Afternoon On The Gunga..

Last week we were blessed enough to have a few friends from Australia breeze into town and spend sometime with us here in Varanasi. This just so happened to coincide with my entire family coming down sick with various illnesses which, of course, made for an extremely long and difficult week and meant that we spent most of our time running off to see Doctors and staying awake throughout the nights tending to our sick little ones.

Thankfully the day before they left my tribe was all feeling much better and so we were able to join them on one of the staples of visiting Varanasi; a boat ride on the Gunga.

The city is such a memorizing place from the water and there is something so special about the feeling of stepping outside of it and peering back upon it as you float down the river. We've been on the water at sunrise, sunset and night, in the hot season and the cold, and each time I find that it's such a different experience than the last with differing colours, water levels, Pujas and atmospheres along the shore line which means that even though it's hugely touristy, it's also amazing.

I won't say too much more, instead I'll post a few of my favourite photos from this most recent trip down the Gunga and let the images do the talking for me.

Building Eden..

  

Towards the end of February 2013 Wild Flower, Little Feather and I packed our bags to leave Varanasi and make our way south. My boy was due to be born in mid March in Kerala (the most southern State of India) and because you shouldn't fly during your last trimester and the thought of spending 4 days on an Indian train with a 2 year old and a heavily pregnant wife didn't appeal to any of us, we decided to split the trip up into a few different stretches and spend some time with our sister community in Goa (around half way). 

Obviously this meant that between February and April nothing much happened in the Gardens except for our friends harvesting and enjoying the last of the produce that was still growing. When we returned home in April with our newest and cutest little guy in tow, the temperature during the days was already beginning to claw its way above 40 degree Celcuis (that's 105F) so as you can imagine, this sort of temperature (coupled with a brand new baby boy) meant that there was no way I was going to get anything done in the gardens for quite some time.

The Resurrection Garden; August, 2013

Now fast forward to August, it's still unbearably hot (still in the high 30's and 40's) but now the first monsoon rains have started to fall which means the humidity is skyrocketing and thus much of the time feels even hotter than before. The previous months had seen small clumps of weeds sprouting all over the Resurrection Garden but because the soil had dried out so thoroughly in the heat they weren't doing a great deal. But after the first rains, all the weed seeds that had been laying dormant for all those months in amongst the soil that I'd been working so hard to enrich, seized upon the opportunity to germinate..   And. Went. Ballistic.

As you can see in the above pic, the weeds took over in a matter of weeks and rendered the garden completely inaccessible. The front wall disappeared under a halo of green, parts of it had weeds as high as my shoulders and everywhere you looked you could see weeds bolting to seed ensuring that I was going to have an ongoing battle of epic proportions.

Initial Resurrection Garden Design Plans

During the hot season you spend A LOT of time indoors and so in amongst adjusting to being a family of 4, I began planning what I wanted to do with the Garden and how to go about sourcing materials to get it up and running once the temperatures came down. I was keen to radically redesign the layout based on a little side project I've been working on that's experimenting with applying principals of farming and agriculture from our Sacred Scriptures (more details about that at a later date) and so I wanted a minimum of 7 separate beds to be working with. Because of the overall size of the space I'm working with and the fact that the average person can't reach more than 75cm, I designed each bed to be 1.50m wide so that I would be able to reach the center of each plot without having to step into it, and thus the space allowed for 8 new beds as well as one long but narrow bed running against the wall which I will use as a trellis for various climbing vegetables.

My default was to think in terms of wood for constructing the raised edges of the Garden beds but a little investigating uncovered that wood here is crazy expensive, that because termites are everywhere (including inside the basketball sized termite mound in the top cupboard in my bedroom.. seriously) so the wood would need to be treated (with all sorts of charming chemicals that would joyfully leech out into my soil) and so I began looking into other options. I spent a bit of time thinking about it and decided that in keeping with the aesthetic of the space, buying a load of bricks would be the best option as they are cheap, easy to use and won't get chewed through by Demuk (termites). I had all the dimensions of the garden and the plans for what sizes I wanted to make the beds and so one day, after crunching the numbers, I went out and bought 350 bricks (with free delivery via Bicycle Trolly Rickshaw) at the outrageous price of AU$0.11 per brick!

