Dear Children,
Today, I would like to talk about home gardening.
Gardening can be fun and pleasurable. It also can help your parent’s budget if you manage to grow some essential food items.
For those of you who have space there is no limit to what you can do. You can grow vegetables, fruit, herbs, greens and of course flowers for pleasure. While saving some household expenditure you can even supplement the family income by selling some of the produce.
It can even be something like limes, curry leaves (karapincha ) and pandanus (rampe) which are always in demand.You can always help others by sharing your produce with them.
If you have medium or small spaces, you can scale your gardening to suit the spaces. You can grow things like cucumber and pumpkin which grow on vines which run along the ground. If you can rig up something overhead you can grow vegetables such as snake gourd, (pathola) which hang down and do not take up ground space.
If you are an apartment or flat dweller you can still have a home garden in pots and cans on the balconies. You can also cut discarded tyres or fashion plant holders out of pvc pipes.
Flowers make a home beautiful and if you grow your own flowers you can have some to beautify your home every day. Another option would be to grow indoor plants such as the beautiful African violets which come in shades of pink, purple and white.
Watering, pruning, weeding and fertilising are very important and always remember to use organic fertiliser. You can make your own fertiliser from garden sweepings, kitchen waste and similar materials.
Enoy your gardening.
Until next Sunday,
Good luck
Aunty Nira