Winter veggies

We’re been planting our winter vegetables, and trying to move another step towards having a more sustainable permaculture-based farm. While we used the tractor this time, we’ve now created smaller beds with walkable paths around each, so that we can move from machine-based to hand-tilling methods as we harvest.

We have planted peas, spinach, radish, carrots, beans, and mustard seeds. Cauliflower, cabbage, eggplant, capsicum, tomatoes, and green chillies are little seedlings. Next, we’re waiting for the potatoes to sprout eyes so that we can cut and then plant them.

Winter flowers too are scheduled for planting next week. We’re really looking forward to seeing all the rich produce and pretty colours in a few months!

Gearing up

We’ve been away and our focus has been simply to keep going – protect existing trees, continue with organic farming, and maintain our boundaries. The extreme seasons of north India give us enough to do to keep things under control!

In 2025, we plan to do our next round of intense plantation. Since January, we have been re-preparing the trenches where trees did not survive: removing weeds and unwanted plants, spraying jeevamrit, watering, and mulching. Now, we prepare to dig a huge number of new trenches and areas in preparation for plantation from July through October.

We’ll be posting much more regularly from now on. Please stay tuned!

Visitors!

On February 25th, we had one of our first ‘tours’ of our Miyawaki foresting. Our partner organization, NIRMAN, had a “Farm to Fork” event with all kinds of inspiring and creative activities related to the environment. One of these was a visit to the main land and forest.

It was lovely having people visit respectfully, observe, and enjoy the beauty of our growing forest. We are looking forward to lots more such!

Here are some of the children and their preparation for the visit:

New additions!

This could be our most exciting announcement to date. We have just brought home a lovely cow and her baby calf!

The walk home
New home

This morning, she gave us three litres of pure milk. Mama and baby seem calm and happy in their new home.

Milk!

We are now in the process of making a shed and a urine tank. We are excited at the prospect of being self-sufficient in our manure and jeevamrit needs. One cow can theoretically produce enough urine and cowdung to fertilize an area much larger than ours, according to many natural farming techniques. So far, we have had to beg and buy both.

Suggestions are welcome as we consider names for both!

Shed and tank

Gangavan in 2024

A forest will grow naturally.

This year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, called for the world to plant a trillion trees. Many commentators explain, however, that all you need for forestation is to let the land alone without further damage and the forest will grow back itself. Meanwhile, “….a new study shows that the potential for natural forest regrowth to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and fight climate change is far greater than has previously been estimated” (https://e360.yale.edu/features/natural-debate-do-forests-grow-better-with-our-help-or-without)

Children will grow naturally too. Yet we are all preoccupied with various approaches for the education, socialisation, and development of children. Or maybe we should be, and are not enough. In the case of forests, we cannot wait for hundreds of years on our own Gangavan for them to grow and so we interfere. We keep cutting back tall grasses, prickly wild trees, and undergrowth, or we would be buried under a Sleeping Beauty type jungle. While we thus remove, we keep digging trenches and pits, manuring and planting. Then we weed and water and cut back more undergrowth around, not in the trenches.

This past year, some of us were away for much of the year and immersed partly in the parallel activity of helping children grow. In April all will be back to the comparably easy work of planting and gardening (while the child-rearing carries on, and maybe the children become gardeners too). These are some of the plans:

To double the number of trenches and pits. Those first planted already showcase a hundred species anywhere from 4 to 10 feet high. No time to lose to forest the rest of the land!

To design more carefully towards the final landscape, which will have: three ponds, double lines of trees around the boundary, groves of specialized flower and fruit trees, walkways, observation spots, a rehearsal space and theatre studio, cottages, a common semi-outdoor meeting space.

To begin to use the land more regularly for classes, for farming, for experiments, for learning and interacting with. We will bring experts, children, teachers, villagers, families and all visitors interested. Whatever anyone wants to do, almost, could be done in Gangavan.

