Since I was a kid I have known about this flower courtesy my mother. She was and still is, in my eyes, the foremost authority on anything and everything to do with farming. We lived in a huge house, my father was a high ranking government servant who managed to get transferred within the same city over the course of our stay in Lucknow. The house was surrounded by around 2 acres of land. From the time I was 5 years old till I was 19 I have worked on those lands along with my brothers and of course my parents. A testament to the amazing knowledge and insights that my mother has is the fact that every year she would enroll in three categories of a statewide competition, kitchen garden, ornamental plants and the usual flowers. Every year till we stayed at Lucknow our garden used to place first, in all of UP. Gladioli were one of the main flowers that we grew in the area in front of the house. along with dahlias, gerberas, phlox, poppy, chrysanthemums, tube roses, hollyhocks and so so many others. Back in 1982-1995 that we stayed in Lucknow she had developed her collection of Gladioli to such an extent that we had colours and varieties that even today are not available to nurseries in India. And all without setting foot outside of the country, the first time she went out was in 1991 I think to Bradford and then Houston, she did bring back some seeds but her collection of gladioli and dahlia was her own doing. We had Dahlias blooming in the garden which were the size of a large basketball and not your regular pink, yellow, white no sir not the commonplace for this first engineering graduate from her university. We had some strange ones, half maroon, half white, green and yellow, deep maroon with white tips… again those were just dahlias. The gladioli were even more spectacular. Essentially, along with my younger brother who is the OG green fingers, she had mastered the art of grafting. These two used to be grafting one plant stock into another and then back to a third and so on and so forth. They did this for rubber plants as well. We had some of the most exotic rubber plants in the ornamental plants section all courtesy the grafting that these two painstakingly and meticulously executed. I was mostly the spadework guy. Most of my involvement I remember is about digging up the fields after the harvest had been done, watering, mowing the grass in the lawns, ferrying cow dung manure from the villages nearby and so on and so forth, grunt work to be specific. Then my father got transferred out of Lucknow and the house in Bhubaneswar had pretty much no land (well just about a few square feet which was nothing in comparison to the 2 acres we used to work with at Lucknow). Farming turned into gardening and all those years of meticulously developed bulbs, ornamental plants and what not, were lost in transit. We did carry a lot in fact, half of the goods train carriage that came from Lucknow to Bhubaneswar was filled with plants. But then subsequent transfers to Kolkata, Patna, Hyderabad resulted in progressively dwindling reserves. In Jaipur they again had a huge bungalow but by then the farm hands (my younger brothers and I were gone), here she managed to still grow some spectacular stuff and a pretty decent amount of it was in the flowers area as well but mostly veggies is what thrives here. Whatever she could manage with the designated Bungalow peon and the occasional gardener who would visit a couple of times a week. After my father retired they moved to a villa on a 300 square yard plot of land… he was always a non-corrupt official and besides the three of us kids had been a major drain on their resources, also no ancestral hand me down so yeah it was a 300sq yard plot that he could manage and it is still one of the most magnificent houses in the neighbourhood with people routinely visiting them to ask if they can have a look and copy some of the design elements. In fact once while out in the main city market my mother got talking to someone and they asked her where she lives, when she told them about the project they were like “oh yes we know, there is this white house there, they have a lot of adeniums, do you people live nearby”… well my mother replied “yes that’s our house”… So yeah there is a lot of respect and immense value in clean living also, people may say they love the flashy but in reality the real goodness is in the simple yet elegant… think Linen, think FabIndia. Anyway I digress…
Cut to around seven months back when I was talking to her and casually mentioned that we have land on our community farm which is not being used for much because it has been planted with mango trees (that are small). I was thinking of putting gladioli in there and was wondering if she thought it was a good idea. She asked me how big are the mango trees, because gladioli will need sunlight and in the shade of a mango tree nothing grows. I showed her the place and that was it. She called up this nursery at Haldia, West Bengal. Apparently one of the two biggest suppliers of Gladioli bulbs worldwide. She had developed contact with that nursery while they were at Kolkata. In a few days the bulbs arrived. I had discussed 1000 of gladioli and 1000 of tube roses. What arrived was 3000 of gladioli and 3000 of tube roses and the nursery guy added 500 dragon fruit saplings as a free gift. It was she said my birthday gift (we have birthdays 6 days apart in September). My birthday gift was to start preparing the land with Shrikant who was our farming consultant at the time. We meticulously developed the land and prepared it for planting the bulbs by the first week of October (latest by then the bulbs should be in the ground). The mango trees are now 3-3.5 years old so there’s a large amount of land in between rows of mango which was at that time infested with 4-5 feet high weed grass. We tractored and cleaned up then added cow manure and let the land rest for 10 days then tractored again and made beds, added oil cakes and let it rest for another 5 days. 5th of October the final spreading of cow manure was done and we started planting. I remember vividly how Ria, the elder daughter, planted the first bulb and then Ira and then Sonali. I was busy making the holes with a long pole. We set up an assembly line, me digging the holes, the girls one dropping the bulbs and the other covering it up with soil the third making sure we were doing a good job. We planted 6 rows (around 1200 bulbs) the rest were planted by the ladies who had come in to lend a hand (hired labour for the task). So yeah the bulbs all went in on the 6th. Then there were sprinklers added to the drip irrigation pipes to water them and we were on our way. I remember the sheer joy when I came back after 10 days and saw all the bulbs had sprouted and there were green stumps showing all over the field. Along the way there were multiple rounds of weeding, sand banking, manure application. Towards the end of November when I felt the plants were ready to start throwing stalks up I did a final round of fertilizer application. I brought in vermi compost and epsom salt. I mixed them in a proportion that felt right and we did the de-weeding and sand banking one last time along with the hired labour. By this time I had had the sprinklers removed. Figured sprinklers feed weeds more than what simple drip irrigation would do.
