Garden update

Potato and onion shoots are coming up!  I'm particularly excited about the potatoes.  I've never grown them before, and look forward to cooking them in a campfire sometime soon.

We owe much of our gardening success to these little ladies (and sir).  Chickens do the dirty work of scratching around in the soil, eating up all the grubs, and yes, leaving little pods of nitrogen for the seedlings. 

Fancy Footwear, dealers in all things spicy

I had a thought a few days ago that I would post an interesting photo on here every day.  This would keep people up to date on life here at Mojo, and also buy me some writing time when I'm lacking time or inspiration.  Well, I've already slacked on that idea, but I'll do my best..  Here are a few from a recent trip into town.

A local ice cream seller crosses the rickshaw stand in Madikeri.

Come to Fancy Footwear for cheap sandals and cardamom!  I really love this sign.  As part of my preliminary research here, I've been interviewing local shopkeepers about where they get their spices, the arrangements for retail and wholesale, and how they determine prices.  I haven't visited Fancy Footwear yet, but most certainly will.

This sign was painted outside a mosque in Madikeri in English and Kannada.  Nice message, don't you think?

Diwali Lights

Most people in India will tell you that Diwali is full of fireworks, rockets, and every kind of noise.  Knowing Indians will tell tourists to get out of the cities before the Diwali new moon blackens the night sky, or else they won’t sleep for even a moment. 

I know nothing of that.  Although I can still hear (two days later) the remnants of far-off firecrackers bursting into the night, they are no louder than the frogs making their whimpering calls outside my door, and far quieter than the crickets drumming their legs together in the forest across the road.  Here at Mojo Plantation, our Diwali was instead marked by cooking, a campfire, and communal song.

The day started off with Maya and me making candles and diyas (small potted oil lamps) out of a year’s worth of spent candle wax.  We melted white and red and sparkly blue wax in a tin over an open fire.  We twisted fresh wicks from good cotton thread.  We cleaned out small clay pots to fill with the hot wax, removing sticky ash from previous years.  When the fire had turned the multi-colored mass into a fresh, runny, and unmistakably brown concoction, we poured it gingerly (and a bit messily) into our ready candle-pots. 

Later on, Sujata taught me how to make a jam tart.  It helped that I had whipped up an apple tart some weeks previous, but this time we went at it recipe-less, tossing flour and sugar and fresh cream from the cow’s milk into the dough.  Passionfruit jam from last year’s harvest filled the browned pastry shell, and then more cream went on top.  We put it aside for dinner. 

As dusk began to fall, Matt and I left our room to help cook dinner in the kitchen.  Aside from the candles and the baking, the day had felt like any other, with chores and research and this and that.  So when we walked up the stairs to the main house, we were surprised to see a string of lights blinking red and white, and a row of candles lit up along the outer bench.

Although festivals in India seem to have many various meanings, from what I understand Diwali is more or less an extension of Dasara, or rather, a reconciliation of Dasara’s story.  At one point long ago, in the time of the Ramayana, the Ayodhyan King Rama flies to Sri Lanka to rescue his wife Sita, who had been stolen by the evil king of Lanka, Ravana.  Dasara (which we celebrated a few weeks ago, and which Matt wrote about in his blog) marks the day that Rama cuts off Ravana's head and rescues Sita.  Diwali, meanwhile, marks the day that Rama returns to India.  It falls every year on the New Moon because Rama returns on a moonless night, and everyone in India puts out candles and diyas to guide his way home. 

We lit the rest of the candles and diyas, and had a round of drinks.  A neighbor friend of Sujata and Anurag’s (and another organic farmer) who had just returned from Germany came over to share in the festivities, so it felt like a real gathering.  New friends, homemade passionfruit wine, and handmade candles.  The ensuing barbecue (yes, it’s finally dry enough to barbecue!), a plethora of sweets, and singing around the fire made it feel like a real holiday. 

As we head into holiday season as we know it, I’ll be sure to keep Diwali in mind.  For Halloween we’re planning a dance party (for the four of us interns, at least), but Thanksgiving and Christmas are right around the corner.  I’m sure I’ll be missing my friends and family then, but at least I’ll know that we can still create a sense of peace, joy, and community on those special days.

Photo of the day

Well, this is a few days old, but I do think it's blog-worthy.  This is "Kiri," short for Kiringi, one of four lovable dogs on our farm.  He is sleeping right on a chapati.

