Caged Beauties

Sometimes, you find beautiful things in the most unlikely places. I saw these cockatiels during a condolence visit. Like peacocks and peahens, the colorful ones are males and the grey one is a female.

My Onion Garden

I recently saw an exciting gardening video about growing onions from scraps. It looked so simple that it made me try it out myself. See the pic on top of my indoors onion garden.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw so much life coming out of mere scraps of onions! An inspiration indeed; a good example of what strong determination can achieve.

Here are the steps.

1. Cut out about 20% of the lower parts of onions from where roots develop. Remove all the dry peels from below and keep only the fleshy part.
2. Place them on little bottles containing water with their root portions touching water. I used little bottles lying around at home.The bottles can be of any material, plastic or glass. Don’t let the scraps drop inside.
3. After a day or two, new roots will appear. Later, the shoots come and the scraps shrink in size.
4. One of my scraps fell inside the bottle! So, after removing it from the bottle, I placed a cork on the bottle and made a hole in it, big enough to let the onion scrap sit on it comfortably with its roots passing below it into the water.
5. In about 10 days, you will get a garden like mine above!
6. You can transfer them to your garden outside or into flower pots and plant new scraps in those bottles.
7. Here’s a pic I clicked just before transferring them into pots. Amazing! So much life in these scraps!!

Spinach Flowers

Special Visitor – A Tailor Bird

On the morning of 30 November 2020, Guru Nanak’s Birthday, I had a special visitor, a tailor bird, in my balcony. She stayed for just about 2 minutes, but she made our special day more special. See the pic above.

Guru Nanak’s Birthday 2020

Because of Covid-19 scare this year, 2020, we celebrated Guru Nanak’s Birthday on 30 November at home.

I made lunch just like the way it is made for langar in the Gurudwara; whole urad dal, alu-gobhi sabji, rotis, and radish salad smeared with pickle. At night, we lighted candles and placed them on the staircase. They looked so wonderful. The sight of light piercing through darkness has a great psychological effect. Your mood becomes better and you move on to better things. 

But what made this special day day super special for me was a tailor bird. See the pic below. It made a fleeting appearance in my balcony, but left behind a lovely memory. Tailor birds are rarely seen in Delhi like this.

Twinning

Affectionate Pigeons

Watching through the window

Here is another one of my window pics inspired from Mayank Austen Soofi’s ‘Looking through the window’ series on Facebook.

Click below for a more romantic pose.

https://jasbirchatterjeephotoblog.wordpress.com/2020/11/23/romancing-by-the-window/