During and after the lockdown

[hydrovac]

Just wondering how long it takes to water all the plants

It takes approx two hours to water them all... i do it in a staggered way.

Lovely garden! Must be an effort to tend to it. But the joy of seeing that greenery and enjoying the fruits must be more than compensating.
I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but the plastic drums don’t go well with the bounty of nature there - both in terms of the material and the color. Aren’t there equivalent alternatives made of clay? Or may be just soil beds?

Thanks, the plastic containers are chosen for reducing the weight, portability and durability... can't do much about the color though.

@hydrovac Why haven't you tried the drip irrigation, since I think watering is quite laborious.

I enjoy watering them personally... didn't want it too mechanized.

Your garden reminded me of permaculture. A design concept that enables one to identify patterns , energy flows in ones space and design a garden that is aesthetically pleasing , sustainable and yield bearing while not being too taxing on ones time and efforts.
I once met a permaculture resource person many years ago. He used to conduct workshops alternately in Darjeeling and Bangalore. Now off course such expertise is available on the internet. He told me that permaculture gardens are not meant to wow you with a lot of colour - energy and effort intensive gardens like the Miracle Garden of Dubai are an antithesis of permaculture- but rather they are habitable spaces in which you are inside the garden , living in it, rather than looking at it or visiting it occasionally from the outside.
Most permaculture principles are not new. They have been a part of the accumulated vernacular wisdom handed down through the ages - like growing climbing legumes on maize plants ( legumes help fix nitrogen while the maize provides support).
But its advantage is that it has organised these principles and practices into a body of knowledge which one can use to identify what is available and possible for ones garden- irrespective of whether that garden is a luxurious plant paradise spread over many levels of terrace spaces or a box of greens in the kitchen window sill.

+1 moktan
as is often the case with permaculture, it all comes back to observation: noticing what is already there, rather than what we want it to look like, or think it ‘should’ look like... labeling farms as “permaculture farms” seems to me to be an attempt to set them apart, based on ideology rather than action.

Permaculture doesn’t teach you how to farm... it can teach you how to look at things from different angles and see different perspectives, but it doesn’t teach you how to lay hedges, or put up a fence.
I learnt how to farm on my own way, and am still learning.

Although permaculture is often thought of as being about gardening and farming, it actually applies to any aspect of life.

...

 

[skroderider]

Few positives about the lockdown is a lot of people have taken the responsibility of sharing domestic duties and realising that at times domestic duties are tougher than duties at their work place.

Precisely. Personally, I always used to equally divide domestic duties - now the overall quantity has increased due to the absence of the maid. I hope it's a good lesson for us men and a general improvement in societal attitudes towards more equality.

 

[ssf]

now the overall quantity has increased due to the absence of the maid.

Just playing the devils advocate here. What about the maid ? How is she taking care of her family ?

My maid is live in. My cook is not. She is paid her salary though.

My mom is my greatest cook. Unfortunately, she is 85 and as of late quite under the weather. Hence, my wife, who has never cooked a day in her life, is now turning out to be a wonderful cook. Me, am still the lazy old bum who does nothing to contribute to the family except finish what is cooked.

Don't get me wrong. Am no millionaire. Just an ordinary Joe in an ordinary family which until recently had both the husband and wife out of the house for the better part of the day.

 

[skroderider]

Just playing the devils advocate here. What about the maid ? How is she taking care of her family ?

Fair question. We are paying her salary, even if she is not coming. Her husband apparently is a good for nothing and she is more or less the sole breadwinner in her family.

 

[Nitin K]

Precisely. Personally, I always used to equally divide domestic duties - now the overall quantity has increased due to the absence of the maid. I hope it's a good lesson for us men and a general improvement in societal attitudes towards more equality.

Absolutely, Women are generally better with time management & multitasking than men.

 

[moktan]

There was this interesting report in the guardian today about how botanists are going around cataloguing weeds in chalk. It’s one of those Covid19 lockdown feel good stories.

'Not just weeds': how rebel botanists are using graffiti to name forgotten flora

Pavement chalking to draw attention to wild flowers and plants in urban areas has gone viral across Europe – but UK chalkers could face legal action

www.theguardian.com

It’s a wonderful thing to be able to name things. Early on in his book Thinking fast and slow , the author says one of the reasons why he has written the book is to provide us with a vocabulary of terminology to describe why someone behaves or makes decisions the way he does ( confirmation bias, halo effect , sunken cost fallacy etc ) .
And in a Mubi movie that I just watched , Papusza , the eponymous protagonist ( a Gypsy poet ) says something to the affect that the words - horse , tree , mountain ( I am making these up) perhaps do not describe or define entities , maybe we are just designed to agree on them.
Now going back the the botany exercise described in the guardian , I was reminded of this wonderful book Up In The Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell. There is a story called Mr Hunter’s Grave. What caught my attention was this description -
The older graves were covered with trees and shrubs. Sassafras and honey locust and wild black cherry were the tallest, and they were predominant, and beneath them were chokeberry, bayberry, sumac, Hercules’ club, spice bush, sheep laurel, hawthorn, and witch hazel. A scattering of the newer graves were fairly clean, but most of them were thickly covered with weeds and wild flowers and ferns. There were scores of kinds. The majority were the common kinds that grow in waste places and in dumps and in vacant lots and in old fields and beside roads and ditches and railroad tracks, and I could recognize them at a glance. Among these were milkweed, knotweed, ragweed, Jimson weed, pavement weed, catchfly, Jerusalem oak, bedstraw, goldenrod, cocklebur, butter-and-eggs, dandelion, bouncing Bet, mullein, partridge pea, beggar’s-lice, sandspur, wild garlic, wild mustard, wild geranium, rabbit tobacco, old-field cinquefoil, bracken, New York fern, cinnamon fern, and lady fern.

I have always envied Mitchell for his vocabulary , this ability to name everything he sees with such encyclopaedic flourish.
Fortunately for lesser mortals there are iPhone and android apps to help us do the same. So armed with my phone camera and some plant identifier apps I went around traipsing in the back garden.
Though I don‘t have Mitchell’s taxonomic certitude , these are the results of my tentative foray into cataloguing the weed inventory in my small garden.
I came up with - dutch clover, red mulberry, common plantain , fairy lily , sheepbit and tasteless stonecrop.


mai

 

[mpw]

 

[Vivek Batra]

So my "after lockdown" period starts. Back to home after full 2 months. Now gonna spend my time with my system. So good to be back home.

Stay safe. Keep enjoying music.

 

[heart_hacker]

This lockdown has taught us many things surely..........