My first experiment - No dig beds

With my hands itching to start experimenting with all the wonderful Permaculture techniques learnt at the PDC in bali, I decided to start with 'No-dig' beds for a fresh source of veggies for our dining table. With not enough biomass available at Chaitraban yet, we nevertheless decided to proceed with the experiment, with whatever we had....

We had,

- Rolls of cardboard,without ink (Unfortunately, India still has leaded ink for printing. If it wasn't so, newspaper would have been the cheapest option)

- Patches of the leftover of some veggies like dill, spinach and fenugreek. We followed the 'chop-n-drop' technique and dropped them on place. At that time, we did not have enough green biomass, but had to make do with what we had.

- Dry cut hay. We had let the grass grow tall on unused patches of land after the last monsoon. In the absense of helping hands, we made a deal with the villagers. They cut the grass for us and in return got half of the hay for their cattle. This worked wonderfully w.ell and we had a big pile of dried hay. This was not really ideal as there were always some leftover seedheads in the bales, but most had fallen off on land and we did the best we could, afterall!

- Manure. Having a cow at Chaitraban was still a dream, and we had to import a truck load of cow manure to fertilise the young trees and veggies for the time being

- Some topsoil.

We layered the same in the order- Greens, Cardboard, Manure, Dry biomass, manure, dry biomass, manure, soil, mulch of the dry biomass. After each layer, we moistened it just a bit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The plan is to grow the greens and follow chop-n-drop for the nitrogen.
Now, our job was to keep the bed moist and to see what happens...and...

After a week...
Voila!!! I picked up some mulch and explored underneath and what a treasure I found! The bed was teeming with tiny creatures of all shapes and sizes :-) And I could already see earthworms! It was the most wonderful and satisfying moments at Chaitraban for me! Now, the beds waited to be planted with some nice veggies for our dining table...



 

The PDC at Bali- was it a dream?

I had always wondered if I was the only one who seemed to be crazy to other people around. I had been leading a normal life in the city (if you can call a city life, normal) and still, my heart seemed to be in a far away place. Some place where there were tall tall green trees, the sun rays falling through a net of leaves, birds chirping and feeding their young in all the hidden branches, beautiful butterflies flying from one wild flower to the other, and bees stealing nectar from each bloom on the plants. There were rabbits and deer not afraid of people and nuzzling around me :-). There was no greed, no cruelty, no cement, no plastic, no fast food and no TV (if anyone can imagine!). Life was peaceful. I wondered if I was really crazy!

The internet opened my world wide and I realised there were hundreds, millions of people who dreamt of the Eden that I did. I longed to reach out and meet them and I finally got my chance one day!

It was a terrible day when I realised everything I have been doing at Chaitraban had all been in a wrong order! It dawned on me when I started learning Permaculture seriously. Uptill now, it had only been a hobby but one book lead to another and to another and to another until I was reading and watching videos and browsing about only Permaculture all day. I had too much knowledge crammed in my not-used-for-a-long-time brain and was getting confused day by day. Suddenly, I had this great enlightenment :-) of doing a Permaculture Design Certificate Course. I browsed and browsed on the net for one in India and found one too. But I needed more adventure (and it was time for a vacation too! I had never taken a break alone in my life and now I had a chance!) and I stumbled upon a course in Bali. It wasn't too far, the faculty was great and the venue looked promising. Out I went packing off to Bali in February 2013...

The lumbung

 We were twenty seven of us, enrolled for the PDC and all had almost the same vision. I met wonderful people, some closer to their dreams than others and some like me, just starting to realise that we could make our dream a reality one day. Each friend had a story to tell, about good and bad experiences, had had their shares of ups and downs in life. We were of different age groups, some in their late fifties and the youngest was twelve years old! He was from a family of organic farmers and was the most interested and the most amazing participant in the whole group. We also had a baby of four months amongst us! If she could talk, I am sure she would have had a story of her own to tell. We all shared our experiences and learnt from each other. We were like a family for those days of the PDC at Bali. We had great interesting sessions of classroom hours, movie hours in the day and then we would dissapear in the lanes of Bali for a different and great gourmet experience in the evenings.

My first duck!

At the end of the course, we had a teary goodbye session with promises of keeping in touch on the net and with a heavy heart I caught my flight home. Once in the flight, my spirits rose at the thought of seeing my loving family again after such a long long time and started planning on how I would apply all that I had learnt.

With a vision of my own Eden, our Chaitraban, smiling to myself, I dozed off on the flight back...