Yesterday was another magical day. Yes, it was Gudi Padwa and Ugadi, the Maharashtrian and Telugu New Year's day. But it was magical to us for more reasons than that.
A day before, we had met Apoorva and while talking about plants and seeds she had mentioned that if you plant a seed you would get an onion, while if you planted an onion, you would get spring onions. That really opened our eyes, ears and minds...how come we hadn't thought of it that way...it was but logical that spring onions were the younger versions of full-grown onions and all along we had thought of spring onions as some exotic cousins of our onions. So today we decided to see for ourselves - the onion bulb we had planted a while back had sprouted a whole bunch of leaves and so we slowly us around the plant with our fingers and lo - tender spring onions beckoned us. We were overjoyed and decided to treat our family to salad made from the spring onions from our garden. We also plucked a few spinach leaves to go with them. Soon our salad was ready, embelished with semi-organic strawberries (ones in which fertilizer had been used but not pesticides) that our friend Mukul had got for us from Panchgani.
It was sheer coincidence that I decided to take a closer look at one of our newer plants that has come up on its own - this has been variously identified as
lauki as well as cucumber by different people. So this plant had put forth a few flowers - tiny yellow pretty things. While taking a closer look at the flower, I realised that there was a slight bulge at the bottom of few of the flowers. This is what excited us. Having learnt recently about pumpkin/ gourd plants having separate male and female flowers as part of the same plant, this was like a demo happening on our rooftop. So now we wait to see if the female flowers will get pollinated and if a fruit will form. Hopefully we will get to know soon whether we are going to get
laukis or cucumbers!
A day before, we had met Apoorva and while talking about plants and seeds she had mentioned that if you plant a seed you would get an onion, while if you planted an onion, you would get spring onions. That really opened our eyes, ears and minds...how come we hadn't thought of it that way...it was but logical that spring onions were the younger versions of full-grown onions and all along we had thought of spring onions as some exotic cousins of our onions. So today we decided to see for ourselves - the onion bulb we had planted a while back had sprouted a whole bunch of leaves and so we slowly us around the plant with our fingers and lo - tender spring onions beckoned us. We were overjoyed and decided to treat our family to salad made from the spring onions from our garden. We also plucked a few spinach leaves to go with them. Soon our salad was ready, embelished with semi-organic strawberries (ones in which fertilizer had been used but not pesticides) that our friend Mukul had got for us from Panchgani.
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