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In September 2004, Bhaskar Save visited us again to help us develop one or two intensive orchard plots, and to guide us in our other farming efforts. His advise was plain. If we aimed to evolve a self-reliant community, and feed it sustainably, we needed to further increase our water harvesting efforts, and also lay a pipeline for more efficient irrigation of distant plots and saplings. For the former, he recommended that we should gradually increase the depth of our rock pool reservoir every year, and undertake similar work on other parts of the stream, or on other monsoon streams flowing through our land.

The pipeline for water delivery (up to a tank near our house) was laid the same year (2004), but additional work on water harvesting was delayed beyond Holi. In April 2005, we started deepening our stream-bed rock pool, and used the excavated rocks to widen and strengthen the check dam downstream of it.

Before the monsoon arrived this year, our open well again dried up. This was likely due to high extraction from surrounding (or downstream) motorised borewells that plumbed a depth much below the bottom of our open well. These trials notwithstanding, we do seem on a sound path of achieving water security for ourselves fairly soon. By January 2006, we’ll resume deepening our rock pool, and perhaps undertake a similar, low-cost project elsewhere on our land.

We also have a number of smaller rock ’n earth structures – bunds and gully plugs – dotting our land. These are dwarf ‘walls’, barely two feet tall, and less than 10-15 feet long. Like the bigger walls of check dams, the bunds and gully plugs too arrest rainwater runoff (and eroded soil), thereby enhancing sub-soil percolation. But more efficient than all these earthworks in recharging ground water is the porous, living soil under our increasingly dense forest.

Our Farming Experiences
Sunlight & Fertility: While inadequate exposure to sunlight is a limiting factor in growing food crops on terrain that is overgrown with vegetation, the proximity of forested area affords a number of advantages as well. In particular, we have a generous abundance of biomass (leaf litter mulch), rich silt (from the bottom of seasonal water bodies), and vermicastings to serve as excellent organic fertiliser and soil conditioner – obtained free from our own land, without the need of any other external inputs for growing our field crops, vegetables and fruit trees. At most, we add some dung manure, and occasionally sprinkle our indigenous ‘Panchgavya’ solution.

Vegetables: Over the years, we have tried growing many different vegetables, particularly indigenous varieties, whose seeds we save from our previous year’s crop. We have harvested a good amount of bhendi (okra), bottle-gourd, cucumber, shirali (ridged-gourd), ghosali (sponge gourd), kohla (ash gourd), karela (bitter gourd), vangi (brinjal), pumpkin, tomato, musk melon, abai (jackbean), gavar (cluster beans), chaoli (cowpea), radish and several leafy greens.

In the past, we grew vegetables only (or mainly) in the monsoon. But in 2004, we inter-planted a number of irrigated winter vegetables too -- in our new orchard plot near our open well, where watering is easier.

Rice: Initially, we experimented with planting seven different indigenous varieties of rice from our Konkan region, obtained from Dr. Richharia’s ‘Seed Memorial’ at ADS, Kashele. Subsequently, we stuck to mainly three kinds - one, the tall, indigenous Nawabi Kolam (a delicious 5 month variety), whose seeds we got from Bhaskarbhai Save. The second, Jheeni (also tall and indigenous), and the third – Ratna, a dwarf variety released by the Dept. of Agriculture, which became the most common choice of farmers in our area, including our own adivasi workers, most of whom had started adding urea in their paddy fields. In 2005, however, we planted only Jheeni, but still had to remind our adivasi workers that the inter-planting distance between 2 seedlings of this tall variety should be at least 18 inches. Unfortunately, they have got too used to the dwarf Ratna, which is about half the normal height of Jheeni, and transplanted at barely 8-9 inch gaps. With such a short gap in transplanting tall native varieties like Nawabi Kolam or Jheeni, we found in the past that the rice plants overshot their normal height, and consequently ‘lodged’ (or bent over) under their own weight. This was particularly pronounced in our extremely fertile, low-lying (stream-bed) rice fields, renewed each year with fresh run-off silt (topsoil) from the floor of the surrounding (higher) forest areas.

Despite the high fertility of our rice fields, the shade cast on the rice plants by the surrounding, proximate tall trees has been a limiting factor affecting yield. (Bhaskarbhai recommended harvesting a whole line of trees along the rice zone perimeter for our own use.) And then, the absence of the scent of human presence during much of the wet (and busy) growing season has also emboldened forest creatures -- wild boar, hare, etc – to partake in our crop. (The rice fields are quite a distance from our two houses.)

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