New Delhi, Jan. 3 -- My gardening hobby has its ebbs and flows. Some years, I'm obsessively buying seeds, cocopeat, compost, seedling trays, and attempting to set up a vegetable farm in what is in reality a modest terrace garden. And then, because it's all organic, the snails and other garden predators enjoy the harvest as much as we hope to. They polish off the tender green seedlings during their midnight feasts and I'm back to square one with nothing left to grow into plants.

Then I'll see a neighbour-or someone on my Instagram feed-posting photos or videos of their garden harvests, baskets brimming with produce, and the gardening bug bites all over again. This time around, I've been lucky: the seeds have shown an impressive germinatio...