Our Story
Grihvatika began with a question a grandmother could answer and the internet could not: what should I plant here, now, in this soil?
It started on a Agra rooftop in 2013. A handful of us — a botanist, a school teacher, a Hindi editor and two people who simply liked growing things — kept meeting the same problem. A household wanted to grow food or medicine on a balcony, searched for help, and found advice written for English gardens: peat, frost dates, plants that die in a Delhi May.
Meanwhile the knowledge that did fit was in the house all along. Which leaf goes into the pot for a cough. Why tulsi sits by the door. When to sow methi so it is ready before the cold breaks. Real, tested, local — and passed on by speech, which means it thins with every generation that moves to a flat.
The idea
Grihvatika was built to hold both halves of that knowledge in one place. Every plant record carries the botany — the accepted name, the region, the water and light it needs, the pests to expect — and beside it, plainly labelled as traditional use, what households have long done with the plant. Neither is dressed up as the other. A gardener can read the record and decide for themselves.
The name says the intent. Griha, the home. Vatika, the garden. Not a farm, not a nursery — the garden a household can actually keep: a windowsill, a balcony rail, a shared terrace, the strip of ground by the gate.
What has happened since
The first version was a spreadsheet of forty plants shared with a WhatsApp group. Botanists began correcting it. Teachers asked for a classroom version. Gardeners in other states sent photographs and sowing dates that did not match ours, which is how the regional calendar started. Everything on this site grew out of somebody needing it and asking.
The work stays free, stays in English and Hindi, and stays open to correction. If a record is wrong for your street, tell us — that is how the last four hundred were fixed.