soil), improves sleep quality and the sense of accomplishment is amazing.
Gardening involves in lots of activities like sowing, weeding, pruning, watering, transplanting, preparing soil, manure and chemical free pesticides, grooming, harvesting if you grow food. It attracts birds, butterflies and bees to your garden.
These activities take a lot of our time and energy with proper planning, and in normal days, we tend to skip certain activities due to lack of time.
The lockdown period is a great opportunity to keep yourself engaged in your garden, to take better care of your plants, gardening is safe and fruitful than staying inside.
Since we had two good shower of rain spells last week soil is is soft and most and it's perfect to work in the garden.
1. Weeds and weeding
Soft moist soil, makes pulling the weeds easily. It's a perfect time to weed undesirable plants with your bare hands. Manual weeding is the ultimate choice for your garden, since it avoids any sort of harmful chemicals and herbicides.
2. Renovate your lawn
You can top dress your lawn, add liquid fertilizer to replenish it with nutrients.
3. Trimming and pruning
Overgrown shrubs can be pruned now, for eg.. Rose's, hibiscus, bougainvillea, ixoras. House plants can benefit from proper repotting, and applying fertilizer.
If at all you happen to see your leafy plants sagging and getting brown tips, they are lacking humidity in the air. Make sure the soil is moist always, place clay pebbles to keep the soil moist.
4. Clean your garden during the lockdown period.
Preparing soil requires loosening the clumps, adding nutrient rich home made compost, manure or any other natural fertilizer. Take this opportunity to grow vegetables, greens, herbs too. You will have enough time to care and water the plants everyday. By the time the lockdown is over, it would have turned into a habit.
It's never too late to start growing and eating healthy and pesticide free food. Growing it yourself is the easiest way to achieve that. Holy basil, lemongrass, microgreens are easy to grow and these strengthens your immunity. You have the power to build your immune system through your own garden. Why waste it ?
5. Composting
Once you understand how to compost, it wouldn't seem like a hassle. Home made compost is an unparalleled treasure, to make your garden bloom.
6. Involve your children
More than just to spend the time having fun, it's a very healthy way to build immunity and teach kids to value and respect nature. Teach children to propagate plants, sow seeds, composting, make a herbarium with available seeds in the kitchen shelf like coriander, methi etc.
Give them something to say its theirs.