Schools have been closed for a year now. Finding himself spending more and more time with his hobby, a teacher Hafizur Rahman Masud started planting an orchard in an abandoned yard.
What began as a small project on his roof has now turned into a commercial nursery, helping him stay afloat financially.
Masud who comes from Kashipur village in Kaliganj upazila of Jhenaidah, said: “I have already sold fruit saplings worth more than Tk5 lakh.”
“When the lockdown happened last March, I had a lot of time on my hands, so I began planting lemons on the roof,” he said about how it all started.
He gradually collected more local and foreign fruit seedlings.
Armed with some research online, he created a collection of different varieties of fruits and flowers from different nurseries in the country.
It now has 180 species of different fruit and flower saplings. These include persimmon, long mulberry, etc, as well as different varieties of mangoes, various orange varieties, lemons, coconuts, other exotic fruits such as olives, Rambutan, Durian, avocado and medicinal plants.
Foreigners too have found him and are now collecting various fruit and flower saplings from him.
At present, the saplings sold from his nursery brings him Tk15,000 to Tk20,000 per month excluding expenses, he said.
Masud said that he was encouraging well-known people and farmers in the area to cultivate foreign fruits like him.
Inspired by him, many have started cultivating exotic fruits commercially. Seeing the nursery on his roof garden and backyard, he said many people are now planting different fruit saplings in the fallow land of their own homes.
