Experience with Adenium

 

As a compulsive ‘plant buyer’ I tend to pick up a lot plants from the flower shows & exhibitions,

without knowing or researching much in detail about them. I do it the reverse way. I buy it on an

instinct and then go about reading and searching out details about them!

One such plant I bought was an Adenium more commonly known as Desert rose.

This tall branch is my adenium

In my earlier apartment, I had a west facing window sill space for all my plants. So, the new plant

had to share a small space amongst the other plants I had picked up or propagated myself. To 

name a few plants that I possess, there are Mint & Basil plants that I propagated from the store 

bought stem, a Ficus (Peepal) tree picked from the roadside, a Mili that I got from the apartment 

complex’s common garden and some orchids.

My plant grew spindly and long (as you can see in the second picture )as there were just a few

hours of sun, which led me to research more about it. After few days of intense ‘google-ing’, I

came to know that it was called a desert rose and it was a succulent. As I got to know more about

the requirement to grow this plant, I understood that it’s most important need was to grow

receiving maximum sunlight, which I couldn’t provide due to the way sunlight falls on my

apartment. But reading further I learnt that I could prune it to give it a shorter height which may

be beneficial for the plant’s growth. And it is during all of this, that I  came across the term 

‘regular pruning’ and ‘hard pruning’ for the first time.

Pruned plant with more branches

Pruning is done to encourage plant to give out more branches. The plant will spread out rather than

just growing upward. Hard pruning is when you cut the entire top half only leaving the caudex. Ideal  

is 6 inches however people who experiment has done much more. There are many methods to get

more branches but that will be for later.

Now coming back to my plant, as I love to learn new thing the ‘hard way’, I could not resist

trying hard pruning even though I wasn’t sure were that would lead. I always like to jump first

and then look, even though this way you can fall flat on your face more times than not.

Something always pushes me to do things recklessly or let’s say ‘trial and error’ method (I have

tried umpteen times grafting another rose scion bud to a plant when I was a kid and of course all

failed(all that remained of my trials were the scars on the mother plant). I never shy away from

that, but of course it’s another story whether my plants make it or not!

So, one fine day I sat with my plant which I uprooted and realised the root had swollen up inside

the soil. I was equally excited and nervous to see and verify my new learnings. In all that

excitement I trimmed some roots, hard pruned the caudex, repotted it in soil, watered it heavily

and left it.

Hard pruned plant

 I came back to check every day only to see no activity or progress on the plant’s side. On third or

fourth day I realised the caudex was becoming softer (I did not realise what was happening). In a

few days more the rot took over and that was the end of my first Adenium trial. Waaah! I was sad

having lost my plant and another experiment gone sour! Determined, I started looking for reasons

why it rotted.

And finally, after consuming many YouTube videos on this subject and online search, I found the

reason! My greatest mistake was watering a plant with exposed and not healed roots. So, from

there I learnt few things more.

 

My first one to flower

Never cut the roots and plant it directly. I might have picked up such ideas from seeing videos by

expert who planted it in that manner but they might have taken other precautions as well! So, the

best method is (for all the newbies like me), when you prune do not repot the plant at the same

time. Make sure you trim the roots and let the plant dry and heal  for 4-5 days before repotting.

The potting media must be free draining so add 50 % sand. 

Do not water for a week. Adenium have enough water stored in their caudex to survive a long 

draught being a desert succulent.

So, these were my takeaways from my first plant ‘pruning’ experiments. I have collected a lot more

plants since then, but luckily or with more knowledge I have not lost any more of my plants! And the

learning process has been awesome and I have been rewarded with amazing blooms!!

Mango Thokku Pickle / Grated Mango Pickle

Mango Thokku Pickle / Grated Mango Pickle

As I have earlier mentioned, I have been in the South of India for more than a decade, first for my college studies in Andhra and then in Kerala. So I have been influenced by its food not all but some have become my favourites. Apart from a variety of yummy vegetarian curries that I love so much, the tangy, spicy and hot pickles are absolutely my favourite!... and by God what varieties!

My pickle ‘love story’ began in my college hostel days. As we had to stay in the hostel for the whole academic year we stocked a lot of bottled stuffs from home to last a while. And so did all of my roommates, who came from almost all parts of India! And the main trade that went inside the hostel was –‘the pickle exchange’! And it was at one of these pickle exchanges, that I was introduced to ‘Mango Avakkai’ pickle! It was love at first bite! That taste of that masala drenched, sour and crunchy cut pieces of raw mango dripping off all that gingili oil ; oh, it was heaven!. I’m pretty sure everyone who studied there will have a bunch of stories about their own late night ‘pickle-rice’ rendezvous.

Today I will not talk about that recipe but a new one which is easy to make and less time consuming.

