A Garden tour with Mrs. Kusum Patil
By: Akshay Singh | Date: 29th March 2018
An interview with Mrs. Kusum Patil feels like a guided tour in nature's bounty with one of its many wardens. This bounty is a 3000sq.ft backyard and yet one of those green beautiful specks, the importance of which cannot be overstated.
She gloats , standing among those lush greens that include various plants, both ornamental and vegetable and about a 100 eye-catchy bonsai. She fondly recalls moments when her son called her He-Man ,in awe of the way she handled them.
Soon she aims to evolve towards rainwater harvesting and make the system more holistic. Initially this was just a barren piece of black soil land and it has been a long transformative journey for her and the land in a mutual way.
"I attended courses of gardening and seminars. I learnt and also did put my own inputs from time to time with choice of plants and design of the garden". "Also, one important thing is to be serious about no chemical inputs" she adds.
The land has seen coconut, guava, mango, almonds,roses,lemons and much more as of now." The land had been plain black soil before. A discipline of using dead leaves, cowdung and the wet waste are what made it possible and nothing else was required ever since.
The land never needs them" Mrs. Kusum says.She cares for this piece of land single-handedly with planting and waste management but the effort isn't as humongous. The truth she acknowledges is that it doesn't need to be labour intensive unless it is judicious.
Even the decomposing process of wet waste,if well aerated,does not need to be unpleasant in aesthetics or even health and hygiene.
Of her achievements in this field, Mrs. Kusum shows us some trophies with immense zeal. She has her own crown of feathers and has been continuously winning various competitions in gardening since the past 10 years after what she was made the judge of the same gardening completion.
Being a member of Rose Society and Bonsai Foundation in the past her social circle also has like-minded people who have learnt and contributed to gardening in their own ways.She looks forward with a smile and the crusade seems reassured.