 

End Of First Day of Clearing

Last year I really learned a valuable lesson by not trying to do all the work myself. I love being in the Garden and originally wanted to do all the work myself, but I've had to come face to face with the reality that it's a big space, it requires an insane amount of work just to maintain it and keep it clear of weeds and debris, I have a tonne of other responsibilities and don't get to spend anywhere as much time in the Garden as what I would like too. So hiring day labourers to do parts of the initial work means that they get an above average wage for a days work and I get done in one day what would literally take me weeks to do by myself. I brought in 3 guys who worked 7 hours a day, for 2 full days, just clearing out weeds!! I can't imagine how long it would have taken me alone to do it, hiring these cats was definitely the right way to go!
 

Nearing The End Of Day 2 Of Weed Removal

Once the space had been cleared, I went to work laying bricks. I started by measuring out all the paths and the individual plots and sculpted their outlines by connecting string between corner markers. This was a great moment as for the first time I caught a real glimpse of what had been in my minds eye for so many months and finally seeing it come together was filling me with excitement. I then got to work laying bricks along the string lines. Long term I hope to get some mortar between the brings so that it will be a permanent setup, but this time round I decided instead to bury each brick a third of it's height in the ground so it would be held in place and will hopefully get to it next year. It would have been a substantially bigger job if I'd cemented them all this time round and I figured if unforeseeable things came up or I change my mind on how I want things laid out I would still have the freedom to change the setup which I wouldn't have if I cement them now. 

One of the things I spent a lot of time thinking about as I was laying the bricks was how the space would function as a whole. Sure I want it to produce a harvest of rich organic crops, and sure I want it to look beautiful, but I also want it to feel beautiful! I began noticing that when I was kneeling on the back path that runs parallel to the back wall, the angle between my neighbours and I was so steep that they couldn't see me from their windows and roofs; the feeling of not having the entire neighbourhood's eyes on you is bliss! This got me thinking about creating somewhere where you could just sit and enjoy this sensation of being in the garden without being the center of everyone's attention. I also wasn't enjoying all the right angles that I was making on each Vegie plot. I made the front wall of my garden form a curving design because it fit better with the overall vibe of the area and I really didn't want to have a boring ole flat fronted garden, yet here I was making something completely practical, yet completely lacking in love. I want to draw people into the space, for their eyes to enjoy it, and so I began mucking around with different design ideas and finally settled on a rejig of what I'd initially planned.

Revamped Garden Designs

I love the idea that by making the paths that divide the plots only come two thirds of the way to the front you have to enter right into the garden space to move about between the individual beds. This draws you in and helps you discover the secret places against the wall where I'll build some benches so you can sit and enjoy it all. Also, having less points of entrance and exit means that once you're in, you're naturally more inclined to walk about and explore each little area.

Laying Out The Initial Plots Design

Once I'd laid most of the brick work and had half of the plots completed, I got to work tilling the soil and bring in some wheelbarrows full of compost that Shoonksworth and I had been cooking up over the previous months. I also bought 80kgs of straw for mulch, had it delivered, and solidified in my neighbour's minds that I'm insane because I put what their cow's eat for dinner on my vegetable garden!

Little Feather Helping Till The Freshly Laid Compost

Those months proved to be difficult for my little family. My little man is gorgeous and smiley, but he's not been fond of sleeping and so I'm sure it's not hard to imagine what unrelenting heat coupled with sleep deprivation was doing to us. Because the days are so hot it was really only possible to do work in the cool before sundown (between 3:30-5:30pm) and so if I got out there twice a week, it was a good week! But I kept on going as much as I was able and by early October I had 5 out of the 7 beds completely set up and ready for sowing.

Resurrection Garden; October, 2013

There is still plenty of work to be done; rubbish to be extracted, stones to be cleared, weeds to be pulled, soil to be tilled, but the bulk of the shape is largely finished and the seedlings are already putting on leaves and climbing their way towards the sun. So my question to you then, is when are you going to join me for a late afternoon Chai in the Resurrection garden?

