Since 2016, we’ve been growing plants on the terrace. Largely, flower-based plants with healthly mix of tulasi and basil. Basil grew well over the years. Rest just survived without many flowers.

In many ways, gardening is like coding. You need to constantly practice and innovate to be good at it. The bare minimum is watering the plants. But a garden needs much more than just watering: resoiling periodically, weeding out the insects, picking seasonal plants to sow etc. It’s a full time job.

Last year, we got an interior designer to help design it but didn’t pursue it due to hospital visits the entire year.

As part of other minor household construction works, we are now revamping the terrace garden. As much as I wanted to automate watering plants few years ago I decided against it as doing it manually gives some physical exercise. Much needed for a sedentary lifestyle.

Resoiling

We got help from a gardener in resoiling, replanting and sowing new seeds. It took her few days to do it for ~100 plants in bins, covers.

We emptied a huge unused tank and the gardener cut it in half. We plan to grow a hybrid mango plant in it.

Structures

We have now brought in structures to support creepers.

A friend suggested using solar cells on top of the structures. Admittedly, we didn’t think of it and it’s a great idea. We’re currently exploring it and having checked with the personnel looks like the structures will easily support solar cells.

It will also be nice to hang plants in pots at the joints.

Stands

Much to my surprise, I discovered excellent gardening content on YouTube. I found one by Harsha Deep Garden on stands [YouTube] extremely useful.

We replicated it to good results. A round of red oxide and paints to avoid rust formation is pending.

12th November update

More updates soon. I have written about the subsequent setup in a new post.