Summer harvest

And here is the harvest from my garden:

Okra, brinjals, Tori, and bitter melons...all my favourite vegetables.
Today I will be harvesting the amaranth greens and possibly spinach.
And the lemon tree has couple of lemons and guavas are developing on the guava tree.  All in all it has been a good Summer. Now if it would only rain a tiny bit so that the temperature goes down a little bit...

Dahlias from my garden

Spring is officially over.  Officially because we had such a wishy-washy winter this year.  The petunias, pansies, nastritiums and the brachyscomes did bloom but the narcisscus gave up half way through and the tulips and daffodils did a no show.  The dahlias bloomed and as Holi was over and the heat has started ratcheting up, we cut the remaining dahlias. Nanku Ram handed them over to me saying I better put it in a jar. 

The removal of the dahlias has given a new lease to the bhindi plants. We hope to have plenty of okra this summer.
The campus, as usual, looks pretty with the bougainvilla flowering everywhere.

This summer I have done away with zinnias. Instead I have planted sunflowers and today I told Nanku Ram to get Gerberas. Nanku Ram, though, is more keen on vegetables. So he has planted tori, bitter gourd, ghiya, chillis, tomatoes, spinach, amaranth, and brinjals in addition to okra. Let us see what comes up this summer.

Spring

Winter was really a disappointment this year. It was really cold for barely a week.  The rest of the time it was declared winter simply because there was no sun for most of the days.  And when it did put in an appearance it was the watery kind.  Today, on the other hand, the sun is really shining and the poppies in my garden have begin to bloom.  And I got to see the first dahlia of the season in my garden.

This year the nasturtiums took over with a vengeance. I did purchase a packet of seed but never got the opportunity to sow them because the seeds left over from the last year started sprouting and before I know they had taken over the entire garden. 


The other flower that has really done well is the alyssum.  The petunias have not started flowering yet.   I expect within a week they would do.
The strawberries were a disappointment to me but not to Sammy, the squirrel, who inhabits my garden. He has been gorging on them.  The rock pigeons too appreciated the strawberry plants by roosting on them in December and January, thus, destroying half of them.
The rose really excelled this year. The bush was covered with masses of pink and white roses bringing in much needed colour during the drab months of December and January.
The vegetable garden did okay. I had three crops of spinach and lettuce and one crop of argula and fenugreek. We have planted fenugreek for another round of crop before the heat sets in.  The cauliflower as earlier blogged were eaten up by the Nilgai.  We tried once more after putting in the fence.  Then the porcupines gorged on the plants so we gave up.

Of birds and wasps

The past Sunday when I went to water my plants in the balcony I noticed a small nest with two eggs next to the pot of fern.  It was the laughing dove who had used the space to build a nest.  I would think it a little bit inconvenient but turns out that the bird was smart.  From the outside the nest is completely hidden situated as it is between two pots both bearing ferns.  The dove, apparently the male does the incubation, has been sitting on the nest for 6 days.   It will be another week to 10 days before the eggs hatch. 

The upstairs neighbour of the dove is the rock pigeon who just finished giving birth about a month back.  The pigeons take great pleasure in strewing the balcony with all kinds of rubbish.  As the balcony is off-limits for Sumitra it is in an appalling mess.
 On the other balcony inside the cupboard that I built to keep all the discarded newspaper and gardening stuff the wasps have built a nest.  I have to be carefully while putting the newspapers into the cupboard as they have a nasty habit of stinging when least expected.
The rains this year, mercifully, have been plenty for Delhi.  The chrysanthemums have been planted. The hibiscus are blooming and I am looking forward to the parijatam tree to blossom sometime next month. In the kitchen garden front, apart from the spinach,  this year I am experimenting with cucumbers and tomatoes.  The only disappointment has been the rajanigandha or sampangi plant which has not bloomed at all.
Finally I got around to making pineapple upside-down cake. It is one my favourite cake and I experimented using fresh pineapple. It came out good or at least Sumitra's two sons enjoyed it.