I've Got Worms..

For many, admitting to the world that they have worms is a nightmare on par with loosing your pants on stage at your school assembly. But for me, it's reason so celebrate!

As you can see above, the path outside my house morphs into a decent flowing stream during the monsoon rains and manages to channel the bulk of the downpour that lands on the property past my front door, out the main gates, down our neighbour's gulley, and out into the main street. One of the sad things I've come to notice is that once the soil becomes waterlogged, the earthworms are forced to the surface (which depending on who you read means that they're either in search of oxygen or alternatively are using the opportunity afforded them of a slippery wet ground to travel greater distances overland), and then decide to travel with the current of water in which ever direction it may take them.

If you're familiar with some of my earlier posts, you'll know that in amongst the countless hours I've spent sifting through the soil in the Resurrection Garden I'd never once come across even a single Earthworm and so to finally see worms (and worms in abundance) on the property was a tremendously exciting event! (Yes, I recognise how that sounds! But don't pretend all you gardeners don't know what I'm talking about!) So I'm sure you can all feel my pain when I came to discover the worms actively moving with the current down the path, past my front door, out the main gates, down our neighbour's gulley, and to their deaths out in the street.

Seeing this tragedy unfold forced my heart and hands into action and out into the rains I went to save these little guys from the cruel streets Banaras and whisk them away to the safety and comfort of a cut up old coke bottle. My neighbour's sons (you may remember them from When a violent riot explodes outside your house) were intrigued by my growing collection of worms so I enlisted their help by offering them 10rupees per small container of worms that they collected. Their eyes went wide with excitement at the prospect of making 10 rupees (roughly AU$0.17) per container, however they are Brahmin kids (the top Hindu Caste) and when their Father caught them picking up worms he swiftly put an end to it.

I remained undeterred in my rescue efforts and before long Little Feather came out to see what I was up to and soon joined in the fun. It was interesting watching my neighbour's sons being extremely timid in their approach to picking up worms; only using sticks and other implements to lift them and squealing if they squirmed onto their hands or feet, contrasted with Little Feather who just charges in and grabs hand fulls of them and now affectionately refers to them as "Mr Wormy-Worms" who are "our Friends." I've got to say, I'm pretty fond of this kid of mine!

In just over an hour we collected goodness knows how many hundred worms (and some pretty decent sized ones too) who were destined for relocation to their new home in the Resurrection Garden. The same surfacing of worms happened again and again throughout Monsoon (essentially anytime it rained heavily) and so I was able to curtail the mass exodus of worms from the property whilst substantially growing the population of worms in my veggie plots. 

I'd like to say that it was all a roaring success but in the spirit of full disclosure, I did, on one occasion, leave a collection of worms in a 10L bucket that had some soil and leaves in it in my spare room for a couple of days. When I finally had the time to move them to the garden, I went in to the spare room and was shocked to find not one single worm still alive. In fact, I didn't find even one single worm. So either there is a collection of Worms currently hiding under the bed (I did actually look there) or the entire group of worms completely disintegrated into a liquid in the space of 50hours. Remarkable creatures! That experience was certainly enough to teach me not to keep them longer than I had too.

Now, to leave you on a slightly more informed note so you won't feel like you've totally wasted your time, here are some facts about Mr Wormy-Worms that may or may not just blow your mind;
* Earth worms do not have eyes (but they can still see, kinda)
* Earth worms do not have hearts (but they still have blood pumping throughout their bodies)
* Earth worms do not have brains (thus will survive the Zombie apocalypse)
* Earth worms are hermaphrodites (possessing both the male and female reproductive organs)
* Earth worms can, on average, live for 6.5 years (older than both my kids combined)
 

Lolark Sasthi..

