Manjhi aa gayi!

Exciting changes in the garden today!

Amjad Sahab, the driver, came up to take a look at my plants this afternoon when he came back from prayers; coming from an agricultural background, he has become my garden advisor. He gives good advice, some of which I completely ignore and do what I know best instead. This system seems to be working pretty well. So I showed him where I had watered this morning, and all my okra sprouts that were coming up, and the place where I had sewn more squash since it just doesn't seem to be germinating. I did not tell him how I replanted one cucumber and one bitter melon sprout so they would be distributed evenly in the pots, and how I had dug in the clay looking to see if the seeds were germinating (one was...I put it back). I know he told me that the shoots were too tender to move, but I was really careful and they are getting their true leaves now so I think it's ok.

Little sprouts getting bigger

So the plants are coming along, sprouting and growing little by little. But the exciting thing happened when I jokingly suggested my idea to Amjad that I needed to get a manjhi (aka manjha aka charpoy) for the end of the terrace with all the veggies, so I could have the complete dehat ka mahaul, 'rural atmosphere.' (I think I may have mentioned this earlier on this blog somewhere). Amjad laughed and then said, "But they have a charpoy in the store room!"

I couldn't help but burst out laughing. "Really? Can I use it?" He took me around to the store room at the little rear balcony, sliding the creaky wooden door as gently as possible, and there, under a stack of mattresses, it was! It's metal and not wooden, a folding-type manjhi, but a manjhi nonetheless.

Amjad told me, "Don't tell them who showed you this...just say you saw it the last time you stayed here." So when the house manager came back from some errands or something, I just said "Hey, if you're not using that manjhi in the store-room can I put it out on the balcony?" There was no objection, so all of us, Amjad, Mushtaq the cook, Razzaq the manager, and I trooped up to the store-room to get it out.

I was not allowed to help move anything.

Meanwhile, also in the store room, I found some old camel ornaments: a bell and two jingly camel anklets, which I have now hung up on the wall in my bedroom. Why not use it for decoration? It's not like there are any camels around here who will mind.

Accessories for the stylish camel

I was grinning like an idiot as they set it up there; it was exactly like I pictured it! "Pura dehat ka mahaul," I told them, so satisfied. Mushtaq took a rag and in grand ceremonial style wiped the dust off of the rusty blue metal sides and faded stripey fabric. Someone pointed out that all I needed was a huqqah for the complete rural Punjab experience, and everyone laughed. For the finishing touches, Mushtaq produced from somewhere two gol takiye, round pillows you lean against. I may never go inside again. Now I sit on the manjhi and wave at the neighbor aunty when she comes to hang up her clothes, I'm leaning against the gol takiya as I write this, enjoying the evening breeze, comfy as can be. My manjhi even gets WiFi. If the AC goes out at night (which it almost certainly will due to extreme load shedding) I'm definitely sleeping out here. Now all I need is the huqqah...

Repotting

I was beginning to worry that the celery and parsley that Chaudhry Sahab had given me desperately needed repotting. They looked so crowded--three plants each in a little five-inch pot. I was about to get Amjad to take me to the nursery for more pots, but lo and behold, I noticed a whole pile of them nestled behind a tree in the garden below! Perfect. I carried them up to the terrace and with the help of a large screwdriver (in the absence of a trowel) I repotted them all. Not sure what I'm actually going to do with all this parsley and celery but hopefully they'll grow. I've also moved to a room that looks out onto the terrace; it's nice to be able to look out at my plants anytime.

Lovely pots! They were free!

Another view of the pots, look how crowded those celery plants are.

At first I placed the celery artfully around my big pots, but have since moved them to a shadier spot because it's getting hotter every day.

All the repotted parsley lined up in a row with the flowers.

My favorite thing about these pots is that they are roughly the same sized but mismatched just a bit; because they are mostly handmade they have slightly different, interesting shape variations. Some of them are a bit more conical, some of them are a bit lopsided, but they have a nice kind of wabi-sabi  harmony.

Celery and parsley before repotting. The 8-inch pots show about the same kind of variation in shape.

