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A little celebration of heavy downpours after 100+ arid, hot and frustrating days. We received ~100mm over the course of three days! Our swales are full, well water is oxygenated, so much life is thriving in there and elsewhere and most excitingly, long overdue planting was done. Phew.
This doesn’t mean much if the NE monsoons fail us again though. Keeping 🤞🏾 now!
#southwestmonsoons #easternghats #regenerativefarming

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Bringing in Nanda’s 39th seeking out the monsoons in lush and bountiful Malnad. Only the best adventures with this beautiful man.

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Drought season blues (and browns and greens and purples and yellows)

Albizia lebbeck bark 😍

There’s a crab spider hidden somewhere in this plant

Scolidae wasp feeding on Premna serratifolia flowers

Apefly butterflies on jamun leaves

Madhunashini

Indian nightjar

Little grass blue

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Welcoming-the-monsoon weekend drive

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Duck watching is entertainment max

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We had a special (uninvited) guest last night 🐘. One who we actually saw for the first time while he was feasting away at our table. Chomped down the same peepal treeling for the fourth time! He even left us a pile of steaming hot cakes in return 💩

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Tree-watching Sunday!

Forest trees of the Melagiri hills.
There were several flowering Psydrax dicoccos and Butea monosperma that I couldn’t manage to take decent photos of. Also fruiting Aegle marmelos!

Many thanks to @kephalos for IDing many of these beautiful beings.

#easternghats #floraofeasternghats #floraofkrishnagiri #seasonwatch #phenology

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Experiments in food preservation. More coming up!

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ಮಕರ ಸಂಕ್ರಾಂತಿ ಹಬ್ಬದ ಶುಭಾಶಯಗಳು!
Happy mid winter harvest to everyone celebrating!

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What I Stand For is What I Stand On.
These words that appear at the end of a Wendell Berry poem gave me everything I needed to summarise the many strands of thoughts swimming through my head regarding land stewardship. It’s also a great starting place for me to flesh out my relationship to the land.

In the months leading up to us buying this particular piece of land, it seemed like Nanda was in some kind of frenzy, spending every weekend coming to the same region with one of two agents we had been introduced to by my uncle. There was much joy and thrill when we found exactly what Nanda wanted. A small piece of land sharing a forest boundary. But very soon, for me, it turned into fears around human-animal conflict; a general feeling of being overwhelmed about how we would manage 6 acres without knowing anyone in the locality; and trepidation around the haste and impatience with which Nanda wanted to begin constructing a house here. In retrospect I’m glad for it.

It turned around pretty quickly for me with more frequent visits and walks around, stopping to notice wild flowers and the insects that lived here. We spent the extremely frosty winter of 2022 here in our shipping container home with a makeshift kitchen which gave us a deeper insight into the shifting of light, the direction of winds, the nocturnal sounds from the forest. The game changer was living here four days of the week once the house was ready and witnessing all the seasons; planting our first fruit trees and flower bushes; watching wild tree species regenerate and much more.

Thanks to greedy house owners who hiked up our rent in Bangalore, we made the decision to fully move here last year much to the apprehension of our families. We have since then developed a meaningful friendship with Thimmaraj, our farm worker, and his family. They look out for us in so many ways and we continue to learn so much about this land, our village and its neighbours, its natural and socio-cultural history from them. This has furthered our rootedness to this place. Truly, a land is nothing without its peoples.

[Contd. in comments]

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Natural regeneration game is very strong in this patch of our land with a seasonal water source close to it. We have pongamia, ceylon boxwood, Albizias, jamun, wild jasmine, Bauhinia racemosa, Breynia vitis-idae, Bridelia retusa, Chukrasia tabularis, palash, ber/ezhandapazham, cluster fig, rosewood, Ehretia sp. all thriving and coexisting beautifully here.
Other patches of the land largely host white bark acacia, some Terminalia sp, Cassia fistula (in plenty!), a great diversity of grasses and some shrubs I’m yet to ID.
Learning to ID plants and trees is a very important exercise in regenerative farming - to evaluate the eco-region you live in, the biodiversity amidst you and to be able to make space for them in the midst of cultivated plants.

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