Tulsi (Holy Basil) – The breath of Indian Households

Tulsi, a plant so commonly seen and worshiped in almost every household in India is quite an easy plant to grow.
With proper care, which is effortless, these semi-hardy perennials can thrive for years.

But, why is it that most home owners struggle growing them?
If you are buying or bartering new seedlings every 6-8 months, seeing it to turn hardy and leafless within a short span of time, you need to learn how to take care of the plant.

The first and most important reason your plants aren’t growing well could be over watering. Overwatering causes these plants to wilt, the leaves turn pale and ultimately turns yellow before falling, since they are religiously watered every day and during every season in India, it is important to allow good drainage for the plant.

Another common problem could be soil caking. Hard soil doesn’t let the roots penetrate, could retain too much water which in turn makes the plant suffer.

Compost/Manure is an important requirement for the plant which is often neglected. Red Soil, while it does contain certain nutrients, isn’t organically rich and IS NOT everlasting. Tulsi plants do seek support from the growing medium but dumping in just Red soil won’t be of any help at all. Make sure to mix roughly equal proportions of Sand, Soil and Compost while planting Tulsi seedlings.

While Holy Basil can thrive in partial shade, it grows well in full sun areas. Make sure that it gets al least 4-5 hours of good sunlight.

All we’d ask of the Tulsi plant, is for it to grow bushier with lots of healthy leaves. Nobody likes the plant to be tall and woody with just a pair f leaves at the tips of each branch. In order for your Tulsi plants to perform as per your requirements, it is essential for you to be aware of the plant growth and behavior.
The plant matures once they grow flowers and seeds, this means it gets ready to promote new plant growth, drops it’s seeds and starts retiring. Consider this as the plants making space for the new saplings (it’s offspring).

Make sure that you trim these flower buds as early as they are forming to promote good leafy growth. If you are intending to grow a wider, bushier plant instead of a woody tall one, pinch the new growth of leaves when they are forming 6-8 pairs of leaves.
Regularly remove old and dried leaves, this helps the plant concentrate it’s nutrition on new leaves and branches.

Our grand parents often practiced pinching of fresh leaves and dropping them in the holy water of the copper vessel on the altar, drinking the herb infused water after worship as prasadam. This practice not only benefited us as the has antioxidants, helps relieve stress and immune stimulating properties but also took care of the pruning needs of the plant. You can consider bringing these practices back in your daily routine to get benefited.

Other means of harvesting these plants are to simply trim the branches and leaves of the plant using a pair of garden scissors once the plant reaches a height of 12- 15 inches, dry them in the sun until the leaves are crisp. These leaves can then crumbled and stored for long term usage.

Holy Basil is generally immune to pests, provided that it is growing in a healthy environment.
Growing in poor conditions might infect the plant with Aphids, Mealy Bugs and other Soft scaled insects. Spraying an insecticide made of a combination of a spoon of cooking oil and a spoon of dish washing liquid in one litre water is a good solution to drive the pests away.

Front Yard at Electronic City

With our extended stay at electronic city, we learnt about the close knitted circles of people here and it wasn’t surprising when we were referred by one of our previous clients to Mr and Mrs. Likitha for their Front yard Garden renovation.

We had in fact seen the house multiple times in passing, given that it is located at the entrance of a major street crossing.
The meeting with Mrs. Likitha prompted us to diagnosing their set of problems with their garden.

The Problems

The garden was primarily taken care of by their House servant, though the plants were in good health and were tended to with good care, the garden lacked structure. Multiple varieties of plants were planted all over the place and it was certainly an unwelcoming sight being the Front yard of the house.

The garden needed lot of sorting and everyone in the household loved the feel of lawn, were terribly missing it in their garden space.

We also figured that they liked being seated outdoors for relaxation, meetings usually took place in the Front space of the house which were rather frequent since they were one of the well known families in the neighborhood.

The vegetable garden patch along the retaining back wall needed minor construction to define layouts and maximize yields. The soil throughout the garden had only one variety of manure for years and needed enrichment.

A storage room at the back end of the entrance was a view they despised and needed some attention.

The Planning

We worked out a plan to first redistribute the existing plants into other parts of the garden, many of them to be moved mainly to the backyard.

A seating space added with a backrest planter box was planned, the planter box took care of the planting needs of the garden as well as being a backrest, served it’s purpose as a relaxed bench.

It also was planned to be at least 4 ft high as to hide the ugly wall of the storage house.

Wooden planks with drooping and colorful plants were planned on the wall to further accentuate the wall. We chose Bamboo to add feature to the whole area with an objective of keeping a natural feel. The roofing extension of the storage space was planned to be hidden with Bamboo screening.

The entrance to this garden space had to be defined and we planned for planter boxes to be constructed with wide bricks which can also act as additional seating space if required.

