It feels like the sun has returned as it is
sunny with a lovely drying wind.
I will enjoy it while it lasts because who knows,
the rain might come back. Several times
we have thought the rain was finished and then we found ourselves wet again.
A blog to keep me in touch with the visual side of myself. Every day I post something about my life in Buddha Garden, a farm in Auroville, South India
It feels like the sun has returned as it is
sunny with a lovely drying wind.
I will enjoy it while it lasts because who knows,
the rain might come back. Several times
we have thought the rain was finished and then we found ourselves wet again.
We found this in the chicken run this morning. Did it die because of the rain? Killed by another animal? We don’t
know.
We found that all the chickens have got some
tiny insects on them – fleas or mites – something like that. Rajan got some special leaves to fumigate the
chicken house after Sangeeta had cleaned it.
Our two chicken families look much better now.
My poor feet.
Not only has the wet weather brought another bout of fungus - now
between all my toes - but I also got a scorpion ant bite which is very
painful. The ant dropped down onto me
from the plastic roof over the vegetable area.
According to Giri there are a lot of them doing
that, maybe the rain is making them seek dryer places.
I spoke to soon yesterday about things drying up! Its started to rain again and with it comes
more mud.
A very pleasant day with sun and a drying wind
which brought down these neem leaves.
They are making what feels like a lovely mat under my feet as I walk
around Buddha Garden.
Another picture of another part of the decay
demonstration. A palmyra tree trunk
which has been there for about two years and even that is getting overgrown at
this time of year.
I’m involved with another farm having problems
at the moment. I’m finding it difficult
to find enough time to do everything I want to do on our farm.
I took this picture recently of one of the
display rubbish dumps in the Garden of Unsee Helpers. I still cannot get over how quickly such
large piles of stuff decay and get overgrown.
There are not small piles of different sorts of materials left as they
have all disappeared into the undergrowth.
We’ve got to get someone with a chainsaw to
come and deal with these. They fell over
during the last cyclone.
Now it seems that the rain has gone for the
time being and I get the sense we need to be planting as fast as we can.
These are our first tomatoes and lettuces of
the cool season planted in the Seed Garden.
These avarakai beans are growing so quickly and
I am sure that all the rain has speeded them up!
I get the feeling that the soil and the plants
are soaking up the water and growing as fast as they can before it all goes
away.
It rained again last night but it seems that
the last of the rain from the current weather system may pass over today. I went out and took a lot of pictures for
this week’s video and came across these
very tiny but extremely brightly coloured mushrooms.
They were so tiny and yet the colour was so
intense it was as if they were blinking at me to get my attention.
After a bright start with the promise of sun
during the morning we had some unexpectedly heavy rain. At the time I was in the bike shed at the
Town Hall where I was stuck along with quite a lot of other people.
We just missed getting flooded yet again but
everything is very soggy.
The rain has brought out a lot of insects like
these ants I saw on one of our gates.
Rajan is worried about snakes in the water but so far I haven’t seen
any.
I walked around Buddha Garden today and it is
still very squelchy. Sometimes in
unexpected places that its hard to see until my foot goes into it.
After all the rain the mosquitoes are REALLY
voracious. This picture only shows two
on my leg but as I squelch around Buddha Garden there are usually many
more. Rajan says its why he is wearing
trousers a lot these days.
It rained steadily for most of the night and
although there has been breaks it has rained quite steadily today. Its because we are in the tail of cyclone Burevi
which looks huge on the maps. The main cyclone is supposed to hit south Tamil
Nadu tonight. Despite all the rain we
haven’t flooded as we did in the last cyclone.
I love this picture of what I have called
‘green and wet’. With rain expected for
the next few days goodness knows when I will be able to start grass cutting
again.
Its started to rain again but not very hard so
the water rests on the vegetation. Like
the drops on the twigs of this tree.
The drops sparkle in the light and are very
beautiful.
Had an exceptionally busy day today with a Farm
Group meeting in the morning and grass cutting in the afternoon. I have to do the grass in the afternoon when
it is dryer and easier to cut than in the morning when it is wet. As the
picture shows, the grass had got very long.
If I don’t crack on and do it now it will grow into a jungle that will be even more difficult and time consuming to cut
I really like this picture of Rajan taken just
after the monsoon when we were cutting up a tree that had fallen across the
entrance path.
Unfortunately the tree root was still half in
the soil so we weren’t able to move it completely out of the way. I think we are waiting for a machine to cut
up more of the wood.
These are all the papayas that we gathered this
morning. Although people do eat green
papaya I doubt very much we will be able to get rid of so many. A few of them will probably ripen but the
rest will have to be thrown away in the forest.
It was lovely to see the sun this morning and
when I looked up into the sky I saw this.
It was only when I looked at the picture that I
realized how dramatic the sky had been this morning.
