Gardening Gyan: Expert Tips for Organic Vertical Towers

A step-by-step guide to making liquid kitchen compost. Just collect your green waste, blend it into a chutney, ferment it for a week, dilute, and feed it to your plants for amazing results.

Don't have a mixer or find it a hassle? No problem. You can still make excellent liquid compost by finely chopping your kitchen waste and fermenting it. The goal is to make gardening simple, not complicated.

Amrit Jal is another fantastic liquid fertilizer, like glucose for your plants. I demonstrate how to prepare it using cow dung, cow urine, and jaggery, and how to dilute it for use in your towers.

Composting is essential for good fruiting. A simple way is to make a liquid fertilizer from vermicompost. Just soak it in water for 24 hours and use the diluted water every 15 days to feed your plants.

Pinching, or 3G cutting, is a technique you must learn for creeper vegetables like gourds and cucumbers. By pinching the growing tips, you stop the plant from wasting energy on vertical growth and encourage it to produce more branches and more fruit.

When should you pinch your plants? I recommend doing it three times: first when the plant is 8-10 inches tall, again when it reaches about 3 feet, and a third time when it's a bit more mature. This leads to multiple branches and abundant fruiting.

Pinching also helps when your plant is producing only male or female flowers. By cutting the tip, you encourage new shoots which often produce the flowers you need for pollination and fruiting.

Let's clear up some misconceptions about pinching. It does not harm the plant; it helps it. Pinching is done by hand on soft shoots, while pruning is for hard stems and requires tools.

Pinching is also important for tomato plants to prevent them from becoming too lanky. Removing the top shoots encourages the plant to become bushier and focus its energy on producing fruit.