Wildness in the garden

After a week of traveling to towns and cities, and a week of thinking far too hard about research questions, surveys, and communication across cultures, I have dived back into the more pleasant pace of farm life.  The pace is slow for me because I have the luxury of being an intern here rather than a full-time employee.  I was unhurriedly informed today that the farm is actually way behind schedule:  the girls are still out in the valleys weeding when the second harvest of cardamom should have already begun.  Myself, I am learning the valuable lesson that not everything can be done in one day.  The potatoes and onions I lost the light on today will be planted tomorrow.  The beans that I did manage to seed into the freshly composted ground will have one extra day to grow big and leafy in the coming weeks.

The truth of it is I’ve been absorbing the gardening in a new way.  I’ve been reading an old Michael Pollan favorite, The Botany of Desire, and each time I leave the book for a bout in the garden, I notice new things.  About wildness and order, or seeds and multi-cropping, or even about biotechnology and genetic engineering.  In this, one of his first and most respected books, Pollan deconstructs the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and potatoes from many angles- biological, cultural, and philosophical.  I found myself wishing he would just keep going, and leave us with an atlas of plant histories.  I’m especially interested in how he would tell the story of coffee, or cardamom, or pepper, the main crops in this area. 

Pollan closes his book with a visit to his own late-August garden, which at that point had become “an anarchy of rampant growth and ripe fruit.”  His description reminds me of the farm here, where our cultivated plants mingle with wild tubers, miniature forests of ferns, and all manner of hulking jungle trees.  He writes,

“Whenever I hear or read the word garden, I always picture something so much less wild than this, probably because in common usage garden stands as the opposite of wilderness.  The gardener knows better than to believe this, though.  He knows that his garden fence and path and cherished geometries hold in their precarious embrace, if not a wilderness in any literal sense, then surely a great, teeming effulgence of wildness- of plants and animals and microbes leading their multifarious lives, proposing so many different and unexpected answers to the deep pulse of their genes and the wide press of their surroundings- of everything affecting everything else.”

This relationship is undoubtedly even more pronounced on a farm such as this, where wildness is intentionally integrated into the cultivation process.  I am continually impressed by the choreography of the crops here, at how unassuming hedgerows attract the pollinators that feed the coffee trees, whose fruit-husks mulch the vegetable patches.  Here it seems to always be ”an anarchy of rampant growth,” but I suppose that’s the nature of a rainforest.

It’s humbling to see in action the various biological processes we learn from day one in school, and a gift to be able to participate in it.  There is nothing so refreshing as spending a day barefoot building vegetable beds out of forest soil and cow manure, and then patting fresh bean seeds into it at the end of the day.  Now I just have to hope their green shoots will come up with the same vigor of each wild plant I am surrounded by each day.  

Photos:  1- Seedlings of beetroot, tomato, nurkol, and chili, wrapped in a wet leaf and ready for the garden.  2- Freshly planted seedlings, neatly organized and fenced in, even within the rainforest. 

Indian Road Trip

There’s nothing quite like a good road trip. The rhythm of tires on pavement, greenery flashing by, the here and gone nature of every scene you pass. Add to that the extreme colors, the odd juxtapositions, and the unique (to me) everyday life of India to the road trip, and it becomes something really special. Today we drove to Ponnampet in Sujata and Anurag’s (our hosts) jeep. A luxurious way to travel, the jeep has three full compartments for passengers: front seat, middle, and a back with two padded benches that face each other so that whoever is sitting in the tail end there can commiserate with the other over every toss and turn that the roads of India provide.

We drove to Ponnampet to visit a professor and friend who teaches in the College of Forestry at the University of Agricultural Sciences, a state school based out of Bangalore. He’s an interesting guy who has a large coffee and spice farm that is half biodynamic and half conventional, for research purposes. His farm, some 35 acres all together, is certified organic (though they define themselves clearly as biodynamic), and quite beautiful. When we finally arrived after about two hours in the jeep, we were greeted by an aging Alsatian, a garden of potted geraniums, and the most delicious snacks imaginable. Fresh chocolate cake in brownie-sized bites, spicy peanuts, and the kicker: sweet avocado pudding. I will no longer sequester avocado (known as butter fruit here) to the savory foods list. This pudding was smooth and refreshing, requiring nothing more (in addition to the avocados) than a bit of sugar, small slices of apples and bananas, and best of all, stray pomegranate seeds meant to explode succinctly in a mouthful of subtle creaminess.