Ingredients

Raw mango 2 nos 1 kg

Gingili oil 1 cup/sesame seed oil

Roasted fenugreek powder 1.5 tbsp

Roasted mustard seed powder 1.5 tbsp + ½ tsp

Chilli powder 3 tbsp

Garlic 10 to 12 cloves (big) if using small double it

Curry leaf a sprig

Hing /asafoetida ½ tsp

Turmeric ½ tsp

Salt to taste

Method

First roast fenugreek and mustard in low flame, don’t burn it set aside.

Peel the mango and grate it .I used Totapuri mangoes; you can use any raw mango.

Heat the oil and splutter mustard add garlic and curry leaf, the original recipe did not have garlic and mustard but I like the Andhra style pickle so I added these two ingredients. Cook in medium flame, see to that it does not burn.

Once the garlic fries a bit add the grated mango and sauté for two minutes add turmeric and chilli powder and sauté for another two minutes. Chilli powder is as per your heat tolerance . Check to see if the mango has cooked.

Add hing and the remaining masalas mix well cook in low flame for a min or two. Switch off the flame and let it cook transfer it to a clean jar.

Pickle is ready to use.

See you again with one of my favourites 😁

Sprouting Fenugreek/Methi

Fenugreek sprouts

I had posted about fenugreek stir-fry earlier, so now I am going to post how to make the sprouts. Its super easy and is ready by day four. It is not necessary to wait that long however as I do not have access to Methi greens so I let them grow a bit more so that I can use it to make Methi paratha which is normally made using Methi leaves.Leafy greens are a rarity in Trivandrum in normal times,now that the Corona (Covid19)has take over and we are holed up indoors, we don't even get to see the normal amaranth overgrown greens.So here is to the microgreens which has become a regular at my dinner table.As long as I have something healthy, pesticide free,I am happy to use it in my cooking.

Be it methi paratha,sprout stir fry or just as salad I relish it.

Lets start.....

Take one fourth cup of fenugreek. 

Wash it and soak it overnight in a bowl of water.

Next morning the seeds will swell twice its size, rinse it and put it in a big strainer. When I made moong sprouts I used to rinse the seeds once a day to wet it, however while researching to sprout soybean I got to know they rinse the seeds often, as often as in two hours gap.Which means even at night 😊 you can miss the night part it still grows well.

This keeps the micro greens clean, hydrated and plump.Below picture at the end of day one .

Run it under the water in the sink as often as you remember, its ok if you forget the 2 hour gap but don’t let it dry out.At the end of day three they have grown so much.

Keep them hydrated and your sprouts are ready rinse it in a bowl to remove all the seed covers and store it in a ziplock bag once the water has drained off.It stays in a fridge for a week.

Happy Sprouting !

Gardening

"Never underestimate the healing power of a quiet moment in the garden"-Nature Hills Nursery.

My love for plants, trees and gardens must have been ingrained in my heart and soul since I was a little kid. Because I can’t remember a time when I was not interested in them! And even though I can’t track back to an exact time when it all started, the  clearest of all those early memories are of my ‘Baje’s(granpa) garden. When I say garden, do not get any ideas of garden that was grandiose in nature! Perched on the mountain slope, as most homes in Darjeeling, facing the glorious Kanchenjunga range, our garden wrapped itself around our little house, terraced and winding like a python resting after a glorious meal. Even though my Baje’s garden wasn’t huge, everyone liked it and said he had a green thumb!

I could still vividly see the delightful time we got to spend in his garden planting little saplings of cucumber, pumpkin, squash, mustard greens, beans and corns, watering them, dirtying our hand in mud, eating baby cucumbers even before they start to swell and my grandfather chasing me away from the garden! I would sneak behind him to open up the ripe Cape gooseberry (sometimes half done) pick and pop it into my mouth and leave the cover intact! Of course, he would find out and chase me out again. He must have known what ‘the little rat’ did in his garden 😀. It’s with such fondness that I remember those times with him and even though he passed away in the 80’s, those memories still brings a smile to my face.

Kale

My father must have inherited that passion for gardening from my baje, but his passion was ten times higher! And he started experimenting with wider variety of flowers and plants.As I had to help out with this increase in 'chores',with his increase in 'experiments', the memories are always not great😅.But I learnt a lot from him all of which I'm able to apply now in my garden!

My dad had around 10 to 15 bonsai ranging from 2 to 10 years, some of them were my favourite! he not just had a robust collection of bonsai but also had a huge collection of Cymbidium orchid which he would collect and bring home each time on his official visit to different parts of Darjeeling.And I helped him prune,train the branches and re-pot as well.After all the years of hard work, at one point he felt it was cruelty to plant them in small pots so he replanted all of them on the ground.

This maple shown in the picture here, once a bonsai,has grown into a huge tree ,standing tall in our small garden!

