Seeds and cuttings!

We have started working on our seedlings. We will be able to afford to buy about 2000 plants from the nursery. Those will be our specialty fruit/nut/spice trees and trees that aren’t available easily in the vicinity. But all the others – over 4000 – will have to be added over the monsoon and following year(s) from gifts and through growing our own from seeds and cuttings.

We are starting with the seeds of gulmohar (flame tree: delonix regia), amaltas (Indian laburnum: cassia fistula), rakt chandan (red sandalwood: adenanthera pavonina), shirish (albizia lebbeck), and semal (red silk cotton: bombax ceiba). We have an abundant supply of neem (Indian lilac: azadirachta indica) and shisham (Indian rosewood: dalbergia sissoo) seeds, but I don’t think we’ll need to propagate them because we have so many saplings growing on their own in our other plots. We’ll just have to carefully transplant them once the rains start.

We are also going to grow nimbu, imli (tamarind), mango, and litchi, which are in season right now. This is even though we will buy saplings of the latter for the specific grafted varieties as well. We aren’t planting the fruit trees just for the yield. We want to see what kinds of fruit might turn up, even if it isn’t every year, or if it takes a few years more for the trees to start fruiting.

The cuttings will be of peepal, banyan, bamboo, guava, moringa. For now. I think that’s ambitious enough. I have never really done any of these things, but we have been reading and researching and discussing techniques for specific trees for a while. Today, the children helped me scarify, shell, and soak in a new ‘Seed Office’ I cleared out (I will describe these in detail once we achieve results). A nursery bed is almost ready. Later, we wandered around inspecting the shisham, neem, and peepal saplings that have sprung up on their own, and collecting more seeds. It was a wondrous day.