Scaling up vegetable grafting will boost farmers' income: Horti head

Hyderabad: On the sidelines of the 11th Nursery Mela at Necklace Road in the city that started on February 24, a team of the City of Terrace Gardens (CTG) met at the venue on Saturday to revitalise with the array of soothing saplings and seedlings of fruit, floral and ornamental variety seething the entire arena along with glittering components to propaga teterrace gardens.

On the second day of the event, the venue was flooded with almost 23,000 CTG members among which most of them were garden enthusiasts from the city and surrounding districts.

Overwhelmed by the presence of huge number of members at the event, the Commissioner of Horticulture Department L Venkatram Reddy felt elated and gave a patient hearing to the success stories of the passionate garden enthusiasts who are not only bedecking their backyards and terraces with array of fruit, floral and vegetable seedlings but are emulating others in raising their own gardens.

On the occasion, the commissioner shed light on the unique method of grafted vegetable seedlings that help produce more than one variety of vegetables with a single stem. Grafting is a unique horticultural technique used to join parts of two or more plants to help raise them as a single plant.

The technique is used to help the upper part (scion) of one plant grow on the root system (rootstock) of another plant. While using this technique, the above-ground part of a plant is grafted with the in-ground part of another plant. This helps the grafted plant grow as a single plant but with a different vegetable propagation.

This technique is completely new to Telangana. It is only available in Kuppam area of Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh. The Telangana government has now decided to promote it in the State to facilitate the farmers with more income-oriented farming methods.

Upon the request made by Srinivas Harkara, senior advocate and the founder of CTG, the commissioner agreed to provide grafted Brinjal and Tomato seedlings to the members of CTG on subsidised rate of Rs 2 per seedling instead of Rs 6 as a token of recognition of their service for turning the terrace gardening trend into movement.