To develop an “Ecological Curriculum” that will include the five elements, vayu (wind), akash (space), jal (water), agni (fire), and Prithvi (earth) woven and interlinked together in just about every topic in the subject areas of Languages, Mathematics, Social Studies and the Sciences. An artwork outside our campus depicts the elements with the shloka:

छिति जल पावक गगन समीरा। पंच रचित अति अधम सरीरा।। (Chiti, Jal, Pavak, Gagan, Samira – Panch Rachit Ati Adham Shareera. In slightly different words: our bodies are made of the five elements of earth, water, fire, space, and air.)

There is no limit to the usefulness of ‘ecologising’ our learning. We will interact with villagers, learning from them and teaching them through our questions and experiments. We will learn to care for our environment, our trees and animals, our earth and water, not just on special days but all the time. We will be happy creatures in the outdoors much of the day, playing while we learn, learning while we play. And because the elements are in fact intractable and complex, we will learn problem-solving at each step. Plant seeds? How do you access enough cowdung and urine to make enough organic manure? Seeds coming up—how to ward off the porcupines and peacocks, such lovely animals but busy nibbling? Saplings a sizeable height—how to deal with rabbits and mice? After that, the nil gai (our own Boselaphus tragocamelus antelopes?) How to dam up the excess water in the monsoons, the frosts in winter, and the scorching sun in summer? How to tackle soil erosion??

Gangavan, the original classroom, laboratory, and Garden of Eden.

Grass and beauty

October. Monsoons are over. It is still raining crazily though. What?? Tonight it is supposed to start and go on for twenty-four hours!!!

We are overwhelmed with grass. Kasha grass, taller than a person, with fluffy white flowers waving gaily in the breeze – gorgeous and resilient. Very good at helping us prevent erosion and protecting the land from human intervention, i.e. us.

How to clear the land year after year in order to have a few months of planting and growing? Not easy to figure out cost- and labour- efficient ways to do this…

Here is our new grass cutter, with Ravi explaining to Sunil how to use it.

Before we take a deep breath and dive in to the work, we invite you soak in the beauty of the land and our home villages.

Preparation for the floods 3.0

Inspecting the bridge – it’s still doing well, but needs a proper inspection and repairs in order to withstand the monsoon onslaught for the next few years.

The nala makes a sharp turn and hits our land at one point. Every year, soil is washed away and we retreat backwards. We build a new portion of wall to replace the part that falls. This is, of course, an unfortunate expense for us, but even more worrying than that is the invasion of the nala. How to prevent it without an exorbitant budget?

Our first pond has given us some answers. The soil from digging this pond provided enough soil to fill up the dam area where we had a deep canyon growing every year. There are a couple of other stretches of our boundary, fronting the river in one case and the nala in another, which need a high and wide medh (berm) in order to stop water from entering. We could not imagine where we would get the soil for making these, until we remembered that we had always planned to have multiple ponds. Ponds can help regulate the eco-system of a plot of land, harvest rainwater and improve soil health, attract birds and animals, and add to the beauty of the land. And they can provide the mud we need! So, at least two more ponds are now being planned. Our goal is to not allow any water from the flooding review to enter the main section of our land this year, where erosion occurs and where young trees suffer.

Gains and losses

As we enter the hectic pre-monsoon months, where we only think about how to prepare for this year’s imminent floods, we assess the past few months of work.

We lost most of the new trees we planted in June-July 2022. Theories about what happened vary. Some trees didn’t make it through two weeks of standing water. Others’ roots were eaten by termites. Some were inadequately watered through the dry months. Whatever the combination of factors, we are sad to have lost hundreds of fruit tree saplings, and others lovingly planted.

The good news is that the Miyawaki trenches planted in 2020 and 2022 are growing very well, just as we hoped and predicted. Some are truly amazing: we have kadamba trees that look five rather than two or three years old! And when we consider that the seven acres which had only babul, bamboo, and kasha just three years ago is now home to almost sixty varieties of trees, and hundreds of trees, we can’t help but rejoice.

The clock is ticking, however, and we are turning our sights towards protecting the land from the floods…more about that soon.

