How To Get Out of Winter Blues -- Tips For My Fellow Gardeners

I usually get winter blues, every year, as the gardening period comes to an end. This year is no exception. What is it in gardening that makes us happy? Is it because we are surrounded by green and genetically we are more accustomed to green (than any other color because of our forest/grassland dwelling ancestry)? Or is it because we are surrounded by sound, color, movement and beauty -- the buzzing of bees, chirping of birds; the fleeting color of butterflies; the swaying of grasses in the breeze; the vibrant displays of flowers? Or is it because we have so much work in the garden -- inspecting, mulching, pruning, deadheading, climbing, crawling, kneeling, standing -- that we do not get the time to be depressed?

If you think deeply, you realize that gardening should be a very depressing chore for all the various reasons:

It is hard-work; dragging all the heavy pots, mulches, compost across the garden is not a fun job.

Trees and perennials take time to reach maturity. Gardening needs patience. It does not give us instant gratification. As you put the plant in the ground and imagine how it will look in ten years time, other thoughts peeks from around the corner; "how will my life be after ten years?" "will I still be alive?" "will the people that I love be still around?" These are not joyful thoughts.

You become a mass-murderer of weeds; you are a serial-killer of seedlings of unwanted plants; you squeeze the life out of garden-destroying bugs without blinking you eyes. You are indeed a psychopath. You can never be happy.

You do not kill weeds and unwanted bugs; you refuse to take life. Well! your garden will never be like the ones shown on TV or in magazines. You can only long and day-dream for such gardens. How extraordinarily sad!!

You fall in love with a plant and then look at the price-tag......

Some of your favorite flowers bloom only for few hours; or a day. Their ephemeral beauty, their short stay remind you that our stay on this earth is also for a fleeting moment. You do not know where you have come from; you do not know where you will go at the end of your life; nothing is permanent in your life. We are just but temporary residents, doing some temporary activities. What's the use of anything, of gardening?

Despite all such melancholy thoughts, gardening always lifts me up. I become like the butterfly, fluttering across the garden, to drink-in all that it has to offer.

I wait in anticipation for the plants to germinate, the seeds to arrive, and wild-lives playing hide-and-seek in my weed-ridden garden.

To enjoy more of gardening I started doing, for the last two years, indoor-gardening. All of us can do this if we have either a basement or attic or some place somewhere in the house. It can even be a garage as long as the temperature is not freezing cold.

I have it in our basement. Our basement is furnished (for my non-American friends, a furnished basement means it is like a proper room; it is not a damp, dark place where things are just dumped) and thus heated. If you want the plants to remain green and even bear fruits and flowers, then the temperature of the place should be like above 55 F (13 C). Thus, it is like a green-house but inside the house.


We built the whole system with less than hundred dollar. We searched around Home-Depot, Restores and Lowes (they are home-improvement supply superstores here in the US), and found this industrial-strength steel racks for about $30 (I don't know why they were so cheap; or perhaps we were lucky). You need such racks to bear the weight of all the pots and soil. You can also use plastic racks but again they have to be of industrial strength to carry all the loads. We set up the racks; bought some grow lights (from walmart, $4 each) and light-fixtures (for about couple of dollars from Restores); fitted the fixtures with bulbs. Hung those up through the racks, and voila! we have established our indoor green-house.

I know! I know! I hear you all...how can I commit such crime against environment by keeping those lights on for about 8 hours every day? I can do so because they consume very less electricity. If I leave all the grow-lights on for twenty-four hours, then at the end of the month it will consume electricity worth less than ten dollar. So, it should tell you how little it consumes and I do not leave them on for more than eight hours.

I water them only once a week along with some water-soluble sea-weed. I do not give them a thorough soak but enough to keep the soil moist. They are inside and thus do not have any of the outdoor elements like wind, sun, to dry them up. Too much water can kill them. I can harvest from them if I want to but I mostly for my enjoyment. Come Spring I put them in the ground so that they start fruiting again. I have bulbs, tubers, peppers, various herbs, tea-plant, curry-leaf plant, ginger and turmeric plants, tomatoes and other greens there. I also have other plants -- lemon, lime, bay-leaf, herbs, aloe, papaya, guava, longevity-spinach and other house-plants -- in front of every window in the house. Our house is a mini-forest during winter. Do you have any plants inside your house during winter?

I'm joining in the memes hosted by Eileen,  Rambling Woods, St Germain's meme.