Lalbagh Flower show

Great Tit

First time flower showJ. I have heard about this event so many times that I dint want to miss it this time. An additional bonus was the fact that “the geek gardener” shop was demonstrating some hydroponics and selling gardening material at the premises. So gardening +bird watching pulled us to this place on Saturday morning.

We did notice some new birds (from our perspective J).

One was this tailorbird that we identified with the help of the book later.

New additions included a Great tit who posed quite well for the camera. Supposedly they look for crunching insects on leaves – that is what he/she is doing here.

Tailorbird

Complete list of birds is there on the birds page.

On the flower show itself, we dint find it great or interesting. They had supposedly spent 1 crore on decorating the place (eyes rolling!!). Inside the glass house was an array of flowers and some of them were shaped to entertain children. But nothing worth seeing! L

One good aspect was the gardening supply stalls present near the glass house. I guess about 25 shops would have made good business that day. They showed us how to use some items in home gardening – hydroponics, vermi-compost, compost, coco-peat. The enthusiasts in us ended up buying 2 huge cubes of coco-peat and were struggling to carry it around. We also bought some grow bags and vermin-compost. Here is a new one we bought – its long and we are planning to use it for radish and palak.

Update on Sunday:

Be careful of your estimation of coco-peat size! That one cube bloated and became enough to fill about 4 grow bags (about 15 L each) and we have used them for around 8 huge pots.  We were told that mixture of coco-peat and compost is enough to grow plants – it does make the pot lighter. We mixed 20% red sand since we already had them in our pots.  Our pots look happy and are responding well.