PIGS, PESTS AND CHICKENS ............ third week of January 2024

We are always busy this time of year, the 'guest season' when Auroville gets very full of people. As a result we seem to be constantly full with volunteers wanting to stay and groups of people wanting to come and have a look around the farm. This week we hosted a group of farmers from Andhra Pradesh who turned up unexpectedly to look at organic farming in Auroville. Then mid week we had a group of school students come, all 36 of whom are interested in becoming farmers.

Other interesting visitors were two people from the restaurant 'Bread and Chocolate' who use a lot of our microgreens. They both came to make a video to show their customers where the microgreens come from and how they are grown. I will be very interested to see how they portray Buddha Garden and compare it to my videos.

This is what we saw on first thing on Tuesday morning!

The feral pigs had come in during the night and completely dug up this bed of ruccolla. We couldn't believe it! Pigs don't like ruccolla plants and yet they had dug up almost the whole bed, which included moving the irrigation pipes. Rajan thought it might have been because there were weeds on the bed that the pigs liked. But this was one of the more weed free beds in the garden. Another of Rajan's theories about it (which I really liked) is that the adult pigs had come out with their baby pigs to teach them how and what to dig up. The baby pigs then dug up all the roccolla, because they didn't know any better and didn't realize that they were not good to eat! Most of the ruccolla plants were just lying on top of the soil and weren't even chewed.

They had also made a good job of digging up this path (which is going to be quite useful), as well as turning over the material in one of our compost bins. Again quite a useful thing for them to have done.

As the pigs hadn't eaten either the roots or leaves of the ruccolla we replanted what plants we could and watered them in. I think there is a good chance the plants will re-root (ruccolla is a tough plant once it gets going) and perhaps we won't lose too much from this pig invasion.

Today we started working on the changes we want to make to the New Horizon vegetable garden. We have the original type of raised beds in this garden which are earth banks without brick sides. Without the bricks the beds are very difficult to keep under control as weeds creep up the beds from the paths and the sides also tend to collapse so the beds are not very wide. In the last months we haven't had time to do much there so the weeds have really taken hold in a big way. In this close up it looks like a jungle.

We have decided that we are going to plough up all the raised beds and use the area for growing various root crops over the hot season. This will include various sorts of ginger and sweet potatoes. And we are going to put an electric fence around the whole place to keep the pigs out. It seems that to grow any root crops this is what we have to do. Otherwise the pigs come and eat most of them.

Before we can plough it, however, we have to get rid of the grass and the the larger trees and that is what we started today. Even using the bladed grass cutter it was quite slow work so I don't know how long it is going to take to do it.

Yet another problem presented itself two days later in the form of this insect infestation into our brinjal (aubergine) plants.

There were one or two plants that had been completely overwhelmed by the infestation but most of them had not. In fact the plants had a quite a few small brinjal on them and so there will be quite a few brinjal to pick in a week or so. To deal with the pests we first removed all the infected material.

Then we got some wood ash which we spread on both the plants and the mulch to discourage more pests from getting onto the plants.

When we gave the infected leaves to the chickens they really enjoyed eating all the leaves.

Once again it was wonderful to see how the chickens help us by eating up the pests which they turn into compost which we put back on the vegetable beds to help them grow. Nature and natural cycles really are wonderful.