In these last months the Festival Season has kicked off here in India. I've turned up to university more than once only to find my building all chained up and a bunch of young guys laughing at the hairy foreigner who didn't know it would be closed because of Festival X, Y or Z. Just this month we've had Navratri (a 9 day festival to celebrate Hinduism's Mother goddess in her various manifestations), Durga Puja (which celebrates Hinduism's warrior goddess Durga by filling the city with hand crafted statues of her likeness, and once the rituals are completed the statues are paraded through the city to the Gunga where they're thrown into the river), Dussehra (the 10th day of Navaratri which celebrates Rama's defeat of Ravana, the demon king from Sri Lanka) and in a couple of weeks it'll be my favourite; Divali (which is meant to represent either the killing of a demon fella by a couple of Hindu gods or in other traditions when some different Hindu gods returned from their exile; I've heard conflicting stories), but in reality, it's a wonderful excuse for everyone to load up on fireworks and go to war with one another! It's terrifyingly amazing!

But these photos here are from a different festival, a local one that took place last month known as the Lolark Sasthi. It's an amazingly colourful festival that occurs right outside our old house here in Banaras. The Kund ('Well' - 'Sacred Body of Water') is an Ancient Well that was quite literally below our bedroom window and we used to get the most amazing views of the various Pujas ('rituals') that took place there as we peered straight down into it. And whilst everyday something small would take place, it was the once a year blow-out festival that would literally attracts thousands upon thousands of men and women to bath in the waters and make access to our front door a complete nightmare.

My understanding of it's meaning is that on a certain day of the year when the sun reaches a certain point in the sky it shines directly into the Kund, creating a particularly auspicious moment. By bathing in the waters on this day and offering certain fruits and vegetables to the sun god Lolark Aditya, the pilgrim hopes to attract his favour and thus fall pregnant (with a male child). I'll admit that it's that bracketed part of the last sentence which irks me the most! India's Dowry system means that often Daughters are despised as they represent to the parents a significant financial expense whilst at the same time Sons are greatly prised for they represent to the parents a new Goat, block of land or a foreign BMW when it comes time for their son to marry.

The view from our old Bedroom window

But putting that to the side, one thing is for certain; the Lolark Sasthi is a colour feast for the eyes! After taking your dip in the waters, pilgrims remove their old clothes and leave them on the steps, walking away dressed in brand new outfits. It doesn't take more than a few hours before the entire area is covered in layers upon layers of brightly coloured sopping wet Saris and the water is full of various Melons and Loki (a phallic vegetable if ever there was) which the Pilgrims will abstain from eating until they birth a Son.

Having myself gone through many years of struggling to conceive a child with my wife, my heart breaks for many of the Men and Women I see descending those steps with that look of pained hope in their eyes as they seek to win the favour of a Sun god who is largely ambivalent towards them. I do pray for them to my God; the Son of God, that in His great love for them he would open the wombs of many of these sweet women who feel the shame of not being able to bare children at all. I pray that these families would be blessed with children (boys AND girls) who they would adore, love and cherish and who would grow up to be Men and Women that would radically change this cultures perception of the worth of girls from a curse to a blessing. And in amongst all this beauty and colour, it is nice to imagine what a place this could be!

Signs Of Life..

So I'll admit it, I've been enjoying writing these posts about the Resurrection Garden - but I'm also a tad over it. Not that I want to stop sharing about what's been going on with it, not at all, I'm just over looking backwards!

For a while it really was enjoyable for me to be looking over old photos and thinking through how far it's all come, but now I just feel like there's so much exciting stuff going on that I'm chomping at the bit to share, and so that's why this post is great! Because by the end of it I'll hopefully have covered all the worthwhile parts of the journey of the Resurrection Garden that will lead us up to the present! And then we can really hit off on some recent developments!

 

Freshly sowed and watered experimental plots in late November 2012

So in late 2012 I began taking the contents from my Berkley Method Compost Heap (which you can see the remains of against the wall in the back of the above image) and started dishing it out. I was already way behind the ideal time to be planting and so I decided to wait for the next year to lay the garden out the its final form of the way I had dreamed it could be. Also, I knew I didn't have enough compost and aged manure to fill each beds with as much as would be ideal and so I decided to make use of the opportunity and do some experimenting.