I've also got more sprouts! Two more bitter melon (for a total of three) and another squash (for a total of three). Cucumber is lagging sadly behind with only one sprout. I planted four or five seeds in each pot so I'm hoping to see more plants soon. Even the okra is beginning to come up; there were four or five new little shoots this morning when I went out to water them. 

Finally, my cat visitor has been back. He loves this particular spot in the mornings. At night he prefers fighting with other cats out back.

Bhindi...and more...

Yesterday I didn't have any meetings or pressing engagements, it was fairly quiet, so on a whim I swung by the big DHA nursery while running some errands in the afternoon, thinking I might pick up a flower or two to add to the collection.

Ha.

Not only did I pick up a flower or two (geraniums), but I now have a small pot with succulents, three large pots for growing okra (known here as bhindi), and nine celery and nine parsley plants. Whoops.

I also made a new friend, Chaudhry Nazir, who runs the nursery itself. The workers at the nursery pointed me towards him when I asked for help. He is a tall, rail-thin, middle-aged man who was wearing sunglasses, a dress shirt, and a bluetooth thing in his ear. Looking at him your first thought would not be "horticulturist." I started explaining to him that I wanted some plants for my terrace, and his response was, "For what purpose? Anytime people come here to buy plants they want them for a certain purpose. So you want them for shade, for flowers, for fruit, what?" I hadn't really thought of it this way

So I ended up hearing all about his horticulture training, his love for plants, as well as the business he has exporting garden furniture from Thailand...I think he thought I was going to buy some bamboo chairs from him. But it was a nice conversation; he gave me some tips on how to use the compost he sold me (he recommended adding a few inches on top of the regular soil, not mixed with it as I would have thought). At the end of our conversation he gave me as a gift all these little parsley and celery plants, with instructions to replant them in bigger pots when I got home. I haven't gotten to the repotting yet but it needs to be done...guess I'll be making tabbouleh!

Upon arrival back home Amjad (who grew up on a farm) informed me that I had been going about my plant care all wrong, and that by watering my pots every day I was killing the seeds. His method is to water well once, just when they are planted, and then not again until they actually sprout. Not sure how I feel about it but since my method has only yielded a single cucumber sprout out of all the seeds I planted I must be doing something wrong. Amjad, Mushtaq and I carried all the pots up to the balcony, then, taking turns, brought the dirt up in bucketfuls as the bag was splitting from its own weight. I spread the compost (which I'm pretty sure is mostly just cowdung), and then Amjad, in his gruff avuncular way, supervised the planting of the okra seeds, poking the holes in the soil for me in just the right places and instructing me on proper seed depth. He has told me not to water so much, and not to water at all until the sprouts come up.

I figure I'll take his advice for now although I there is a tiny hard corner of myself that resents the intrusion (however well-intentioned) into my gardening autonomy; he even told me that he would check on the plants for me and tell me exactly when to water them! Just as a backup I'm going to soak more seeds overnight and see if I can't force them to germinate that way before I put them in the soil. It's been two weeks, I'm seriously losing hope for the bitter gourds and squash that I planted, as well as all the other cucumbers. Commence Plan B.

All the new plants, lined up in a row. I had tried to put them in an artful clump but was informed that it wouldn't look nice...sigh. I'll change it around when I repot all the parsley and celery.

My new succulent, gorgeous color.

Bag o'dung

Okra seeds!

Impatience and Hope

I am getting more and more anxious about my vegetable seeds. It's been nearly two weeks with daily watering and the pots are still depressingly bereft of cucurbits, although lots of other plants seem to have no problem sprouting in the pots...grasses, little weeds, whatever. I think the seeds were probably present in the cowdung they mixed in with the soil.

The soil too is an area of major concern. It drains very poorly, and is very sticky, heavy, clay soil. The drainage thing might not actually be a drawback considering how hot and sunny it's going to get in just a short time...daily temperatures well over 100F and full sun for ten or twelve hours a day. I have high hopes that the cowdung will work well as a fertilizer also, but I'm really getting concerned about this germination time, although a lot of things I have read indicate that two weeks is not unusual for cucurbit germination, probably because the seeds are quite hard.

