BANANA PRUNING, FENCE MENDING AND A STUDENT VISIT FIRST WEEK OF FEBRUARY

We began the week by pruning more bananas , but this time in Le Jardin as we finished doing the ones in the Prayog garden last week.

Rajan said that instead of pulling the suckers out we should just cut the ones we didn't want. He showed me an instance in the Prayog garden of how pulling out the roots of the smaller unwanted suckers made the whole plant unstable. In one case a larger sucker, which we hoped would produce bananas, became unstable and fell over. Only cutting the suckers off means that the job is not so heavy (no need to dig and pull out roots!) and is much faster to do.

Next job was to mend the holes in the fences where the pigs have been coming in at night.

I cannot understand why the pigs keep digging up the rucolla bed that they dug up last week. There are no weeds in it for them to eat and they don't appear to be eating the ruccolla. Which of course isn't growing so well with the plants having their roots disturbed so much. I found out later that they like to eat worms so they will dig up any soil that looks like it might have worms in it.

As often happens here we managed to find material for doing this job already lying around in the farm. We used this discarded wire netting which had been used to cover nursery trays but was starting to disintegrate and would otherwise have been thrown away.

There was enough left, however, to patch up the fence together with various sticks to block up the hole. But of course its a very temporary fix as the pigs will undoubtedly find weak places in other parts of the fence where they can make new holes. We talked about the possibility of putting things that make noises, like bells, when the pigs move the fence, but I think in the end they would probably just get used to it. It seems the best possibility to keep then out is an electric fence but this costs quite a lot. We will see how long the patched holes last at keeping the pigs out.

Remember these from last week? We found more of these this week together with the bugs that are making what are very beautiful nests using the leaves of our brinjal plants.

Apparently they are called sawflies. Once again we cut all the nests off the plants....

....and once again we gave them to the chickens...

....who once again thought they made a delicious breakfast!

One morning we had 40 school students come to experience the work we do in the farm. As usual we organised three different tasks for them, one of them being planting seeds in trays. In the picture they are doing the first job of putting the nursery mixture in the trays. We ended up with quite a few trays of planted seeds although none of them labelled. So we will just have to wait until they grow to see what they are and where to plant them.

Another job all the students seemed to enjoy was going into the forest to rake up leaves which they then took to the Suryan garden to mulch the brinjal bed.

In two of the three groups, for some reason the women carried the barrel of leaves from the forest to the garden while the boys used the wheelbarrows. In the third group the boys did all the leaf moving. This happened spontaneously with no discussion about who should be doing what. We discussed what this says about how the boys and girls have been socialised although we didn't come to any firm conclusions about it.

Of course the day in the farm would not be complete without everyone doing a bit of weeding! It seemed that all the students enjoyed the visit and were very open to the experiences they had. They are the sort of group we love to have coming and we hope they learnt from the experience.

It was only much later that I was able to really appreciate this picture of the pond I took in the early morning of the day we hosted the students. At the time I was vaguely aware of the beautiful light and reflection but it was only on having time to look at the picture that I realized just how beautiful parts of Buddha Garden are.

Will this be lost when the farm disappears? Will it become a wild pond once the farming activities cease?