Woke up to floods in different parts of Buddha
Garden and quite a few trees down, especially papaya trees. Had a very soggy
morning walking through flooded paths and clearing up all the debris and making
a path around a large fallen tree on the entrance path.
It has been raining heavily all day and we are
still waiting for the expected strong winds and the actual cyclone to hit
us. I think the picture captures the
feeling of the day perfectly – sort of grey and smudged.
Everything is saturated with water.
After our workers had finished clearing up
around the stones I managed to get all the grass cut this afternoon after the
grass had dried out a bit. First time it
has looked like this for ages. For the
last year or so we have only cut a path through the grass rather than all the
grass. We haven’t had time to do any
more.
I’m not sure I will have time to cut it like
this again after more rain comes.
A cyclone is coming but apparently it is coming
much slower than expected. Its very grey
and at times very silent and then it rains very gently for a while and stops.
It feels like nature is holding its breath.
There is such a lot of grass cutting needs
doing at the moment but its hard to do it before lunch as its still a bit
wet. This makes it harder to cut as well
as more of it coming onto and sticking to me.
This afternoon I went and cut grass by the
stones. There is still clearing up and
more cutting to do but hopefully I will get a chance to do some of it tomorrow.
This is the chicken family which is really
gorgeous. I love the sounds of the
chicks and the mother when they are together.
We haven’t had any of these for a very long
time. Recently we put a cockerel with
the hens and this is the result. With everything else bursting into life after
the rain and sun its feels just right to have a family of eight chicks in the
chicken house.
This is a tree recently planted in the Garden
of Unseen Helpers which has also burst into life in the last week or so.
I saw this beautiful new bud for the desert
rose this morning when I was out doing photographs and video clips. With the monsoon rain and sunny days it feels
like life is quickening again.
Today we found that two more papaya trees had
fallen down because their roots couldn’t hold in the very wet soil after all
the rain. These trees tend to get top
heavy as they grow larger and are very prone to fall down in rain and wind.
One of them fell on the very expensive pipe of
one of the water research units. As the
picture shows, fortunately it didn’t break.
Its beautifully sunny again today for at least some of the time.
The rain has devastated the plastic on the roof
of the new nursery. We will have to go back
to the drawing board to find something more robust. Maybe polycarbonate sheets or something like
that.
More sun and rain which continued to clear the
air. Parts of Buddha Garden looked quite
magical in the sun. Although at other
times it was extremely grey and wet and muddy.
The day started with heavy rain but this
disappeared as sun took over the rest of the day. The air seemed very clear and the sun very
bright and everything growing like crazy.
I’ve spent the day doing the weekly video as
fire crackers go off all around me. This
is not very good for the air quality, although of course its not as bad here as
in urban areas.
Its taken us about two months but at last we
have completed the roof on the new nursery.
I wonder if the plastic will let through enough light, especially in the
monsoon, but we can plant some plants and see how they like it.
I couldn’t resist taking this picture of the
New Horizon vegetable garden where I cut the grass yesterday afternoon. Cutting the grass was really hard work as it
was very overgrown and doing it has made my back sore today.
But as the picture shows, it was worth it.
Today I was sitting inside and could hear a
sound which I couldn’t identify. Turned
out it was Vasantha and Mala sorting the mung beans which we use to make
sprouts. They toss them up in the flat baskets
so the small mung beans jump out and then go through them to take out any bad
ones or bugs that they find. The noise consists of the beans being thrown up
and down and rolling around.
According to Rajan most people now do this job
with a machine!
As I was walking around the farm this evening I
came across these flowers that glowed gold in the sun.
Today we started removing the thorns in the old
cashew orchard that we have recently replanted.
There turned out to be are far more thorn bushes than we first thought. The grass had grown so long it hid a lot of
the thorn plants. So I don’t know how
long it will be before it is finished.
I was really pleased with this picture which
was just a happy result rather than a thoughtful one. I just pointed my camera at
the flowers and pressed the button. I
love the colours and the detail, especially how the raindrops on the flowers
have come out.
I loved the way these bunches of leaves hung
down from the vine which was curling around a palmyra tree. Yet another shade of green to enjoy.
As well as being for good for our newly planted
trees the sun and showers have been very good for Sangeeta’s roses. I love the delicate pink of this rose and
felt this was the right blue for it as background.
We have been doing a lot of planting in the
past weeks but I have been really worried that we would miss planting
cashews. At last the cashew seedlings
arrived (from quite a distance) and they are being planted in the gaps in the
cashew orchard.
This is a picture of the first custard apples
of the season. They are a really good
size, presumably because of the rain. I
love the different colours.
Today I did
a lot of grass cutting especially in the orchards where I cut paths through the grass. This is a picture of
where I did it in the Pryog orchard.
Its lovely to walk along these paths as the
grass seems to encourage the butterflies that fly all around as I walk.