Curry Leaf Plant

By Shivani Manivasagan

Last winter, one of my mother's friends gave us a baby curry leaf plant that we've nurtured for the past year. Curry leaf plants need a lot of sunlight, especially when they are seedlings. Since we received the plant in winter, when our backyard doesn't get much sunlight, my mother placed the plant under LED lights indoors throughout the nighttime and turned it off during the day. After the weather improved, we moved the plant outdoors into a bigger pot and noticed that it grew much faster under direct sunlight, as opposed to the LED lights. We water the plant every day with the starchy water leftover from cooking rice, which functions as a natural fertilizer and pesticide. Whenever we make vegetable juice, we add some of the pulp into the pot as fertilizer; we noticed the curry leaf plant grow a lot when we did that! My mom carefully removes a small branch of leaves from the plant whenever she wants to use it in her cooking, as it's often used in various South Indian rice dishes. We're really looking forward to seeing our plant grow taller over these next few years, and it'll eventually grow into a curry leaf tree!