Vegetables, vegetables, vegetables

Vegetables, vegetables, vegetables

2 April 2019, Tuesday

by Anita Bhattarai

Those who have been with us for a long time know that we plant sooooooooo many plants! We have planted many types of flowers, fruit and vegetables. We plant the seeds or saplings, take care of all the plants by watering them and adding fertilizers, weeding them and putting them in sunlight if needed or protecting them from too much water.

Our flowers are in our small garden patch and all our vegetables are at the back kitchen garden patch. The fruit that we plant are taken care of until they are good sized saplings and they are taken to the village to plant. We have done avocado, lemon, mulberry and camphor trees.

 

The flowers are great to look at and to study: ovules, stigma, pollen…. We take care of the vegetables until they are ripe and ready and then we eat them. We eat the leaves as in spinach, vines as in pumpkin, fruit as in eggplant and squash, and roots as in radish.

 

Before I was even here, the spiny babbler kids had planted a lot of avocado seeds and had given 52 avocado trees to be planted in a village in Dhading. The most recent vegetables we planted was spinach. We took care of them, saw them germinate, we weeded and gave them water, we picked away the plants that had grown too thick, we transplanted the saplings to make sure distances were good and we put fertilizer. 

When they fully grew, we ate what we had taken care of for months and when we ate our lunch and dinner using what we had planted and taken care of, we had a very satisfying feeling. Right now our kitchen garden patch is pretty empty as the spinach that we were eating is finished. There is still lettuce that we eat and also Zoya who is six months old eats. 

There is celery, shallot, aloe, onion but we wanted more so we decided to plant more vegetables. We went to Lagankhel and bought lots of different vegetable saplings. We bought chilies, eggplants and tomatoes. Sabita didi helped us dig up the land and made holes at appropriate distance. We planted the saplings in the holes and covered the roots gently with soil.

Everybody helped with the planting and everyone got to plant several plants. Then we watered the plants. We will take great care of the saplings till they are fully grown by giving them plenty of water, making sure they are healthy. We are finding ladybugs and we are putting them in the flowers that have aphids on them.

 

I am happy really we are getting to eat what we grew by ourselves. Pallav sir says that our work contributes thousands of rupees to our school. He said that we grew more than Rs. 4000 worth of spinach alone in the last three months. Yay!