Monday, March 17, 2014

New Garden as on March 2nd 2k14



The New Garden as it looks on March 2nd. Looks awesome. It rained a little bit before the video, and the garden looked as if it just took a nice gulp of cool oxygenated water after a thirsty time.









This garden went through a lot of changes. Initially, it was set up with beds similar to what we have in the above video..

New Garden set up back in june 2k13.

Then, the idea was to make veggie beds and it worked great.. with some cocopeat, some compost, some vermi compost, it produced quite well. But then, right around the monsoon, we got into other work, namely Kritagnata Mahotsavam, the 75th birthday celebrations of our Master Ekkirala Bharadwaja, and this garden was left for itself. We used to 'forage' from this place rather than garden it. It was producing quite a bit, but as nature wills it, appropriately, it jumped into rampancy and there was a strong growth of what is called 'weeds'. 
Here is are a few photos of how it looked before the so called 'weeds' started to take over : 





Most people consider weeds a nuisance, a menace, an enemy to fight. But understand what is happening in nature, and what weeds do, and to learn to work with nature than against it, as is the permaculture maxim, they appear to be indicators, friends, allies and most definitely as a resource.

Here is how the garden looked as the weeds were taking over. These photos themselves are a beautiful education if we look into them and observe the weed response. The grasses, other 'weeds' and where they are occuring etc. Nature is amazing.  More about that in future. The following photos are from september 2k13. You can see that production of veggies was happening quite well, even with all those weeds all around, or should we more appropriately say, in the lovely company of the so called 'weeds'. The last photo is a quick shot of a very quick 'forage' session. :)











In october, I uploaded this vid to you tube, and it shows what was happening and how it all looked. And there was a snake in the garden too, thanks to the rampancy of Nature that life finds refuge in the garden! 





After a while, an excellent PDC happened, where your truly taught a mammoth 26 day PDC to the entire Nagole bunch. Feeling pumped up, they all decided to make it a Nagole community garden. And thus the work happened fast, every body got hands on experience, the women, the young men, the kids, every one got together. During the PDC we made berkely compost, two piles both of which became black gold in just 20 days (one pile took a week longer)! This is the compost getting created by the PDC students. Look at the color of it. Awesome!

And the beds were sheet mulched (some of them) and the garden started to look
like a garden again by the middle of december 2k13.



But by the time december 2k13 rolled around, a lot of things were rolling on the permaculture front. I gave an introduction to permaculture talk, and another event, the first ever 'Gather to Garden' happened (which was a brain wave of our beloved uppu upendra), and it was a crazy good time! 


That is me giving an intro to permaculture class. Good day. And these are the photos of the first ever 'Gather to Garden' event : 
The morning session on Upendra's rooftop


The Afternoon Slideshow and QnA session


And visit to sai's rooftop garden in the early evening.

The event was a grand success and it was even in the papers : http://epaper.sakshi.com/apnews/Hyderabad-City/09122013/Details.aspx?id=2084980&boxid=25901630

However, it was just the beginning. I was feeling a bit cranky and went off to ongole in late december. For rest I said. But I just could not shut up. I conducted a 'Gather2Garden' event in ongole where I spoke for sometime and then make a compost pile with the participants. Here are some photos of the ongole g2g : 



In the meanwhile, the Nagole bunch kept up with the compost and the new garden. And by early January, the garden started to look awesome. In early Jan it looked THIS good! 


And then in Late January, this is how it looked : 



And then in february 2k14 : 


That is the history of the New Garden and what happened since last june. There are several experiments going on in the garden, always, and great produce. Lots of it. 

Cheers!
DJ