Time + Matter + Chance ???

I heard recently, "The best things in life are free", and we have been reminded of its truth almost every day.

This past week, my son and I had driven down to the village to drop off a friend, and were coming back just when the sun was setting. It had drizzled a bit during the day, and as we were climbing up on the road to our farm, we saw this beautiful sight of clouds nestling on the nearby hills and in the valley between them. And just over the clouds was this rainbow.

We stopped to gaze at it for a few minutes, and got some pics, though I have to admit that the pics only convey half of the magic we experienced.

And when we got home, the sun was just going down, the last rays contrasting against the dark clouds with the silhouetted trees witnessing the magic moments...

Who can dare say that all this beauty is a random product of time + matter + chance, and not the handiwork of a loving God?

Moooooooing times are here at last :-)

Yes, the cows have come home  - quite literally.

The cows that are now part of our farm are a Kasaragode dwarf and its 3-month old calf.

Why this breed? Well, we were just clear that we wanted a native breed. We had tried looking for a Kangayam cow (native to the nearby town of the same name and quite familiar in the neighboring districts) in the yearly Oddanchatram cow mela but the asking prices were sky high.

In the meanwhile, a friend of ours who procures organic vegetables for a store chain mentioned he was going to bring in some Kasaragode and Vechur cows from Calicut in Kerala, and we told him we wanted a milking cow with its calf - since we needed a source of milk right away.

http://vechur.org/kasaragod/

As it turned out, our friend was able to find and procure just what we asked for. Since its a small cow, we were easily able to bring the cow and the calf in our camper. It was an interesting spectacle, and I wish I had remembered to take some pics of that.

Anyway, Bindu the cow and Bambi the calf are now getting acclimatized slowly to the cold, the hills, and to the new varieties of grass. The milk output is very miniscule, but its just about enough for our kids to have a glass of milk every day, and for an occasional cup of filter coffee for us.

Farming to the fore again!

The long-drawn construction of what we wanted to be a simple couple of rooms to live in had taken the time and effort of all of us in the farm, and as a result growing vegetables and other farming work had been relegated to the last bench.

Now that these are drawing to a close, and also because of the encouragement provided by the rains in May and June, we have started to do our vegetable cultivation and tending to other plants again.

We have planted agathi keerai (sesbania grandiflora) along many of the stone-fortified steps in the vegetable patch. The primary purpose of these is to provide much-needed fodder for the goats, and probably provide for an occasional dish for the people here too.

Radish and beans are doing well, but we're hoping worms, pests and the wild goats (barking deer) don't get to them before we do.

 

 

We got a couple of kilos of seed onions from Coimbatore from a roadside onion vendor, and they have shown much promise.



 

We have also been slow in getting Napier grass ready for cow fodder, and finally we have planted some cuttings of CO-3.

Using fishnet, we have fenced off a portion of the land near the vegetable patch for the hens. This way, the rest of the vegetable patch will not be ruined by the hens, and they will also be relatively safer from the big birds inside the enclosure. We now have to "enrich" the enclosure with vegetable and fruit waste so the hens don't have a good reason to go elsewhere.





Some more work is on in the vegetable patch, and I'll be back soon with updates.

To those of you who have enjoyed reading these, and who find these useful in some way or the other, please feel free to leave write back - either right here as comments, or by email to gideonsjoseph@yahoo.com.

More peripheral construction work completed

The last few weeks marked the completion of several "features" we needed in and around the house. Here's a round up of these:

A second tank, on top of the first. The water stored in this is for drinking and other domestic purposes, and the other reason to build this was to have sufficient pressure in the taps in the house. This was built with ferrocement, by the same mason who had built our biogas plant.

What started as a washing stone soon had another utility tank tagged to it; in the end it turned out to be big enough to be a nice splash-pool for the children!

We wanted a large wood-burning stove in the kitchen, and after looking all over for smokeless chulas, we found a very competent mason who specializes in custom-building these. So this is how it looks in our kitchen now:

We have started cooking our meals in this stove, and it really is almost smokeless!

The cow shed is now complete, with the stone paving for the floor and the fodder bin all done. It just remains for us to find good country breeds, and we're hoping we'll get them in the next couple of weeks.

On the other side of the half-wall seen at the far end is the enclosure for the goats.

Finally, we had the ESAF project manager visit our site and officially declare the bio-gas plant to be fully operational. Even though we're still awaiting the arrival of cows, we have been bringing enough cow manure each week to keep the plant running, and in fact we get enough gas for at least an hour each day.

PS: Yes, I'm in one of my blogging moods, esp. after I realized that its been more than two months after I last wrote a post! I may write one more after this before I hit the bed tonight...

Gypsy's puppies

Our faithful hound of 2 years, Gypsy, had puppies in the first week of May. While Gypsy has a known Combai pedigree, its "unauthorized" mate did not. All we knew was that it was an all-black country variety common in the hills.

The litter consisted of 4 dogs: 3 all-black females and 1 peach-colored male. The high female proportion was also the case when Gypsy was born.

Gypsy seems to be a very responsible mother. The first two weeks, when the puppies could hardly see or walk, she was terribly protective and would hardly let any of us near the pups. As time went by, she started relaxing and sometimes seems pretty happy to be given a rest from the pesky puppies.






By the middle of June, the puppies were in the "terrible twos" stage in children - running around, biting stuff, dragging things along, and generally being a nuisance. So we have had to restrict them to their kennels now and then, leaving Gypsy and us quite relieved, and the puppies so unhappy!





Our children, of course, enjoyed playing with the pups and wanted to keep all four. But very early, we parents were clear that we could not manage to keep all four, and so a compromise was quickly arrived at: keep the male and one female, and give away the other two female pups.

So in the last week of June, two of the black pups were dropped off at a friend's farm, leaving just these two with us now. And these shall be called Peach and Mulberry ;-) The names were in keeping with their colours, and also for the fact that we hope to soon have peach and mulberry trees in our farm!