My garden December 2012

New blooms of Bougainvillea, lavender and the oranges. Only problem with them is pruning. Every time I prune it I have scratches over my hand.

Sorry state of our lawn.
Our lawn is usually infested by termites and we apply chemical fertilizer to minimize the infestation. So far we have applied thrice in two years but this time we decided to tackle in organic way. So my husband applied urea directly on to them. I have told thousand times not to do this but he has done this couple of times and killed few plants here and there. Later he applied neem powder to them. As a results we have even badder looking grass, never ever follow this.

Rapidly spreading Thunbergia blue creeper. They are every where in our front garden and have taken the Bougainvillea plants for the support.

Umbrella plant growing tall against the windows.

Dwarf variegated umbrella plant and the dark pink rose. I tried to propagate the variegated umbrella plant, but I wasn't successful.

Roses are very hungry plants and always in need of nourishment, otherwise they fail to bloom. One of the thumb rule you should follow for roses are pruning and fertilizing. Luckily I stay in the outskirts of the city so I have access to the cow dung manure. Every month I mix the fresh cowdung with less than equal proportion of neem powder, dilute the mixture with water and apply to the plants.

Lastly my pomegranate which has so far given us around 10 fruits tasting good.

Hope you enjoyed my garden!

Last week...

Hope you all had super Diwali blast. Whenever I think of Diwali, eating sweets, crackers and cleaning comes into my mind. We all do cleaning everyday but for the festival Diwali it's even more. We got live in Gujarat for about 3 years and I got this habit of cleaning home for Deepavali from Gujaratis. It's is believed that Goddess Lakshmi resides only in clean home.

Sharing here with you is our children's room.
Currently this room is occupied to the fullest by the elder son Pranav. The younger one Prajwal is yet to establish his foot here and his domain is the living room and the dining hall.
I have a special cleaning session of this room on Monday morning after two days of masti by the boys. You can't imagine state of this room at the end of the week -:)
We tried a lot making Pranav to clean his room(especially his table) by bribing, threatening etc., but it works only temporarily.

Before

After...

Cloth basket

There are lot of cotton sarees my in-law, mother gave for making cloth nappies for my toddler sons years ago. Most them were unused, so I decided to make better use of it and made a basket out of it. They aren't sturdy for sure but all they can do is hold things together.

It has been months since I started this project and dropped in between. It was just like few things that I fail to continue due to lack of motivation. So it was tucked away in the wardrobe for many months. Last week when I was cleaning the wardrobe I found my half finished project. I felt like continuing it. I started working on it with full force and hardly took 3-4 hrs to complete it.  

To make it sturdy I took my old unused  crossstich  base and stitched the cloth plaits back to back.

After finishing it, there was a heavy demand from both my sons. The elder one wanted it to hold his Cricket Attack cards and the younger one to hold his small toy cars. I know I should make more to satisfy their demands...

Tips.... about chikkoo

Image via Fruitpedia

Sapota or chikkoo as we call them is one of my favorite fruit. But unfortunately whenever I bring them home, it's more thrown than eaten. If I get the ripe ones, I cannot consume them all at once, the next day they would have the sour taste. Once I asked the shopkeeper how do I make the raw ones ripe at home. He suggested me to put them in the rice dabba/box and close its lid. But again they would be ripe but would have a undesired wrinkled skin. Therefore most of the time I just avoid buying sapotas even though they are tempting.

But recently I thought to give it another try. I put them in a polythene bag and then put this bag in the rice box. Ha, ha this trick of mine worked. 

So guys if you are sapota lovers like me, all you have to do is put the raw, grown sapotas in a polythene bag, tie it and put them in the rice box with a closing lid and you get to taste the juicy sapotas in the end...

Lord Ganesha, the Vignaharta..

It's been weeks since the festival 'Ganesh Chaturti' is celebrated and over. Sometime in August there was a competition announced in the local Kannada paper. It was about painting Lord Ganesha in any form and submitting. After intense googling I came upon a simple  painting of Ganesha in lovely Madhubani style. I decided to give it a try, and if at all it came out re-presentable then I would send it across the paper's address. But due to my MIL illness I could not complete it on-time and the whole idea was dropped.
Like the celebrations running late in the daily TV soaps, I finally could complete the picture, frame it and seek the blessings of Lord Ganesha.
After viewing the results of the competition, I discovered that there were lot of talented painters among us and their way of depicting the Lord was simply amazing . I am glad that I didn't participate, I know I would have looked like a fool among them -:)))

Flowers, Plenty of them..

How do you spend your week if you are a homemaker like me? 

Me, all I do is arrange and re-arrange most of the things at home, and I am sure most of the decor lovers do the same. Apart from this I constantly try to arrange flowers. Oh, don't think too big on this, all I am talking is putting the flowers in a holder/vase, few match here and there and then making a pleasing flower arrangement for myself. 

Who doesn't love flowers in their home? Flowers brings happiness and adds cheerfulness to your life, your home. I am one lucky girl who has sources of flowers other than buying from outside. Yes, I pick flowers from my own garden, from the scarcely populated public garden, few fallen flowers from trees, fresh flowers from trees etc.

Hibiscus Idli's

Surprised, aren't you!
Today I am sharing you a simple tip while preparing Idli's. Well this is a traditional recipe followed in my in-laws place and it does tastes good.
It's just that you add few hibiscus leaves to your Idli batter. The most preferred one is the white hibiscus leaves but if you don't have it you can add leaves of any other colored hibiscus. You add approximately 20-25 leaves of the white Hibiscus or approximately 8-10 leaves of any other color. This is considering serving three people.
Please note that while making the batter soak a bit lesser Urad dal than you usually do. If you are using a grinder for grinding then put the leaves first in the blender and later to the grinder along with the Urad dal.
As a result you will have
1. Colorful green Idlis (If you add grated carrots, definitely more colorful) instead of boring white ones according to my son.
2. More healthier version of Idli.