I began digging some long trenches, some individual holes, 3 larger plots (roughly 4x1x1 feet) that I completely cleared of soil and then 2 long rows right against the back wall. I filled all of the holes with only the compost and manure except for one of the larger plots which I mixed in 50% of the old soil that was already there. I was interested to see what changes would occur in the quality of the soil in each of the different plots over the coming months now that there had been such a good influx of freshly decomposed organic matter and hoped that would give me some more direction for the next years.

New growth in early December 2012

I planted some seeds in punnets to be transplanted out but the vast majority I simply sowed direct where they were to grow with a fairly high strike rate of germination. I only had a relatively small amount of space ready for planting (compared to the long term vision, we're really only talking 15-20%) but I managed to fill it up with 6 different types of lettuce (something which you can't often buy around these parts), Pak Choi, Spinach, Yellow Squash, Zucchini, Cucumbers, Snow Peas, Sugar Snap Peas, Tomatoes, Rainbow Silver Beet/Chard, Carrots, Radish, Basil and Garlic.

Interestingly Garlic has turned into a bit of an obsession for me lately. Here, Garlic are these pitiful little things which taste fine, but are so small that you'll need 4-5 of the little fellas just to equal 1 average clove from back in the West. And considering Garlic is in so many Indian meals, I imagine the local women must be stuck on the kitchen floor for hours each day just pealing those things which is why you'll often hear Shoonkdedi Bloom shouting out the windows and across the landscape "Indian Garlic is a form of female oppression!" So now every time I see a Garlic Walla pushing his cart around I find myself eyeing off his produce trying to find a decent sized bulb or clove so I can plant it and start a process of growing some decent sized Garlic.

A happy garden in January 2012

Growing Subzi (Hindi for 'Vegetables') in the Resurrection Garden isn't without its fair share of relatively unique problems. I've already spoke about the state of the soil and all my efforts to clean it up but sadly those efforts didn't translate into my neighbours ceasing from tossing their rubbish over the fence. Each morning there would be a new bunch of rubbish; everything from broken shoes, unwanted plastic items, last weeks homework, last nights dinner, all the way up to plastic bags filled with human feces were daily left there for me to clean up. Shoonkdedi Bloom helped me to come to terms with this one morning when I was feeling particularly frustrated when she quite helpfully pointed out that "When we gardened in Australia we had to pull the weeds out of our garden and that was just normal, now when we garden in India we have to pull up the weeds as well as our neighbour's rubbish, and that is just the new normal."

Another problem I'm facing is trying to come to terms with the different growing season. Up till around August-September it's simply too hot to grow anything (or do any work in the garden) and the monsoon rains make it difficult for many seeds/seedlings to not get flushed out. But when it hits late September and the temperature starts coming down then you have the problem of wanting to plant none-winter crops in the lead up to Winter. In Australia I'd be planting many of my crops as soon as it hits Spring and things start warming up but here once it 'warms' up everything's just going to die, so I'm doing a bit of research at the moment and trying to understand better how to plant during this completely different set of growing seasons to what I'm accustomed too.

 

Some locals checking on the buffet

 
And then there's the greatest problem of all. I have looked around for advice and even turned to my trusty copy of the Gardening Australia book but for some strange reason Peter Cundall doesn't seem have any advice on how to deal with Monkeys in your Garden! Now look, I know what you're thinking, "Oh monkeys, that's so cool, they're so cute!" But you'd be wrong. It's more like how you'd feel if a pack of wild dogs came into your backyard every couple of days, not so exciting. Not only are they carrying all sorts of wonderful diseases, but they love to destroy things and at certain points of the season when they became particularly bad they'd come every few days and start ripping whole plants out of the ground or pulling up the radishes and taking a single bite then tossing it away. Sadly it's an on going problem with no real solution. However the acquisition of some decent slingshots (care of Oodbilav) has served to level the playing field somewhat!

Little Feather, Wild Flower & Fräu-Clau helping harvest for Sunday Lunch at the River Ashram

During January and February I was fortunate enough to have a number of people lend a hand to dig new plots and sift out rubbish from parts of the garden I was yet to get to and for this I am still EXTREMELY grateful (you know who you sweet folk are!). I happily managed to plant a number of things in those later months which I knew I would never see the fruits of as when it hit February my sweet Winnie Wild Flower was 8 months pregnant with Little Foot and so we left Banaras and started making our way south to Kerala where he was to be born. Because of this, all my work in the Garden was finished for the season and so I had to be content to wait and scheme for the next season before I could get back into it.

