When the garden stopped breathing...

There was a year in the history of my garden when nothing grew. Nothing. Seeds refused to sprout. Foliage froze in place. Even the hibiscus, usually generous, stood still. It felt as though the garden had stopped breathing.

The garden was a year or two old then. Our young gardener, an enthusiastic man from a village near Kanakapura, came armed with modern ideas. He believed that urea and DAP were the cure for everything. He kept saying the grass would turn lush and there would be more flowers if we “nourished” them with these. We were new to it and complied. The plants looked greener at first. They always do when nitrogen floods the soil. Around the same time, I had begun my composting journey with khamba pots. One morning, I opened the back door and found a mass of worms crawling on the floor. I screamed, but then realised no one else was going to deal with them. So I collected the worms carefully and sent them back into the khamba under layers of leaves.

Meanwhile, the gardener continued his quarterly rituals of sprinkling DAP. The plants appeared fine for a while. But when the first wave of mealy bugs arrived, he reached for pesticides used in large fields. The garden smelled sharp and chemical. The pests died; a few plants did too. The rest looked uncomfortable, as though they had been fed too much and too fast. He insisted this was how big farms worked, and we should be
happy that the bugs had died.

And then, one day, he stopped coming. The garden, which had become dependent on these artificial boosts, began to collapse without them. When spring came, I loosened the soil and sowed seeds. That was the moment I understood something was wrong. There was no earthy smell. The soil felt flat and exhausted. Hardly anything germinated. The few seedlings that appeared stood uncertain and weak, as if the soil beneath them had nothing left to give. It struck me later: the compost had worms; the soil in my garden did not. One was alive. The other was exhausted. The Rs 500 I had spent on DAP had quietly created an immeasurable loss.

I knew I needed help. I reached out to a gardening friend whose advice I trusted. He listened and said something that stayed with me: chemical fertilisers can turn soil into an addict. As long as you keep feeding it urea and DAP, it responds. The moment you stop, the soil has no idea how to function. It forgets how to make its own nutrients, how to cycle organic matter, how to support microbes, and how to breathe. The soil needed to relearn. “Add life back to it,” he said. “Give it compost, leaf mould, cow manure. Add anything that once breathed.”

So I emptied the pots one by one and rebuilt the soil slowly. I mixed in mature compost, crushed dry leaves, and well-rotted manure. I also added a scoop of my own compost, hoping it would reintroduce some life into the tired soil.

Gardening demands patience when nothing else works. Over the next few months, the soil began to soften. A faint earthy smell returned. And one monsoon morning, after a night of heavy rain, I found a few earthworms on the surface curling away from the light. Since then, I’ve leaned more gently toward organic methods, for they rebuild the living fabric of the soil.

Watching the garden heal taught me to pay attention to the smallest things. In the years that followed, whenever I reached for compost, cocopeat, or neem cake, I found myself pausing. Why am I adding this? How much does the plant actually need? Is this the right time?

The experiments revealed their own truths. Too much of anything, even good things, can unsettle the soil. A pot of soil must hold the same complexity as the earth itself: the quiet work of microbes, the slow decay of leaves, the patient chemistry of decomposition. None of these can be replaced with shortcuts.

The right measure of anything remains an enigma which each gardener should solve through seasons of attention. We often believe plants suffer because we haven’t given them enough. But sometimes, they suffer because we give too much. In gardening, as in life, a measure of everything makes all the difference.

Motley Garden is your monthly kaleidoscopic view into a sustainable garden ecosystem. The author believes gardens are shared spaces where plants and creatures thrive together. She can be reached at [e-mail] or find more garden notes on social media at @allthingsinmygarden.