Gardening where we live in South Asia has been something I have recently taken to and find it quite therapeutic. Plants brighten up the home with color, help clean the air (which we always need with our pollution) and can provide healthy additions to add to dishes.
A few of my favorite things about gardening where we live in South Asia are…
- beautiful hand painted ceramic pots are crazy cheap
- you can get free potting soil from a handful of neighbors who own cows
- almost all the women know how to garden and are experts at it so finding someone to teach you is fairly easy.
- plants grow really well cause we basically live in the jungle
I created a little garden nook in our bedroom since it receives the most sunlight. It’s where I keep the garden tools, the potting soil, and a few plants. You’ll also find easy access to sunglasses, a baseball cap, and an ENO hammock. Makes it easy to grab what you’ll need for a morning or afternoon on the balcony and enjoy the outdoors.
House Plants
Garden Tools
What’s in the garden tools basket?
- fertilizer pellets
- root grow powder
- seeds
- sharpie
- cardboard cut into strips for labeling plants
- shovel
- spray bottle
- (later I added organic neem oil, a nature oil that kills mites and began attacking my fiddle leaf)
My Failed Attempt at a Compost Basket
I had these two baskets laying around which might look kind of cool… well they were, until I realized after I bought them in November 2019 that they were infested with termites. I’m pretty sure the nasty bugs are gone since I sprayed the baskets about fifty times with bug killer. I wasn’t going to bring them back into the house so I figured they would be great for composting since compost needs air flow.
I had this idea to start composting on our balcony because a lot of the local people compost and use it for their plants. Well, great idea but it ended up being more complicated, time consuming, and honestly disgusting than I thought. I used one basket that was lined with a trash bag and then covered another basket on top of it. Maybe I didn’t have enough dirt but the main problem ended up being the fruit fly’s. Oh My Word– it was like I was attacked with a fruit fly plague every time I went to dump more compost in the bin. I finally gave up and realized I put so much time into cooking here that I don’t need to create my own fertilizer from food scraps on top of that.
