It has been a while since my last update about my sustainable garden. In my last post, I shared pictures of the different varieties of pepper plants in the garden and I remember mentioning how well the pepper plants were thriving.
Today, I would be sharing with you one of my secret recipes for a well thriving garden, the creation of a nursery for more pepper plants and some plants I recently harvested from the garden.
First, the secret recipe. We all know that watering our plants regularly is essential for proper thriving of the plants but do you just use plain water while doing this? For a very long time, I watered all my plants with just normal water and they were all doing fairly well until they weren't any more. At some point, I observed that most of the leaves(especially the leaves from the potato plants) turned yellow and the growth of the plants was generally very slow.
I went online to do a quick research and I finally settled with the conclusion that the plants were lacking calcium. Not too long after this conclusion, I began saving my eggs shells and also storing the barks of some fruits in a container filled with water.
Once I got enough egg shells, I ground the egg shells till I got a powdery texture which I added to the water filtered from the fruit mixture. This fluid was used to water the plants in the garden and in no time, I saw visible improvements! This mixture, alongside normal water, is what I use in my garden till date and all I can say is that the plants are thriving pretty well.
Next, allow me to introduce you to the nursery made out of sachet water packs. Instead of littering the dustbins with so many sachets, I decided to fill some of them up with sand mixed with homemade manure.
I watered the sand and let it settle for a few days before planting the seeds. A few days ago, I saw a sprout and I cannot be more proud of myself. Soon enough, I would get to transplant the seedlings into bigger bags or plastic bottles and watch them thrive.
The last thing I would like to talk about is the bountiful harvests of sweet potatoes, tubers of yam and ginger.
First, the sweet potatoes. I mentioned in one of my previous posts that I was really scared about the growth of the sweet potato plants. This was because the leaves were perforated and discoloured. I was very close to giving up on the sweet potatoes because I thought they were eventually going to wilt and die but to my utmost surprise, they didn't.
The sweet potato plants–which I planted in recycled cement bags–had a major and very interesting comeback. A few days ago, I just decided to harvest them because they were due for harvesting and I was greeted by two very plump looking tubers of potato from the first bag, not to mention the rest of the bags.
The tubers of yam that were also planted in the same type of bag did extremely poorly but the good news is; the tubers of yam still germinated and that made me content. However, I would advise that tubers of yam should be planted directly in the ground and not some makeshift simulation of the ground because tubers of yam need so much space to thrive properly. Lesson learnt.
Finally, the star of the show–ginger roots! One would not believe that I got so many ginger roots just by planting a few of the roots(about ten to fifteen roots only). I cannot overemphasize how thrilled I am about the harvests and the upcoming sprouts– all things being equal.
I have learnt so many lessons from my sustainable garden and one of such lessons is perseverance. Even when the plants seem to be wilting, persevere.
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All images used belong to me and were taken with my mobile device except stated otherwise.
Liebe🤍