Permaculture Living with MLG

Always meet friends for dinner

We all feel a latent sense of anxiety about climate change and the state of the planet. But we have a sense of helplessness at the problem. Manisha & Agam felt the same, till they heard about permaculture. It sounded like something they could do, and something they SHOULD do!

Starting a Permaculture Farm

Living in cities we are so far removed from what is going on in villages. It is a very extractive economy, which is taking natural resources like food, minerals, metals, stone, sand etc into urban centres. Any land you buy in the country comes with it's shares of problems, and is more often than not, degenerated.

We live in an absurd world

Many of us describe ourselves as nature lovers. It is time to convert this adjective into a verb, and work towards restoring the nature we love so much. Influencing the younger generation early in their lives and taking them along can be a very rewarding experience as a family.

It literally takes a village!

Finding people to help you with your long distance permaculture project can be a challenege. But by paying a good remuneration, giving them respect for their skills, embracing the community and of course some luck, you can find many people to help you.

The reality of fresh water

On agricultural land, you come face to face with fresh water resources. There is no municipality, no tanker water, and no back ups. Just rainwater and borewell. The reality of how much or how little there is, and where it comes from, really hits hard.

Lets renovate our home

We need money to invest back into nature, because resources have been exrtacted from our environment never endingly for the last several decades or even centuries. For nature to heal, we need to shift monetary resources back to it. This money is in the capitalist economy of the cities. We need to do a reverse migration of wealth.

Life is a trade off

Our life in the cities is so fast paced, that we can barely find time for our hobbies, interests or even for our families! In that context to take on another commitnment like restoring a patch of nature seems like an audacious or even foolhardy exercise. But a time audit will reveal how you can make time for something that is important for the future generations, but also a great way to bring the family together

Designing the Farm

In the corporate world we are taught to get professionals to help us with everything. Pay them the money and outsource. You can't do everything yourself, we say.
But a landscape design that mimics nature works differently. It needs someone who will listen to it, walk together with it and evolve over time. You have to do this yourself.
It is one of the most intuitive things to do, because we are wired to live within nature, to protect it, to care for it, to care for ourselves and to care for the future generations.
I talk about how we approached designing our landscape at Aanandaa Permaculture Project at the start of the project, in this latest episode of my podcast Permaculture Living with MLG.

Gearing up for Execution

Restoring a ravaged piece of land is as simple as managing rainwater through earthworks and planting trees. It does not take rocket science or any great knowledge to do this. It is the most intuitive and simple activity to undertake. A simple contour map explains the slopes & potential flows of water. A simple design map will give an idea of where to plant trees and which trees to keep in the list. As we sat in our offices in Mumbai, I would steal some time during lunch break to creatw worksheets of tree lists!

Flooded!

Rains arrived on time when we landed in Chandigarh for the planting season of July 2011. We made a day trip to Saharanpur and bought 1000 trees from Farman Bhai. A collection of fruiting trees, flowering trees, medicinal trees, timber trees, and native heirloom trees.
The size of the saplings were a bit of a shock for us, and Agam was highly sceptical of any of these 12 inch twigs becoming full grown trees.
On the way back we stopped at Aanandaa, and were shocked to see that our land was flooded with rainwater.
Thanks for stopping by, stay safe xx
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