In spring my dad would take us to the forest to collect the forest leaf to make compost. On bright sunny days, cicadas crying loud and hard (that sound to this day, reminds me of home!) all of us, the family of four, would head to the nearby forest with sacks for a day of hard labour(or at least I thought so then).

He would collect the compost and fill the sacks as per the weight we could handle. The easy part was going down to the forest as you walk or rather run downhill, all boisterous and chirpy!. The return on the other hand was all uphill, a herculean task! One that would make our hearts thump so hard that you literally feel it in your chest, like in the 'looney toons' cartoons; thump, thump thump,...😵.

One of biggest challenge in maintaining a garden, especially in a high altitude hilly terrain is – Water! And Darjeeling has a notorious history of water shortage, even back then when the population was less but more so now,as the population has exploded beyond comprehension around the town!. Water was and still is an important commodity to be used sparingly for everyday use, let alone for gardening! Imagine having rows and rows of plants to water. Who would get the water from the springs? Yup! You guessed it right, me😂! I could write and write stories titled’ adventures of a water carrier’ but that is for another day. It was a horrible and fun job at the same time, walking all the way up and standing in queue with the whole village, waiting for our turn to fill the jerry cans.

Anyways, coming back to the flowers, my dad had three seasonal flowers on display every year. First to bloom would be Cineraria in the springs along with the perennial ones like Cyclamen, Gloxinia and Primula.  Planting seeds would start in September for spring display. So by March we had a huge display of around 30 to 40 flowering plants .Every morning as the sun goes up, we could hear the buzzing of honey bees and house flies in equal numbers fighting for space for the precious nectar! So imagine the amount of compost required for the flowers, phew!

Squash from the garden

One of my foraged plants from the forest long ago flowers every spring inviting all kind of birds.

By the time we were enjoying these amazing display of cinerarias in full bloom, the begonias would start popping out from their bulbs! So potting them would start and we had to place it in every inch of space possible. These plants would take around two months to grow, so by monsoon these delicate beauties would be showing off their outstanding brilliance.The stands outside the house would slowly change the ‘tenants’ for the next season.The cineraria producing seeds for the next year would slowly leave, giving way for the new comer 'begonias'!.

And then around June, we start with taking chrysanthemum cuttings from the old plants. Alongside the begonias these autumn flowering perennials would root and establish strong shoots for the autumn flowering. Along with the chrysanthemum in the pots, beautiful marigolds will be competing with them in the garden or anywhere they have sprouted.And even though by autumn, things starts getting cold and gloomy, these flowers would bring so much cheer and joy to everyone of us!

Magnolia

By writing so much about these flowers, all I am trying to say is how much work I had to do 😁..

Now looking back, it is not the hard work that I remember but the colourful riot they brought to my life and the joy and wonder they gave to everyone passing by! That feeling can never be replicated. Happy Gardening!

Bhuteko Farsi ko biya ko sukkha achar/Roasted pumpkin dry achar

Farsi ko biya ko achar

I have been thinking for long, by long I mean years and years to do some research about Nepali traditional foods. Whenever we type Nepali food, mostly food from Nepal is displayed in the internet. I belong to a small Himalayan district in the state of West Bengal, India, so basically I am an Indian Nepali. Our traditional foods have almost disappeared from our table we are more influenced by other cultures. Look at Momo aka dumpling, it was introduced by the Tibetan refugees and now it has become one of our most loved foods.

There is a joke in Darjeeling, before the joke I  will tell you that eating out is not in our culture majority of the people still have their main meals at home. It’s the snacking that happens in the market .I remember in the 80’s when I  was a kid my parents would take us for a bowl of thukpa (soupy noodles) or a plate of momo after a movie. That was it!  So here is the joke (weirdness of Darjeeling jokes, mostly its only the locals who understand ha ha).... Finally The joke.... we (we as in people of Darjeeling) enter a restaurant and the waiter gives us the menu we take 10 minutes to look at the menu from top to bottom reading all the dishes the hotel has to offer and at last we order a plate of momo ha ha ha .....

 I am not here to revive our food culture but I would like to find out more so that they do not disappear from the face of this earth. I am more curious at this point.

Growing food in the hilly terrain is a challenge and people make do with whatever they have. We don’t have the luxury of beautiful ingredients but look for nutritious and fulfilling meals. So I am in search of those simple fulfilling meals of the past. But for now I would like to give a simple recipe of the humble pumpkin seed which has emerged as a super food of today. For people in olden days it was to utilise every bit of what they had.

For this recipe I have made changes to the original recipe by adding skin removed pumpkin seed you get in the market and replaced lemon juice with chaat masala.

