Finding Our Feet

We’ve been cleaning out beds of turmeric and ginger the last few days, Chitra and I. It has rained too much this September, and the coffee-husk mulch they put down last month, when it was drier, has acidified the soil. The ginger is browning and dying already, exposing its fruitful roots. It is two months early.


There are only ten or eleven beds of these plants, but the work is tedious. We slosh through muddy drainage corridors, then squat to reach between the leafy stalks. Though the Indians we are working with gave us coconut half-shells to scrape the ground, it’s easier with bare hands. We squat on our heels and pull handfuls of decomposing coffee mulch toward us, revealing ants nests, crab holes, and all manner of crawling insects. I decide that I shouldn’t pause long enough to see the insects or else I’ll want to stop. There may be leeches here too, my newfound nemeses. But in a country like India, with a commitment like I have made, refusing squeamish work is not an option. This is a chance to connect with Basanti, the short, capable 29-year old who plants the beds, harvests the crops, cleans the sheets and the guesthouses, and feeds the chickens.

Basanti is a giggler. When she converses with Chitra, it is in Kannada because that’s all she speaks. Chitra speaks her native Tamil, perfect English, and Hindi. All four of these languages float through the raised beds of turmeric and ginger as we remove the acidic husks from the roots. When Basanti discovers a new word in Tamil, she giggles. When she teaches Chitra a new word in Kannada, she giggles. When she slips in her flip-flops on a mossy log, she giggles. She loves her work, knows it well, and enjoys our help, I think.

After we clean the beds of their coffee husks, we sprinkle them with wood ash collected from the spice-drying shed. This is supposed to lower the pH of the soil, and will hopefully revive the browning ginger plants. We’ll see in a few weeks, if the rain ever stops conclusively.


I’ve begun to learn a few basic tenets of organic farming. When Basanti led Chitra and I through Valley IV of the plantation today, we passed the usual crops – coffee, cardamom, vanilla, black pepper – and then noticed a small red impatiens, obviously planted recently. It was squat and delicate, a bit out of place in this tropical environment. Basanti gestured and explained that “madam,” the lead farmer Sujata, likes to plant flowers amongst the crops. It seemed like a nice idea, a way to brighten things up. Later, when we asked Sujata about it, she smiled mysteriously and said, “It’s for the insects. We want more of them.” It is the diversity that makes things tick out here, and a careful eye for indicators like soil pH, water quality, spider numbers, and frog variety. A good farmer lures the right insects to their fields but then directs them to alternative snacks, the non-crop producing plants. This keeps the frogs and the birds around, who will then eat the bad bugs, the borers and the beetles.

The dirty work can be, well, dirty. But there’s no way to connect with farmers without knowing the basics, and without sticking your own hands in the soil.