There is a ray of hope though:

I'm not sure, but this may be a cucumber sprout! I don't want to get too excited in case it turns out not to be. 

I'm going to give it two or three more days, then try to force some of the seeds I still have to sprout by soaking them overnight. Meanwhile I'm keeping busy by pulling out some of the obvious weeds in my pots and thinning out the flower sprouts. Fingers are crossed that more sprouts come soon.

In other news the neighbors' motiya vine is blooming and when the wind comes from just the right direction the fragrance wafts across my balcony. Ahhhh...

Jewel-like Visitor

Sitting on the balcony this morning drinking a cup of joshanda for my cold, I was surprised to look up from my book and see a blue gem darting around in the red flowering vine. It looked almost like a hummingbird, but didn't hover like one. Gorgeous deep violet plumage! I watched as it spent a little time drinking nectar from the clusters of bright red flowers and then darted away and was gone. Thanks to the internet, I've identified it as Cinnyris asiaticus, the purple sunbird. I couldn't get a picture at the time, but here's what he looks like:

I know he was a he because apparently the females are dull brown on top with a yellow chest and stomach. You can hear what they sound like here. The aural environment of the terrace is dense with birdsong, with many different species announcing their presence and calling back and forth throughout the day. I was lucky to see this one though, as I never have before. Fun facts about this bird: it uses spider webs to make its nests, and if threatened by a predator they will call each other and form a mob to gang up on the attacker (for instance an owl). They feed on nectar but also on small insects and berries.

On a side note, I believe that the red-flowered vine may be a Rangoon creeper or Quisqualis indica. But I'm still not completely sure.

Mosquitos and Malis

Two nights of rain have given me respite from having to water the plants myself as well as cooling things off. The weather is perfect right now! Additionally, there is life in my pots, although perhaps not of the kind I was hoping for. The flower sprouts are coming up quite nicely, and I think I'll have to thin them soon. The big pots show no signs of squash, bitter melon, or cucumber as of yet, but there are a million other tiny plants that have sprouted in it. The seeds must have already been in the soil, or floated in from the sky. I'm too afraid to pull the little sprouts out though, just in case they are going to turn into my big plants.

Last night, sitting on the balcony in the rainstorm, I was surprised to see a truck drive down the street with huge white foggy clouds billowing behind it--a mosquito-spraying truck. I sat mesmerized watching the clouds billow inevitably onward, up to the first floor balcony where I sat. The white smog seemed to leap towards me, and even though I thought I should go inside I didn't move. So I may have breathed in a bunch of crazy chemicals last night, who knows. I know that they sprayed for mosquitos in Virginia my whole life growing up, and I haven't died yet, so hopefully it's not so bad. I'm worried about that stuff getting on my veggies though.

Now a word about the mali. I feel like an account of gardening in Pakistan wouldn't be complete without understanding the cultural norms and practices related to gardening. Typically in South Asia gardening is the purview of members of an occupational caste called "mali," which means gardener; I'm not sure exactly how those caste boundaries are drawn here in Pakistan. It's not a prestigious occupation; here is an ad offering work for a mali in Dubai. The monthly salary listed is 700 dirhams, which works out to a little less than $200 per month.

Depending on how the caste thing actually works in contemporary Pakistan (and I don't want to overgeneralize here because it also seems that mali can be just a generic term for gardener) it could be interesting to study the transplantation of caste-based occupations outside of South Asia. But that's someone else's dissertation. Here's a colonial-era depiction of the mali of Baptist missionary William Carey:

19th century Indologist and folklorist William Crooke (1896:453) offers these origin myths for the mali caste: "One story of the origin of the caste is that one day Parvati was plucking flowers in her garden when a thorn pierced her finger. She complained to Siva, who took a particle of sandalwood from his head, or by another account a drop of his perspiration, and on this Parvati wiped the blood from her wounded finger, and thus the first Mali was created." Another legend states that the mali caste is descended from "the garland-maker attached to the household of Raja Kans at Mathura. Krishna asked him one day for a garlad of flowers and he at once gave it. 'On being told to fasten it with a string, he, for want of any other, took of his Brahmanical cord and tied it; on which Krishna most ungenerously rebuked him for his simplicity in parting with it, and announced that in future he would be ranked among the Sudras.'"