The area between the seating space and the entrance to the garden was marked as lawn area as decided previously during our initial discussions, we also planned on using stepping stones between the lawn to have access to all the areas of the garden space.

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  Construction

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  Lawn Laying

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  Planting

The Execution –

This project was executed with client’s laborers as opposed to our usual way of working where in, every aspect of the process is taken care of, by us. They had laborers regularly working for them with their own buildings and we agreed to only provide consultation, designing and supervision during the execution – co ordinating with their laborers.

With a week’s job of repotting of existing plants, prepping up of the soil, masonry at the vegetable garden patch as well as Front yard, visiting multiple nurseries for the selection and purchases of plants, we were finally ready to bring the garden alive.

The coming week was dedicated to planting – We worked together with the laborers and our clients too joined hands in planting, this was a great experience to their son just at the age Five (5).

Several other additions were made during the process, like addition of Clay pots for their Balconies, a bamboo lattice for creeper varieties in the vegetable patch, addition of a century old unused stone wet grinder (a hand implement) as a centre piece in the garden.

This family has lived in this locality for generations and we heard
lots of stories of how urban development took over the place from a silent village to bustling “Electronic city” within a few years. Their home was filled with centuries old wood and other antique pieces preserved neatly.

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Tropical Hideout at RBD Stillwaters (Backyard)

Prashant and Shalini’s Backyard Garden.

The idea of this modern tropical garden weaved itself after we received a call on a December morning in 2017.

As we set out to meet with the client, we were excited about designing a garden space that’d be cherished for a long time.

After the initial discussion with Mrs Shalini, a pathologist and her husband Mr. Prashant, an Engineer by profession,  we figured that there were different areas around the home dedicated for garden. A rough hand sketched layout was planned and presented to start with.

We later tweaked the design slightly to suit the garden space available, considering various constraints of the space during our next meeting and the design was finally concluded.

The materials were arranged, transported and jobs were assigned to the limited set of laborers available.
(Side note – In India, 70% are in unorganized sector of employment, the labour system is almost a chaos)

As part of the layout were elements such as stepping stones. Mr Singh had specifically requested against hardscaping i.e., usage of concrete or hard tiling etc in the garden areas except already existing concrete areas.

Hence the stepping stones used in the backyard was part of the soft scape work and lawn was to be added in between to compose the layout, creating a modern appearance. This lawn would later help holding the stones in place as well.

The other aspect of the garden plan was the Lawn. As it is true with other clients too, Mr & Mrs Singh were skeptical about using Shade Grass.

We reasoned against the usage of Mexican/Bermuda Lawn because of the poor light conditions due to a high raised building casting shadow on all areas of the garden.

Finally, they agreed trying Shade Grass and are in love with it now.

Also in the end, as the clients enjoy the garden mostly in the evening, we added few lighting to enjoy the garden post sunset as well:).

From Our Instagram Profile –
Convincing clients for shade grass had been one of the most difficult aspects for us so far. 
This one client Mr. Prashant reluctantly agreed to try it out almost promising himself to replace it with Mexican lawn later…
Read the full story on our Instagram here –
 we revisited his Garden almost 7 months later and his reaction to the shade grass in his Garden was priceless.

A Friend’s Garden

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style”. ~ Maya Angelou

As we converted our passion to business and started out officially in Aug 2011, the journey seemed quite long and it seemed this would never go ahead. As days passed by, all our savings was draining out and Rajhesh’s day time job alone was fueling us with funds. Just the hopes and determination kept us going. In fact, we didn’t have a single garden (commercially) to work until May 2012. It was Archana, our dear friend who first offered us to re-pot and add few plants to her garden.  It was our silver lining on the dark cloud and we immediately accepted the offer.

Even though this was not our first garden experience, working on the commercial part was highly challenging as we didn’t know how to gauge the price, calculate the quantity of materials needed and so on. Archana was supportive and wanted to go ahead as planned, setting out for trial and errors.

We visited her home on a bright Sunday with few bags of compost, cocopeat, red sand and few herbs & seeds. Suhas & Rajhesh began working on the 40 to 50 odd pots, pulling out the weeds and soil mix from the pots. Later Archana also lent her hand with moving the pots around helping us to keep the place organized from all the mess. LOL!

Preparing the Potting Mix:

Our first potting mix with a ratio 1:1:1 (Compost, Cocopeat, Redsand) was prepared and later filled into all the possible containers at her place which included earthen pots, plastic pots, paint cans, old vessels, Plastic bags and whatever we could find in there.

It was then that we realised we still had 4 bags of Compost left which was extra. “1st lesson learnt” 🙂

And later we visited her garden for the next 2 months and we could see all the happy veggies and herbs growing in the garden and all the smiles on Archana’s face.

WE THANK ARCHANA FOR OPENING THE DOORS FOR OUR FIRST GARDEN 🙂