Seek, and ye shall find...
The traditional monsoon vegetables nobody grows any more
Colocasia, taikilo, ambadi and shevga: a handful of monsoon-season vegetables grandmothers along the Konkan coast still know, and almost nobody else grows. A case for putting them back on balconies.
Every June, the rain arrives on the Konkan coast and most kitchen gardeners quietly give up for three months. The tomatoes rot, the lettuce melts and the general feeling is that the monsoon is a season to endure rather than grow through.
This is exactly backwards. The monsoon is the easiest growing season we have, as long as you grow the right things. The trouble is that almost nobody remembers what the right things are.
My grandmother grew colocasia (alu), taikilo, ambadi and shevga without thinking of it as gardening. It was just what you ate when it rained. These are plants that want heat and water and humidity, the three things the monsoon delivers in abundance. They ask almost nothing of you in return.
Take taikilo. It grows wild along Goan roadsides in the rains; the young leaves make a bhaji that tastes of the season. Nobody plants it because nobody needs to, but on a city balcony, a pot of it is a small, reliable miracle when everything else is drowning.
Ambadi (Gongura) is the same story: a sour-leaf green that thrives in the wet, makes a superb chutney and shrugs off the pests that destroy your tomatoes. Shevga, the drumstick tree, will give you leaves all monsoon and pods later, from a cutting stuck in the ground.
I’m not romanticising hardship here. These plants are practical. They’re adapted to precisely the conditions that defeat the imported vegetables we’ve been taught to want. Putting them back on balconies isn’t nostalgia; it’s just good gardening for the climate we actually have.
Start with one. A pot of ambadi or a colocasia corm from the market. Watch what the rain does for it. You may find, as I did, that the monsoon becomes your favourite season to grow in.