Ingredients

Pumpkin seed 1 cup(whole seed with cover)+ 1 table spoon of pumpkin seed (skin removed)

An inch of dry ginger

Garlic 5-6 cloves

Red chilly powder 1 tablespoon (or as per your heat tolerance)/or whole dry red chilly 4 nos

Sesame seed 1 tablespoon

Chaat masala 1 tsp (please adjust to taste it has to be a hint of tanginess)

Salt to taste

Method

Remove the pumpkin seed from the pumpkin wash it and let it dry. You can collect it over a period of time. What I do is collect wash, dry and roast slightly in oven and store till I get another batch of pumpkin seed .If you cut a big pumpkin you can collect at a go.

I had half roasted the pumpkin seed about 5 to 7 mins in microwave oven before roasting in the gas .You can do it directly in the gas stirring it so that it does not burn in one side only in low flame. Roast it evenly till you start to hear the popping sound of the seeds.I added the whole dry ginger 1 whole chilly and garlic as well when I roasted the seeds.

Remove from heat and let it cool.

Dry grind all the ingredients together till you get a fine powder, taste for salt and the tanginess and adjust .Store in clean glass jar. You can keep it outside or in fridge for longer life.

Enjoy !

Stir fry fenugreek sprouts

Fenugreek sprouts stir-fry

Fenugreek also known as methi is an annual plant whose leaves we consume .The seed is used as a spice in Indian cooking and has lots of health benefits. The leaves are used as curry and are very important winter greens in Northern India. Aloo methi being the most popular of the dishes. Methi leaves can be added to wheat flour dough to make methi paratha. The dried leaves are called kasuri methi and are added to curries like the chole or chickpea curry. It is beneficial and may control blood sugar, heart burn, inflammation, helps milk production in lactating mothers and it has side effects as well. Lets not dwell into medical uses anything used in moderation does not harm the body.

Did you know you can sprout it?

Yes, we can.

We can consume it every day as salad, just add salt and a squeeze of lemon juice. I can just chomp off (as my 8 year old says to anything he likes) any day but beware it tastes a bit bitter.

I sometimes make this sprout and as the shelf life of the sprouts are not very long, say about a week at most in the fridge; we have to consume it fast.

By the way I have not told you that I am a Nepali, born and brought up in Darjeeling. I have lived a decade in North while studying and now married to a South Indian so my cooking can be a mix of all types. Not that i am an expert nor was I interested in cooking while growing up, but somehow along the way i have picked up some skill to cook decently. For a long time i thought of starting a food blog but i know i will not keep it up same with my travel journals which i have not updated since 10 years(but that happens to be the time since my status changed to ‘married’ ha ha...such is life your priorities change and so on....

The only positive remark about my cooking when i was in school and back in Darjeeling was my brother who told me once “you cook anything as long as its sweet i will eat it”.

As i am writing about food let me not miss this line as well before i write about sprout stir-fry. After i started to work i stayed with my brother in Delhi and he would always prefer home cooked food from there my food journey began.Quite late in life non the less it started and i am thankful for that.

 My grandfather and father both are good at cooking. I will leave that to next time.....

Here is my simple recipe of stir fried methi sprouts.

Ingredients ( i am not much of a follower of proportions )

1 big onion or 2 medium onions

3 medium tomatoes

4 crushed clove of garlic

An inch of ginger julienned

2 green chillies (as per your heat tolerance)

Salt to taste

3 tablespoon oil

And a cup of methi sprouts.

Method

Heat oil add ginger and garlic stir fry a bit till it becomes light brown add chillies and onion sauté till translucent. Then add tomato add salt as the tomato cooks faster. Once tomato is mushy add the sprouts .Sauté for 2 to 3 minutes and switch off the flame. Add coriander leaf for garnish.

It’s done!  Easy and healthy serve with hot rice or roti.

Birds of Darjeeling

CHESTNUT CROWNED LAUGHING THRUSH




I see quite a few birds around my house so i had it in mind why don't i write something about them as well.The most difficult part is to get a nice and clear picture of them.They are so elusive and fast ,just cant stick to one place at least for me till i can take some cute pictures of them.I have managed to click some pictures of them and i am going to try again and again till i can get good pictures to show around.
I had no clue about the names in English ,not that i know a great deal in Nepali he he he...:)




I got interested to know more about them once i followed a thread in India mike a travel forum and the thread starts with:- Which bird is this ? The experts gives us the name and their cry .So i somehow started getting interested to post some of mine pictures as well just to know there names.




Now i know few names of the birdies and would like to share with people who might be interested to know about them.
The first one is Chestnut-crowned laughing thrush i don't know why the name laughing thrush because i cant make out it laughing.I will not even write its scientific name because i cant identify with name.
here is the picture .



These birds are found in the altitudes ranging from 1000 to 3400 m.It is found in nepal,Bhutan,North east India (himalayas),Burma,china.Read they are extinct in pakistan.