If you have a garden and would love to use scientific methods and techniques to truly make it bloom, then the Agharkar Research Institute (ARI) should be of some help.
If you have a garden and would love to use scientific methods and techniques to truly make it bloom, then the Agharkar Research Institute (ARI) should be of some help.
For the last 20 years, the ARI has been running a gardening course to help people nurture gardening hobby.
Course coordinator Vinaya Ghate said, “The institute is under the aegis of the Maharashtra Association for Cultivation of Science. During one of our brain-storming sessions, we thought of an idea to have a course for people.”
And thus they designed a course to teach the science and technique behind gardening. Dr Madhav Nagare used to look after this course earlier. The six-month course deals with gardening at home.
Vinaya Ghate said, “Here, the word home has various meanings. The course teaches that if the garden is in a flat then what plants are to be selected and how to take care of those plants; if it is a bungalow then what groups of plants can be cultivated and how they can be arranged. We also teach about indoor plants, how to take care of them and more importantly which plants can be kept indoor. We also teach about floriculture and about various types of fruits and vegetables. We also give latest updates on how to grow plants at home, apart from basics of potted plants to bonsai to tissue culture.”
There is no examination at the end of the course. The course is conducted from 3.30 pm to 5.30 pm every Thursday. The course fee is Rs1,500.
“We also organise outdoor trips for the course members. Generally, we take trips to those homes which have unique gardens. We give a notification in the newspaper about the course in May every year. By June end we finish our admission procedure and the course generally begins by June end or the first week of July,” said Ghate.
Each batch consists of 40 to 50 students. Participants can also attend demo practicals as well as lectures by experts. There is no age bar for joining this course. Anyone, right from a collegian to a senior citizen, can take up this course. However, it is mostly women who enroll for the course.
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