I haven't yet met or spoken with the malis who work here at the guesthouse, but I plan to try next time they are around; it seems like they would know more about gardeners and gardening in contemporary Pakistan than Mr. Crooke.

Sprouts!

I have sprouts! My zinnia/dahlia mix seeds have come up in the two small clay pots and are getting bigger every day.

The veggies have yet to emerge, but my understanding is it takes quite a while for all of these seeds to germinate because their casings are so tough. I'm trying to just keep them moist and hope for the best.

I am seriously considering acquiring a manji (aka charpai, a traditional rope bed) for the vegetable side of the terrace. I know that this is only a guest house and I'm only here for a few months. But they are so comfy! And it would be a much nicer place to sit than the ugly chairs, especially once the vines come in. On the other hand it is about to get hellishly hot, to say nothing of the mosquitoes, so we'll see.

Another option, if I save up a little bit, would be to get a manji at somepoint in the US...I recently discovered that there is a company in California that makes them. But hundreds of dollars for something that here is probably going to cost around $20? I'm a bit too much of a cheapskate for that.

Bonus: Lovely red flowering vine is in full bloom! I wish I knew what it was.

New Beginnings

I should have known that it wouldn't be possible to give up gardening for a whole year while I was abroad in Pakistan. I need plants in my life, I need the quiet peace and satisfaction that come from having your hands in the dirt, from watering and weeding, from being in the fresh air. So, it's time for Lahore Balcony Jungle!

The idea occurred to me last week as Amjad, the driver, was taking me home from somewhere and we drove past a nursery...I saw the little plants and thought hey, why not. The terrace at the house is vast and empty, with only a sad laminate table and a few chairs breaking up the barren expanse of gray faux terrazzo. I went and picked out a little asparagus fern and a crown of thorn euphorbia. Lovely! But when I brought them home I noticed two problems. First, the plants were so small that they made the terrace almost more depressing by contrast. Second, they clearly needed repotting.

A few days went by, and I toyed with the idea of expanding my garden, but was torn. Did I want to invest time and money into something that I'm probably going to leave by the end of summer? Shouldn't I try to focus on my research? As I was driving from Government College to meet someone at Geo TV I saw a tiny store tucked behind a little white mosque: "Sunny View Seed Store." I took it as a sign and told Amjad to remember the place.

After my meeting we went back and I spoke with the proprietor, who hooked me up with seeds for squash (I meant to buy pumpkin, but oh well...), bitter melon, and cucumber, as well as a zinnia/dahlia seed mix. Hooray! I was in business. He recommended I get some cowdung for fertilizer.

The next day, I had Amjad take me to the big nursery in Defence. He had jokingly offered to just steal some pots for me but I declined, pointing out that the vegetables might not grow well in stolen pots. I talked with the nursery guy, explained what I wanted, and eventually ended up with six large pots (gamle) and two small pots (pyale 'cup'-style pots) filled with a dirt/cowdung mixture. They were loaded carefully in the trunk of the car and we drove home at a snail's pace, trying to stop them from spilling or breaking. Only one tipped over, and fortunately none of them broke.

I should have known that I would not be allowed to carry the pots upstairs myself. When I tried to lift one of them I was firmly stopped by Amjad and Mushtaq, who insisted on carrying them up to the terrace for me. At one point they even asked if I wanted to arrange for the gardener, who comes twice weekly, to take care of the watering for me. I declined.

So now I have ten pots, and have planted seeds in them and watered them. The soil seemed to have a lot of clay, and not great drainage, so I'm not sure how well this will work out. I've never worked with soil like this. Anyway, I have two of each of the cucurbits in the sunniest corner next to a trellis they can climb, and I repotted my euphorbia and asparagus fern into the cup-style pots. Into the small pots that were left I put dirt and some flower seeds.

Now, we wait.


Small pots

Big pots

Sunny end of the terrace

Looking back at the shady end of the terrace (with my clothes drying there)