After thoroughly gorging our sweet tooths, Dr. K showed us around his farm. We passed a bio-gas pit near the first cow shed, and several heaping rows of compost. At the second cow shed, I got my first lesson in biodynamic farming. Dr. K pointed out eight rectangular pits built right into the floor, and behind them a bag of cow horns. He pulled one out and explained that the best horns to use are those of lactating cows who die of natural causes. I definitely do not understand the whole process yet, but basically what they do is create a mixture of cow dung and some other things, and let it ferment in the horn for a while. On the full moon, they open the mixture and add it to 100 gallons of water, a significant dilution. This they add to their compost, and eventually their fields. It seemed to me like some kind of Effective Microorganism mixture, which we use on Mojo Plantation to quicken the compost and decomposition process, though grounded in biodynamic science rather than laboratory research. However it works, it was utterly fascinating. Dr. K explained to us that when he and his wife first started the farm, they had many problems growing their crops organically. They switched to biodynamic farming because of this, and the problems went away.

Elsewhere on the farm, we saw 50-year old coffee plants looking healthy as ever, a graceful Bronzed Drongo, and black pepper creeping up native forest trees. I even tried a raw peppercorn for the first time ever, and wow! After the initial spicy shock, it became a delicious and cleansing seed to chew on, with a lingering flavor as effective as the best kinds of mints.

After our farm tour, we drove back to the college and then into the hills toward Madikeri. On the way we passed a bus thoroughly run off the road and stuck in the bordering weeds, and dozens of school children in all manner of uniforms- stripes and plaid, kurtas and slacks. While driving between layers of brilliant green rice paddies, Anurag turned up the stereo and we rocked out to the blues. A cross between home and away, the road trip twisted on along the winding road until we finally came back into the rain. The forest grew lusher and the roads more pockmarked until the jeep was entirely splattered with mud and moisture. Back to our new home, we tumbled out of the jeep and into our rooms to crash for a while. The journey, just nine hours or so, had worn us out and filled up our thoughts for a time, as any good road trip will do.

Tumba maleh

The monsoon is back in full force.  It’s been raining for four days straight, with no end in sight.  Every so often the sky will turn white rather than gray, the rain will slow to a light mist, and we’ll all look up with some hope.  Two or ten or twenty minutes later, the sky opens up again, as if the downpour never really stopped.  We’ve learned the word for rain in Kannada:  “maleh.”  And lots of rain:  “Tumba maleh.”  

The rain has some benefits:
1- I tried my hand at baking for the first time here (thanks to a friend in Philly for the simple apple tart recipe.)  It was an experience, as it took me more than ten minutes to find the flour, and quite a bit of guessing about the size of a cup, a tablespoon, and a teaspoon.  It’s a good thing that apples, sugar, and butter in an oven almost always turn out okay. 

2- We have discovered the joys of coal.  Each night before bed we carry a rusty tin box to the wood fire that heats the spice-drying shed, and coax smoldering embers into the tin.  It dries our clothes and makes our little bungalow quite a bit cozier.

3- The leeches, astonishingly, don’t like too much wetness.  I haven’t seen any climbing their way quietly up my rubber “gum” boots in four days. 

Probably the best part of the rain is that it’s given me a chance to get organized, read up on local politics and farming practices, and start the first part of my project.  For this, Chitra and I trekked up the road a ways to a nearby farm to interview Hemavati, one of the women who works in the fields here at Mojo Plantation.  She greeted us warmly, offering tea and snacks, and we settled in along the wall of her long cement porch.  Behind us, a chorus of roosters, hens, and a solitary dog accentuated the survey.  Chitra invaluably led the conversation, jumping from Tamil into what she knows of Kannada, and back into English to keep me in the loop.  This is the theme of this place – finding translators, sitting patiently while other people talk, trying to piece things together.

The next day, we interviewed a whole group of women in the kitchen.  Almost all of the workers here have their own farms as well, most between two and three acres.  The farms and families are often connected by complex arrangements of marriages, siblings, and inheritance.  All of the women we have interviewed so far spend their days working for a wage, and their early mornings and late evenings tending their own farms.  On Fridays, their only day off from their “day jobs,” many of them take their extra fruits and vegetables, if they have any, to the village market to sell for whatever the going rate is. 

They work hard, rain or shine.  The excessive rain obviously poses new challenges to the farmers here.  This current “2nd monsoon” is unseasonal, coming far later than usual.  It’s supposed to be drying up now, and in a few weeks it should be dried up completely.  The tumba maleh threatens the plants we have all begun to seed, as well as this year’s crop.  But, as we continue to tell the guests – what can you do except wait it out and make the most of it?