Hello lovers of Gardening! With reference to the #gardenjournal announcement for October it is my pleasure to share more stuff about on my skills putting in place to promote the growth of varieties of gardening in my area.
Today being Saturday, I took a lot of advantage to take care of my Herb 🌿 Garden, Container Garden and Backyard Gardening. It's very good to have multiple types of gardening so that they will serve many purpose in case I need them. But to some people, they think that this is labour intensive, high cost of maintenance or timely to monitor the various gardening. To me,this is my hobby and pleasure visiting them all.
My Herb Gardening [Sisal]
Saturday is resting day, so in the morning I visited my Herb 🌿 and Container Gardening which are just grown at my compound. The Herb 🌿 plant is "Sisal grass". To my community, this sisal grass has given a special name as "tea grass" or fever grass," due to the it function of treating fever and malaria 🦟. The herb is resistance to all weather conditions. Because of this, most Gardeners grow them at the back of their house. It can also be grown in pots or containers and bear soils. As you harvest or trim the leaves for cooking as herb for drinking, the leaves emerge again within a short time.
My Sisal plant grown as herb with good purpose
Monitoring my Containers Garden
My house is fenced, ideal for containers gardening. I have four (4) different plants that I raised this year when the rain started heavily in April. But the actual growing of these plants started in June. These plants are bryophyllym pinnatum, ginger and onion. Some of these plants can either be used to prepare food or used as medicinal purposes.
1."Bryophyllym pinnatum" normally referred to as life plant is noted to be used in many spiritual work and also used for curing many diseases many people belief that even the witchcraft fear it due to how the plant work.
2."Ginger" Ginger is also used for preparing soup and stew. The fruit is used as additive or preservatives in other medicine. Ginger is noted to be working on chest pain and boosting our immune system.
3."Onion"
I love onion 🧅 in all my food additive to my stew, soup and also used as salad 🥗 adding to other food like rice 🍚 and Banku.
My cultural practices & other monitoring work
I removed all leaves and the based leaves that have become brown. The rain is still drizzling so there is no need for me to irrigate them in the containers. Because these plants are in the compound, I don't find it difficult to monitor them.
My backyard garden
Lack of space to cultivate varieties of crops in my compound, I had extended my to backyard garden. This farm is mono cropping comprising: plantains and cocoyam. I didn't include cassava due to too much competition of nutrients among crops. The land is only half acre well fenced with wooden slaps due to the destructive nature of Goats 🐐 around. I just weeded the farm only 2 weeks ago, but I could see that the weeds are sprouting again. I was very conscious considering every crop to observe some challenges affecting each of them. Well, there was no much corrections to be make on them. The problems were just minor like giving stake to some of the plantains, pruning excess dead branches.
plantain growing well
The cocoyam are not go healthy as the plantain. This is due to too much canopy closure of the plantain and few trees in the farm. But, much emphasis is giving to the plantains more than that of the cocoyam. Due to excess use of agrochemicals in various lands, most cocoyam are not able to yield well. In the olden days, Virgin forest are able to bear cocoyam without cultivation, however due to over use of weedicides, most natural grown foods and mushrooms aren't able to germinate.
Cocoyam over shadow by plantains
comparison Home gardening & backyard gardening
It very easy accessibility to home gardening such as containers and pot gardening. One can always pay frequent visit the plants. monitoring, maintenance and treatment can be done one the plants most often. Since more attention is paid to grow the crops, it keeps the plants healthier and beautiful. The farmer can easily harvest without walking to long distance to get some of the farm produce. Watering of the crops can be done at any time.
But, there are possibilities of producing small quantity for family consumption due to small space, compare to that of backyard gardening where we can get reasonable moderate land to maximize production. If the farm is within an enclosed area like fenced one, then animals like free range goats cannot cause destructions. One issue affecting distance farming is the failure to pay visit to the farm frequently. However, large quantities of products can be produced.
In summary,
I was very happy having given my gardening a lot of great support. I will continue to offer more cultural practices to improve upon my Gardening.