Warming up with soups

Now that days have become shorter and evening cooler, I tend to include more soups in my diet. Winter is always delightful with wide range of vegetables. On my grocery day I picked up fresh peas and carrots so today I decided to make peas-carrot soup. It was simple. I gave tadka of jeera (cumin) and sauteed one onion, one carrot and few shelled peas. I then added water and allowed the vegetables to slowly cook. I flip-flopped about what spices to add then decided on using sambar powder. So that too went into the pot along with salt. Once the vegetables were done, I allowed it to cool (I learnt the hard way that patience in this matter is always a virtue or else you will end up with soup splashed all over the kitchen and one self).  Once cooled, I pureed it in the blender. Before eating I warmed it up and added garnish of coriander leaves.
Here it is:

As an aside, Nanku Ram today decided that we should plant coriander in the garden.  Sumithra has been telling him to plant it but he has been resisting the idea. Today he finally decided that on Sunday we will plant coriander. So hopefully, this winter I will have fresh dhaniya from the garden.
The garden is now being readied for winter flowers. We pruned the hibiscus and the pavazha malli tree.  Plots have now been prepared to plant nastriums, allysium, poppies, pansies, and of course petunias.  We have started the seeds for all except pansies (which failed to germinate) and petunias.  Once the plants have become hardier, we will transplant them into the prepared beds.

Hibiscus

Last year I got a double hibiscus from Rajdhani Nursery and potted it in a pot in my balcony. The plant did not like it and started showing both stunted growth and yellow leaves. In despair, I planted it on the ground and gave it up on it survival.  But the plant thrived and this year it is full of blossoms.  Enjoy!

Pavazha Malli (Night Jasmine)

It is the state flower of Bengali. My Bengali colleague tells me that Durga Puja is never complete without Pavazha Malli/Harsingar/Parijat as it always flowers during the puja time. I planted a small sapling last year and watched it grow into a fine tree. This year we trimmed it and lo, it flowered right around puja. Today I had enough to use it for decorating. Here it is:

Lilies and Tulsi

Now that the monsoon has finally hit Delhi, my white and yellow rain lilies have started blossoming.
Here they are:

Nanku Ram and I also discovered that some Tulsi seeds have sprouted. We are allowing them to grow though I do not know how it is going to survive the bitter cold. All my attempts to nurture the Tulsi through the winter has failed miserably.

An aside: I am glad that the Indian bureaucracy has been very efficient and issued an Aadhar card to Hanuman.  I hope they do a similar exercise for the entire pantheon of 33 crore Hindu Gods.

Palak Dal

Yesterday I cut the first spinach crop. I planted it in June and went to Chennai for a break. When I came back all the saplings had dried up. Nanku Ram said that the heat had been too much for it and we will now have to wait for the rains before attempting anything more on this front. But when the first rain came the plants too sprang back into life. A fact we discovered while weeding that area. Here they are after the rains:

And my first batch harvested and washed:

Nanku  Ram told me to put it in the dal. So I made palak dal today using toovar dal. I got the recipe from Hare Rama Hare Krsna cook book. It called for tomatoes but I eliminated it.  I just did a tadka with cumin seeds and sambar powder. Finally I added some lemon juice. The recipe does not call for sambar powder but I told you I improvise depending on my mood.
Meantime, we uprooted the bhindi plants after harvesting the last crop. I thought I would never say it but I do not want to see bhindi for some time.

Let us talk of many things

The title, of course, comes from my favorite poem 'The Walrus and the Carpenter'.  I used to blog at scribblesside.blogspot.com but I cannot sign in anymore to that blog. Hence a new blog and a new beginning.

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things...

I am going to talk today about my garden.  This year my gardener was inspired by the tiny plot of land that I have carved out in my apartment complex. The university gardeners had planted some evergreen plants which I rooted out and instead planted series of roses and jasmines. It was not enough for my gardener, Nanku Ram. He decided that the time has come to plant a vegetable garden. The first vegetable he chose was bhindi.   We planted it in mid-April and by mid-May I was plucking bhindis every day. 

I took some for my parents when I visited them in June end. Nanku Ram also was able to take them home at least twice. 

Today's menu featured bhindi with potatoes. I ate this long time back in the hostel. It used to be, as was norm with most hostel food, unedible. I tinkered around a bit to get it to my taste (not to my father's who believes that bhindi should be perfectly cooked such that no trace of the green color remains. It should, preferably, be black after cooking.  And in this world there is only one person who can cook bhindi to his specifications.  And it is not my mother.).  I also realized, as I was making it today, that I would hopeless giving out recipes because I cook as per my mood. Today, I decided to use panch phoran (Bengali spice) for tadka.  As I chopped the bhindi, I changed my decision and chopped one onion too.  So this version of my bhindi-potato contained panch phoran, onion, and no turmeric.  I heated the oil, added panch phoran, and then the onions. After the onions became translucent, I added bhindi.  It was hot, so while bhindi was cooking, I came out and played few games on the computer.  Once the bhindi was done, I added two small boiled potatoes, salt and one green chilli finely chopped. Few turns and it was done.  Some times I omit panch phoran and instead add cumin seeds. Some times I add a tomato or amchur powder. It all depends on my mood.

But one thing is certain: the bhindi from one's garden tastes heavenly.