Happy New Year!

Happy New year 2016! May all your wishes come true this year and may this world be one helluva green, peaceful place to live!

A small break from active blogging became an extended break due to ever increasing farming activities in the last many months.

To give you a perspective on what does a 'good monsoon year' really mean to a farmer in my part of the world, consider the activities that were done in the last nine months (two good monsoons and the months in between):

Planted 

1. few hundred saplings each of all tropical fruit trees I could

    think of

2. many hundred timber tree saplings

3. hundreds of Pepper vines

4. thousands of Curry leaf plants

5. thousands of Pineapple suckers

6. hundreds of Arecanut saplings

Re-did the entire drip irrigation channels.

Experimented making the following using produce grown naturally in my farm

1. gingelly oil using sesame seeds

2. coconut oil using, well, coconuts!

Harvested

1. plenty of hill veggies and plains veggies (& greens)

2. shellots

3. cucumbers

4. pumpkins and ash-gourds

Planted ground-nut on new year day with an idea of making ground-nut oil in a few months from now.

Started bee-keeping and extracted (in a bee friendly way!) few kgs of honey.

Put up

1. a Pigeon shed that would hold few hundred of them eventually

2. a chicken coup that would hold few tens of them eventually

3. a goat shed that would house few tens of them eventually

4. two vermicompost yards

all using locally available materials and local semi-skilled labour.

Tried my hands selling veggies and coconuts to local shops with mixed response and am in the process of setting up a farm-outlet to sell the produce from the farm!

Not bad for the nine months absence from blogosphere eh?!

Green thumbs happily crossed for the monsoons to come by :-)