The Resurrection Garden from August 2012 to January 2013

All things considered, I feel like in just 5 short months the transformation that you can see in the above image is pretty immense. You only have to look at the drop in the ground level against the back wall to get a feel for just how much rock, brick and rubbish we pulled out of this thing (check out the drop between the 1st and 2nd brick pillars in the above two images) and that literally every brick that makes up my paths or little garden wall that you can see in the 2nd image was pulled out of the ground when I first started cultivating the garden beds.

And not only did I get to improve this little patch of earth and visually transform the space, but I was able to feed my family with fresh organic produce (something I'm growing more and more passionate about) and even had enough to be able to feed the throngs of sweet Hippy travelers that came each week for our Sunday lunches at the River Ashram. 

My resurrection project has both eyes on the long term, but I have to admit that even after just one season I'm already super excited about the amount of transformation I was able to achieve and am still feeling hugely excited about what the future will bring!

When A Violent Riot Explodes Outside Your House..

 

This morning there was a loud knock on my front door. You can imagine my surprise when I opened the door to find a mob of masked Bandits (baring a striking resemblance to what I imagine the outcome of a drunken mistake between the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Wiggles would look like) brandishing light sabres and trench clubs on my door step.

They demanded Mitai (Indian Sweets) but when I refused things turned sour.
 

Threats started to be made and from there things escalated quickly. Within minutes violence broke out, yet peculiarly against each other and not against me, but this is Banaras so I don't try to understand all the 'how's and 'why's' of this place.

As the violence grew more intense and wide spread, the cute girl riot police were sent into action. She seemed to enjoy beating the rioters but was forced to retreat due to the overwhelming numbers of the mob. Thankfully the violence subsided and the mob disbanded around sundown when their Mother's called them in for dinner.

Total Fatalities:             0
Total Causalities:          0
Total Scraped Knees:    3

Monsoon Musings..

 

It's coming to the end of Monsoon here in Banaras and you can notice the change in the air. It's only my second monsoon here in India and so maybe I'm mistaken, but it feels like it's been fairly light on with the rains this time round. We had plenty of flooding in the city but the overwhelming majority of that was coming from upstream and so whilst there were times when you could literally sit and watch the flood water rising before your very eyes, we hadn't seen more than a few drops of rain in over a week.

On those days where the rains did set in you really hoped and prayed that you didn't have to brave the flooding roads and go anywhere till tomorrow but instead could just sit and enjoy cool shift from inside your house. Unless you're one of our kids, in which case you couldn't wait to get outside and get as wet and as muddy as possible.

 

And of course, once the rains were done you had those joyous playgrounds known as Puddles.

Yes, that is a Papad/Papadum in Little Feather's hand.. what else could you possibly want to chew on while splashing about in puddles in India.

I love letting her loose in the puddles to enjoy what I'm thinking should be a universally required part of childhood.

And I must admit I also enjoy the look on my neighbour's faces! Cleanliness is a highly prized virtue around these parts and so the idea of letting your child play in the muddy puddles is probably something akin to child abuse, or more likely something that would bring great embarrassment upon yourself and your family. And being an Australian (coupled with an inability to curb the driftings towards those more quietly subversive parts of my nature), I'm often more than happy than not to get out there and get wet with the little ones.

When my sweet neighbours - often with eyes wide as dinner plates - inform me that my daughter is getting wet (usually around 15-20 minutes since we've started playing in the rain and are both thoroughly resembling drowned rats) I've learned to simply reply in Hindi "No No, it's Ok! She's Australian!" I feel like this has the dual outcome of both educating my neighours that not everyone in the world feels this way about kids playing in puddles, but also that is confuses them long enough for Little Feather to make her escape to the other end of the path to keep on kicking them puddles! Viva la Puddle Revolución!!