On 6th of December Ria and I along with Bagheera came to the farm. I needed to urgently apply pesticide to the mango trees because mango was about to start flowering in a few weeks. I had had the farm hand prepare the pesticide with garlic, chilli, aloe vera, neem leaves and leave it to ferment for a week. The farm hand had left for his home town and I needed to get this done urgently. So Ria and I decided we will go and do it. She is my partner in crime always. We reached around sunset and immediately got to work. Bagheera was highly agitated by the sound of the super sprayer so Ria cam back to the room to calm him down. As the sun set I continued spraying the mango trees. It got dark as I reached the trees where the flowers had been planted. I saw something bright white sparkling in the distance. Not sure what it was and not bothered because right now my focus was on getting the spraying completed I carried on. But then I saw it up close and realized. I called Ria on the phone and told her to come right away with Baggu. The flowers were here! Meanwhile I called Sonali up and showed it to her. She was very excited and we agreed to come visit together the next morning when we could see it clearly. We hung up after some talk about how it is not safe to be out in the farm after dark and that we should wrap up now and head home.
It was a sight to behold. At this time my mother was on a vacation driving through USA and Canada. She does that sometimes thanks to our youngest brother who loves to take her on these exotic vacations. I called her and told her also sent her pictures which I took with Ria holding her phone torch in one hand and struggling with a hyperactive Bagheera with her other hand. She was ecstatic, said this was a lifetime dream come true. She had always wanted to grow Gladioli in such large quantities in a farm but had never been able to because resources were never enough. So yeah we had successfully grown gladioli in a farm on pretty much virgin land. Start to finish for bulbs in the ground to flowers it took exactly 2 months. I harvested a lot of flowers, sold them to neighbours who appreciated them a lot, gave them to a lot of friends and family as gifts. I even tried setting up a sales channel to my clients (web development, hosting) in Australia who were into flowers (florists mostly). Turns out there is a tonne of paper work to be done and some post processing that is not easy for hobbyists but then we’ll get there eventually. I even went to the flower market in town and they offered me excellent terms because so far they have been getting gladioli from Kolkata because no one grows them in such excellent quality in Hyderabad. Who would’ve thunk, this was my first try and we had done better than anyone around Hyderabad! Only thing was that connecting to the local market was a little late in the season and we did not have enough to justify a supply chain setup at this late in the season.
Once she returned from the vacation we had another one of our long calls while driving to the farm (it’s a 1 hour drive and when I am not with the wife I call the mother because this is the most peaceful time I can find when either of them will listen to me and talk for an extended duration). She was like “do you want to try out another round of planting and harvesting? I went from 120kmph straight 100kmph, I’m listening. So then she explained that if we could somehow plant another round of bulbs in another area of the mango plantation before the 15th of January then we could harvest a second round of gladioli by 15th of March. Today is the 15th of March and today I see at least 6-10 stalks that have bloomed. I came to the farm yesterday evening to fix an ongoing issue with the water distribution system. I had made up my mind to stay overnight and complete the task properly as well as teach the new farm hands how to manage it. Within 15 minutes we isolated the main problem, cleared it up and got the basic circulation going. Then I started working on the control valves all over the farm. Opened up one completely and cleaned it and handed over to the farm hand to put it back together. I went for a walk through the farm to see what was going on in the absence of proper watering. Well as lit happened last time, while inspecting the guava trees I noticed something white glowing in the distance. The sun had not yet set so this time around I smiled because I knew what it was.
So yeah that is the story of my experiments with Gladioli, so far. The ides of March have been traditionally a time when I have had the worst luck any year. Like the rottenest stuff that has happened in life has happened between the 1st and 15th of March. Today is the 15th of March. I am expecting the day to pan out really bad, like losing an arm or stepping on a pick axe or falling off a tree or stumbling into a ditch or even getting electrocuted or something. Let’s just say I woke up at 1:30 (after having gone to sleep at 9:30 yesterday evening) saw two new fires had started (work front), fixed those and sat down to type this out. Figured might as well get this out there before the Ides of March gobble me up and spit out my bones… wrong decisions, bad calls everything I can somehow trace back to this 15 day period throughout my life… let’s see if writing this down changes things up a bit š Either ways glad that the second PoC of growing a second season of gladioli worked out…