Garden Park

Hey guys, Hope Everyone is safe and doing great in the midst of all these ongoing pandemic issues. nevertheless, I’d like to write my second blog about gardening that I am doing over the past few years.

just to give a brief intro, we had a property of 2 grounds around Chennai city (4800 Sq.feet ) that was bought around the late ’90s and it was left as a barren land for almost 2 decades. apparently, people around our neighborhood started to litter by dropping garbages, eventually turning it into a Trash / waste-drop off location .since we were residing in our house from a quite farther place, we‘d hardly visit this land every six months and couldn’t spend much time

so after 2 decades, when I grew up as an Engineering graduate and settled in an IT firm in DevOps/AWS domain, I decided to change this property into a little park for spending leisure time at weekend.

I wanted to have elements like a garden outdoor pond, water Lilly, lotus, proper pathways, flowering plants, and other landscaping works to look like a park or even better than that.over the course of time, we were able to achieve what we thought as shown in the first pic.

so apart from the house which occupies around 0.5 ground we had the remaining 1.5 grounds that we can use for the gardening purpose. since having a Korean grass lawn in our place was very tedious to manage due to water constraints in summer and requires lots of pruning works, we decided to lay a concrete floor in the middle of about 600 sq feet as a common area to play, have conversations or to do yogas facing the sun at the east direction as shown in below pic.

we have lots of Facebook gardening groups named “IOTG, Grow your own veggies, Chennai Terrace gardeners” which would be useful to learn basics of gardening techniques, mulching, sowing veggies seeds, dealing with pests and bugs, tricks to get a high yield and to swap the seeds through a 5rs Postcard .so I gradually had a chance to increase my knowledge and started to dive to work on my expectations. before planting I had an envision in my mind of the final outcome and based on that I work in my garden, so outsiders or other people cant actually understand my ideas until it gets completed fully.

another important aspect that our garden has is a proper rainwater harvesting done in our well to conserve water which would be used in drought seasons.

Water Lilly: below pic shows night bloomer water Lilly which was brought from a lake in Anna Nagar Tower Park few years back and it blooms quite good in summer.

White Lotus: These tubers were bought from a Facebook Group where we can sell or buy plants/seeds/tubers which would be sent in a speed post or a courier. been a year since we planted this in below cement rings and we are still waiting to see a bloom.

Outdoor Fish Pond: an outdoor fish pond of 6*3 feet with 4 feet depth which has different varieties of molly live breeding fishes. I was really fascinated and admired a lot in my childhood to have these ornamental fishes in a fish tank which was tedious to maintain so that's the reason why I wanna have this outdoor pond which required less maintenance since I had dropped few aquatic plants like hydrilla and other live plants for providing a good environment, shelter, oxygen to these fishes.

pathways: proper pathways that have around 5 feet in breadth which should be comfortable for 2 people to walk without any hassle.

Garden seater: This is not yet done, but we are planning to have multiple granite seaters around the corners in our garden.

Trees: we have different varieties of fruit trees, medicinal trees, and oxygen-producing trees.

Fruit trees: these are the mandatory ones that every family would have based on their available spaces. so in our garden, we have around 5 guava trees of 2 varieties (normal one and the red one),chikoo (grafted and a country variety) ,pomegranate, gooseberry, mango, soursop(mul seetha) , water apple, 3 varieties of bananas, papaya, custard apple

Medicinal Trees we do have a big neem tree along with a peepal tree as shown in the second pic below .

Shade trees like golden shower (cassia Fistuala) which will have large yellow blooms in summer season which would attract lots of honeybees, butterflies, and beneficial insects that help in pollination, also we have mimusops elengi (magizham Tree).

Medicinal plants: few of the medicinal plants exist in our garden are henna, curry leaves,moringa ,Coleus amboinicus(karpooravalli ), mint, sweet basil ,betal leaves

Flowering plants :we have croosandra, portuculas, gomphrena, adenium(desert rose),Lilly , hibiscus, plumeria, vincas, butterfly pea around the garden as shown in below pics .

Hibiscus collections: below are the few native hibiscus collections that we have in our garden

We also had seasonal/perennial flowers like marigold, geranium, gaillardia,etc but we need to collect seeds and sow them for next season which would require lots of work. instead, I planned to have annual flowers like hibiscus,crossandra,portuculas,adeniumwhich would bloom most of the time in a year.

having Flowers with different colors in your garden which relaxes and soothes your mind and give an aesthetic sense to view and also attract bees(especially yellow colors attracts bees) .

all the trees and plants are planted in a peculiar way to utilize available space efficiently and to grow maximum plants with space we had. like planting multi crops or having plants under a shrub under a tree would reduce water usage and also sunlight gets distributed equally which is the ultimate source for photosynthesis.

nevertheless, I had lots of free time due to COVID-19 this year which I could spend in useful ways to renovate my garden and to do other interesting stuff to engage ourselves in different hobbies /activities.

Hope this blog was engaging and influence others to start gardening with whatever space that they have in their terrace or ground.