Greetings to all you gardening enthusiasts! I feel honored to have been selected to share with you all my gardening experiences. You will soon realize that growing your own fruits, veggies, herbs & flowers can be a great adventure, filled with rewarding triumphs & occasional blunders. Frankly, I have learned a lot about plants by screwing up, so I will be (shamelessly) sharing them with you as well. I will be posting lots of pictures, as I believe that a picture says 1,000 words. But before I do that I’m gonna need to sort out how to upload pix. Once that is done, I’ll be posting with more frequency.

During the past two years, I have been keeping track of my gardening experiences, be it indoors or out. Some of these experiences are still ongoing, as I have a few perennial trees growing indoors. Yup. Indoors. My living room looks like a Rainforest Cafe, but with real trees. But the main area that I am using as a “grow room” is an L-shaped pantry closet near my kitchen. In there I grow peppers, herbs, young fruit trees, and, on occasion, flowers and vining plants (which I have momentarily stopped growing due to space issues). Anything is fair game when it comes to growing–I have temperate-zone plants growing next to tropical ones, and they all seem to do fine. Some may say that indoor gardening is a fine-tuned ballet, and I agree. But in my grow room the Chacha & the Waltz get equal play time.

I am also using different grow methods with my plants–some are grown in ebb & flow tables, others in drip buckets, & yet others are hand-fed. Hydroponic, organic, & mixed nutrients have all found a place in my arsenal, which by now occupies about half the space in my kitchen cabinets, but since I am in charge of the galley, no one challenges the mess sergeant. I have been brave enough (or stupid enough) to go fully-organic on my ebb & flow systems, but have found the bio-sludge hard to keep up with. Yet I have had my best results by alternating between high-quality, salt-based hydroponic nutrients & organic ones. Coco coir is my substrate of choice, although I also use rockwool, LECA, lava rocks, & silica stones. Because space & heat are an issue in my closet, I use a 400w HPS lamp on one side of the grow room & a DIY rack containing 7 compact fluorescent lamps on another area of the closet. For CO2 supplementing I use a biokinetic CO2 Generating System (AKA the good ol’ gallon of water with sugar & yeast). It is biokinetic ’cause I have to shake it up frequently to get those bursts of CO2 released into the grow area. Pest control had, in the past, been achieved by using a mixture of neem & coriander oils (as both soil drench & foliar spray), but a recent & persistent aphid infestation required the use of aerosolized pyrethrins. My grow room climate is kept in check by a nifty gadget called the Intelliclimate grow room climate controller, thanks to the guys from Urban Garden Magazine & American Hydroponics. But the toughest part of the whole affair is done by the plants themselves; after all, they are the ones germinating, thriving, vegetating, flowering, setting fruit & ripening. Me? I’m just their caretaker, and I suspect that no nutrient program or method alone can yield good results on their own without diligent plant husbandry. And that’s what I do: plant husbandry. So, stick around until I can find a way to upload all the pictures I have in store for you; you might like one or two of them. And feel free to reply to my ideas & experiences, for it is through critique & the sharing of  new information that knowledge is broadened.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

नमस्ते