2023

It has been a few months since we posted on our site. Ganga Vana has gone through a cycle of seasons: the monsoon and winter. Now it is Phalgun, the last month of the Hindu calendar, and it is Spring, or perfect weather.

Welcome back to Ganga Vana. We look forward to sharing with you all kinds of ruminations on the goings-on on our lovely riverside ‘jungle’ campus.

The one thing making the most impact right now is our plentiful harvest. We have a field full of peas….we have already shelled and frozen many kilos. We eat them everyday, in curries, rice dishes, and as a snack. The cauliflowers are enough to feed the campus daily. The carrots and radish are more than we can manage. On certain days there is radish dal for lunch, together with a radish greens curry and a radish salad. No one complains! So tasty is everything. There are basket-loads of spinach and coriander (palak and dhania), fenugreek and dill (soya and methi). I didn’t mention the potatoes: small, succulent, their skins transparent and fresh—real babies.

It’s a puzzle as to the best use of these super organic vegetables. Very few can be stored or frozen. To sell them needs organizing ourselves for the enterprise. Over-eating seems the only recourse.

On visiting back after a few months, one cannot help how are critter neighbours have fared and what the seasons are like for the different creatures for whom the place is home. What are their concepts of the calendar, of time, of the cycle of the year? So much to research!

The largest animal on our land is the nilgai (Boselaphus tragocamelus), the largest Asian antelope and the sole member of the genus Boselaphus. They can be seen singly, or n herds. They stand very still and gaze out into the distance as if lost in a vision. They are shy of humans and if the humans approach even a modest distance, they gallop away soundlessly. They are not aloof when it comes to humans’ products, however. They graze appreciatively on new-sown shoots and midway grown crops and then fully grown stalks. Indeed, they are downright greedy (and always hungry) and can leap over the highest boundary walls to get at crops. Many a time have they have dropped the bricks of the top three or four rows in our boundary wall. Then they stand in the distance, quiet, still, happy.

As buildings, walls and human settlements expand, they are being chased away, since everyone chases them away, much as city people do monkeys, including with false gunshots. We are always cursing them for their destruction of walls and crops, but at heart we want them to stay. Not only do we want to disturb the natural web as minimally as possible, we would love to have animals sharing the land with us. The departure of any one species is a potentially tragic thing.

The second biggest animal on this plot of land named “Ganga vana” or “The forest on the Ganga” is the siyar, a jackal or hyena. Its call is plaintive. Every evening, at sunset, just after we have returned home from work or play on the land, washed up and resumed our urbane, cultured identities, a cry reaches our windows from the wild. Or rather, cries. In terms of spotting, we have only seen one siyar at a time. But we can hear, always, a team. Are they a family? A clan? Ae they two competing groups? The cries are hair-raising, as if they were a kind of monster babies being tormented, or demons in disguise to lure you into chasing them.

Smaller than them are the siyahi, or porcupines. To be exact, the Indian crested porcupine (Hystrix indica). None of us have seen one. We have collected its quills, however, and taken them home. We stroke them and admire them—they are strong, somewhat pliant, and anywhere from six to eighteen inches long. The porcupines are destructive too, like the antelopes, and we can see evidence of their having dug up our lovely potatoes, onions, radish and cauliflower. As Wikipedia tells us:

“They consume a variety of natural and agricultural plant material, including roots, bulbs, fruits, grains, drupe and tubers, along with insects and small vertebrates….These porcupines can act as substantial habitat modifiers when excavating for tubers. They are also considered serious agricultural pests in many parts of their range due to their taste for agricultural crops. For these reasons, they are often regarded as a nuisance.”

Now, we don’t exactly regard them as a ‘nuisance.’ We want them to stay. Maybe all we need is to re-define our needs so that whatever the land produces can be shared by all animals, from humans down to the lowliest.

Peacocks and peahens are probably larger than porcupines, and they walk around like animals, only essaying a flappy flight to cross a wall or reach their nests. Peahens, peacocks, other birds, snakes, dogs, cats, spiders, insects, and ants, all to come.

Pictures to follow!