Butterfly @ work

A butterfly @ work in our garden!

Turning the kitchen into a terrace garden

The Government of Tamil Nadu has announced the do-it-yourself kit programme for the promotion of roof top vegetable garden in Chennai and Coimbatore.

This kit introduced under the Urban Horticulture Development Scheme contains vegetable seeds, pesticides, fertilizers, a polythene sheet and gardening tools along with a technical booklet with instructions. This has been introduced as a platform to city dwellers to cultivate their own vegetables in polythene bags on their rooftops.

The best thing about this kit is that it contains all the products in one package - otherwise, you would have to run to about a dozen stores to collect all the ingredients to kick start your own garden. 

While the actual price is around 2,700 Rupees, the Government has offered 50% subsidy and the kit costs Rs. 1350. From my experience, it is real value for money and the commercials are great. 

The end result will be like this:

While I bought a kit offline, you can also explore online buying at https://tnhorticulture.tn.gov.in/horti/application-do-yourself-kit

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Beautiful Garden - An India Special

Nature at its best - A beautiful scene from a Garden in India

Tomato variety with mega yield of 19 kg per plant

The Indian Institute of Horticultural Research’s (IIHR) Arka Rakshak variety of tomato has yielded 19 kg per plant. This is the yield level recorded by IIHR scientists at a farmer’s field under precision farming.

With this kind of yield, the new variety of Arka Rakshak (Arka stands for the river Arkavathi on whose banks the IIHR is located) has created waves in the sector.

BIOCARVE - Discount on seeds

BIOCARVE is running an offer on their website - a flat 10% off on all products. Apply Code OVDLF to avail 10% Discount on all Flower Seeds and Vegetable Seeds on www.biocarve.com. 

The only catch is that there is a fixed standard shipping fee of Rs. 75. But it is offset by reasonably low priced seeds for vegetables. The other positive is the categorization of vegetables into those that are ideal for summer(like Bitter Gourd, Bottle Gourd, Capsicum, Cucumber, Okra, Long Melon etc.) versus those that can be grown in winter(Beans, Brinjal, Peas, carrot, Cabbage, Broccoli, etc.). The site also sells Gardening Tools and Manure.

The site features their seed processing facility equipment. Overall, an impressive website with a variety of reasonably priced  vegetable and flower seeds.