Hello Hive

Pleasant weekend to us, especially passionate homesteaders and gardeners. Hope that we are getting some quality rest at home today.

While we still await the rains to start farming properly this year, work is not relenting as we have made quality use of the timing to grow these veggies and important plants useful for food here.

You can find different species of veggies here, from spinach to jute mallow, fluted pumpkins, and other medicinal veggies.

All of these veggies have their unique features and methods of growing them. Some require excessive irrigation, while others do not.

Okra, here for instance, can get dried within 3 weeks if there is a shortage of water. Buy fluted pumpkins; on the other hand, they are a little more resistant to dryness and can survive longer without water.

This feature makes us adopt different ridge cultivation methods for these veggies. Since pumpkins can survive longer, their ridges are made in vertical or horizontal rolls like this. While wetting the farm, we need not wet the entire space in the farm and can just hold the pipe across from one pumpkin to another. This often reduces the amount of water pumped here and saves us some fuel as well.

But for these other okra, jute mallow, and spinach, we have to prepare the land in different square portions like this.

This is usually done manually with hoes, as tractors cannot make these kinds of ridges. While we were done with preparing this land in this manner, we were preparing the place to plant more okra. The next thing will be some viability treatment where we will be irrigating the soil consistently to regulate its temperature and get some manure onto it before the okra seeds are planted.

Some veggies, like these ones that are fragile, require the soil viability treatment before planting, while others, like the fluted pumpkins, may not necessarily need this. This is what we were keeping busy with during the evening yesterday.

Due to the high temperatures these days, we prefer to work at dawn or twilight in order to be able to work with some bit of a bearable temperature.