Organic farming experiences

I spent 4-5 months with a couple of communities at Auroville (Aurobrindavan - Bernard and Deepika and Solitude - Krishna). Learnt a lot and met some very interesting folks.

Bernard's place is very interesting because the land is highly eroded and has absolutely no humus and is rock hard if you try to dig. Deepika has managed to create raised beds using the Prayog Parivar method that yield very healthy and tasty (trust me to verify that!) vegetables.

At Krishna's place we planted a lot of lettuce - starting with seeds in small cups in the nursery and transplanting after a couple of weeks. Planted tomatoes, several kinds of very tasty basil (there was an anise basil that I liked a lot), cucumber, pumpkin, brinjal. Threshed the ragi, red rice. Mulched a lot! Built earthen walls for Krishna's house. Made ragi dosai, pongal, rotis. And I nearly forgot - we used to harvest papayas every day in the morning. Believe me, catching a 3 kg papaya falling from 20ft is no joke. I bet after that I'd have been better than the average on the Indian cricket team. Generally had a lot of fun!

Then I spent about 3 months with my friend Siddarth in Sengottai - he has a small fruit orchard. The land is on a small hillock and you can sit and see other hills around and clouds floating in between. And you can see the checkerboard paddy fields just beyond. Its all quite pretty until you realize that to water anything you have to lug a kodam up a 100 feet! My land is going to be like a billiards table :-)

We started a vegetable patch and planted kottavarai, mullangi, jack beans, ginger, turmeric. We tested Bernard's tips to use charcoal to minimise leaching by mixing charcoal into one bed and the turmeric from that bed was definitely bigger and healthier. Also planted tuvarai and ragi on the bunds. We started a compost heap but apparently it didn't do too well - S thinks its because the water got in. So he is trying again without soil and covered with a plastic sheet. Climbed a lot of trees - specially the jack because I wanted to make as much jam as I could! I think we have nearly perfected the art of making good chakka jam and mango pickle that does not spoil easily.