Fire in the mountain, run run run!

This is no children's game that I'm talking about, but one in a series of mountain fires we've been witnessing throughout the past month and a half. Only, this time (and another one last weekend) it was specifically meant to burn down our farm.

The miscreants were smart, as they have been on earlier occasions: set fire on a Saturday evening or a Sunday morning, the time that is most likely that people are not around in farms. The weather, too, couldn't have been better suited: the entire Palani hills have been reeling under extreme hot weather, causing most of the wild brush to become dry; heavy winds to keep the fire going; no water in any of the streams; little stored water that could be used to douse it. And also, this came right on the heels of propbably hundreds of wild brush fires in the Palani hills in just the past month, leaving the few forest guards either weary or uninterested.

Here's a first hand view of this particular fire that was set at about 11.00 am on easter Sunday, the 27th March, 2016. The fire raged for about 6 hours, burning up dry grass, cutting through not only government poromboke land but patta lands too, and finally running out of breath more than a kilometer from where it started.

Watch the video of the fire burning up one end of our farm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oUnTm8fgB4

My wife and I, along with a friend who was visiting us, had just started on a small walk around our farm when we saw the smoke. Quickly gathering a couple of people from the neighbouring farm, we first thought we could beat it out. When we realized it was too big for us to even go near, we hoped that the four-foot clearning we made around our farm would stop it. But no, even the clearing could not do much. The fish-net fencing we had put up to keep away small animals melted like wax, and the fire just breezed its way into large portions of our farm land, burning up coffee and pepper plants, along with the dried brush and the dry leaves on the ground. We could only watch in disbelief and helplessness as it worked its way down a hill, across a dry stream and up the next hill.

Watch a clip of the fire burning away after moving down the adjacent hill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4f5v_b6rdk

Calls to the forest guard only evoked a weak "how-can-we-help-a-forest-fire" response. Complaints to the forest checkpost the following day evoked an equally disinterested response. We will now have to take the time to make a formal complaint to the district forest officer and/or to the police since this was clearly the work of miscreants intent at harming us. If any of you reading this has any wisdom on how to take this up with the authorities, do write back, we'd be glad for any help.

Learning patience, the slow, hard way... (contd.)

So, here's how we've been doing in 2016 wrt our building endeavours...

January, 2016

The remaining masonry work on the biogas plant was completed by the ESAF mason. Just that the feed pipe from the cowshed to the plant has to be covered up with soil.

 The walls of the main building were done and the pic below also shows the gable walls coming up.

Also, the cow shed, after remaining at basement level for a very long time, started to come up.

February, 2016

After looking in vain for someone to raise the height of the tank, a friend of ours introduced us to a very competent contractor who quickly sent people to add two more feet to the tank, to make it a total of 10 ft height. We also made a concrete slab to cover the tank, and on top we're going to build a ferro-cement tank of about 3000 lts.

The roof work started - at long last. We hooked up an alternator to a power tiller that we had borrowed earlier from a friend - and voila, we had a working generator.

In the meanwhile, the porch came up. Another major step forward was getting our carpenter friend from Chennai (along with a colleague of his) to come to our farm and fix up all the doors and windows.

March, 2016
Mistakes in putting up the truss work set us back by quite some time, and let to a lot of rework. The cow shed's roof is now complete.

The residence building, after the rework on the truss work, now looks a lot better. We're hoping the GI sheets and the tiles will be laid by the time March rolls into April.

So, lets see what this last week of March and the coming weeks have in store.

In the meanwhile, we spent a quiet Easter Sunday at the farm with a friend who was visiting. At least, it began as a quiet Sunday, but turned out to be something else. Read about our encounter with the big fire in the next post...

Learning patience, the slow, hard way...

Or is there any other way?

We started with the planning and construction of a modest residence comprising of three rooms, a common kitchen and toilet, and a shed for cows and goats - almost a year ago. And how are we learning patience? Well, these buildings are STILL not yet complete.

Here are some pics along the way, with a timeline :-)

May 2015

We had finally found stonecutters to stay at our site and cut stones at the site.

At the same time, we were also hopeful of making our own bricks, experimenting with quantity, size, composition, and so on...

June 2015
The basement of the residence building had been laid. You will notice that the filling was made with the red soil from the site.

August, 2015
Having realized that we simply had to move to the farm, we had finally managed to buy two army tents from a company in Dehra Dun, lugged the heavy shipment to the site, and had set it up.

September, 2015
We managed to find several sets of old wooden doors and windows, had some basic reconditioning done, and the door frames were set in the building which had just risen above the basement level.

November, 2015
That's right, October is missing in the chronology because almost no work happened with the workers taking off in different directions. A chance meeting with a friend who visited us in September finally led the way to a good soul sending us a new set of masons and helpers, and after a long pause the building was growing skywards again.

December, 2015
Apart from the steady progress with the building, we also managed to have the basic biogas plant built, with the connections to be built a month later. A big thanks to ESAF (http://esafindia.org/) for getting this done.

So, thats how 2015 closed.

How did we fare in 2016? Read the next post to find out....

New kids on the block!!!

Three new kids, to be exact, were born in the first week of March to our goats in the farm.

In fact, of the many kids born in our farm, these were the first that we as a family got to witness.

First, the black & white goat went into labour and out came a tiny one, also black and white like its mother.

Three days later, it was the turn of the black goat to deliver. We all woke up to see it just begin to deliver what we had expected to be twins. There was a third one too, much to our surprise, but it was in the wrong position and took an awful lot of time to come out, and by the time it did, it was too late. Anyway, we were happy for the twins. The kids were both full black, just like the mother.