100 Madhavi Guttikonda from Andhra Pradesh is a popular organic terrace gardener. Her YouTube channel ‘Mad Gardener’ now has 4,83,000 subscribers
Despite the fact that 2020 and 2021 have been difficult years of the Covid-19 pandemic, both have provided some silver linings. To deal with the tough times, many people turned to hobbies that they had always wanted to do or never believed they would do to find peace and good health.
With rising health and food safety concerns, many individuals have begun to engage in organic terrace gardening, as they are more concerned than ever about where their food originates from and how it is grown. However, not everyone can get it properly the first time; they need someone to guide them as well, because varied climatic conditions necessitate different tactics and skills.
Madhavi Guttikonda, a 43-year-old caring plant mother who has established her own niche in organic terrace gardening, was that “beginner’s guide to gardening” for most people in Andhra Pradesh.
From sowing flower seeds in her small space a decade ago to nurturing a 1,800 sq ft garden with an ever-expanding variety of organic produce, this Vizagite’s gardening journey has been fruitful not only for her but also for the audience of her YouTube channel, ‘Mad Gardener.’
Madhavi Guttikonda, a Visakhapatnam terrace gardener, uses , ‘Mad Gardener.’ to share the knowledge she has acquired through observation, experience, and experiments in terrace gardening. Madhavi, who won the Rythu Nestham Award in the terrace gardening category for the year 2021, stated, “For me, the word tranquilly is synonymous with gardening. I made the move to completely organic terrace gardening and began with planting green vegetables.
Needless to say, Madhavi exclaimed, “They had to be some of the most wonderful vegetables I’d ever tasted. Instead of just getting the advantages all the time, gardening allows us to contribute to and care for nature while also lowering our ecological imprint.”
She began growing vegetables such as tomatoes, radish, aubergines, carrots, sweet potatoes, various sorts of beans, cabbage, cauliflower, lettuce, practically all forms of gourds, and medicinal plants around a half-decade ago. She also grows turmeric, and mushrooms, as well as various fruits such as guava, dragon fruit, and so on. Madhavi continues to experiment with seasonal and exotic types.
Gardening, in addition to physical health, boosts mental and emotional well-being by soothing our senses and keeping us linked to nature, according to Madhavi. Madhavi stated that the production from her garden alone meets a major amount of her family’s food demands all year.
It feels so good to be able to harvest for ourselves and our families during a crisis, whether it’s a virus outbreak or skyrocketing prices. On the advice of her children, the plant mother launched her YouTube channel ‘Mad Gardener’ in 2018.
She stated, “I simply intended ‘Mad Gardener’ to be a virtual library where people could get gardening-related questions answered. That is when I decided to upload videos week after week, with a goal to help more people understand the significance of a self-sustainable lifestyle.”
‘Mad Gardener’ now has 4,83,000 subscribers, and Madhavi Guttikonda, has a sizable following on Instagram (45,000 followers) and on Facebook (2,188,000).”
