Ootta from Namma Thotta -2

 Ootta from Namma Thotta ( food from our garden) 

It has been a slow and steady progress , what with these incessant  and unseasonal rains attracting the pests, rotting out the seedlings and making sowing and harvesting so unpredictable. 

A big shout out to all those small farmers whose livelihood oscillates and depends upon mother nature's mood swings. Mother nature seems to be showing menopausal symptoms....

But ye shall not complain about the incessant rains... we need to soak in as much water as we can, because the summer is going to be scorching without all those trees that were sacrificed for the namma metro. And to keep us urban monsters fed and hydrated is getting to be a tedious tasks year on year. 

   

The harvest has been slow and steady. 

The conventional vegetable plot has been yielding some harvest although it has now massively slowed down. 

The circle gardens are a new experiment on the adjacent plot.  This is my home work after attending Krishna Mackenzie's Permaculture workshop at Auroville in April . 

Permaculture - shortened term to denote permanent agirculture aims to keep the human effort and intervention minimal and let nature take its course. 

Out there we do not till the land and do not plant 'Hybrid' variety of seeds that do not regenrate. 

Anything that is planted would either thrive, survive or die. If this does survive, and manges to thrive then the next generation of the seeds would automatically propogate and effortlessly yield in the next season. 

That is how agriculture was supposed to be. 

But our need for high and predictable  yields, good and consistent looking fruits and vegetables and pest resistant varieities, we let 'Hybrid' varieties rule our lives.  

Hybrid varieites are great. Althought when you consume them you would rarely know that the seeds in them are all infertile. That is why even if you throw a tomato or a pumpkin out into the soil they do not germinate. 

That is when you can tell between the 'Native' variety and the 'Hybrid' varieties. 

99% of the food we eat are all 'Hybird' varieties.  

Thr world is fast losing the diversity the varieties of fruits and vegetables that we get to consume. 

Here is  small effort towards seed sovereignity and to give space for the native variety of food crops. 

For now my fingers are crossed. Let us watch the permanculture vs conventional plots as they metamorphise through the seasons. 

Here are the six circle gardens as part of the permaculture. 

     

Being gender neutral

 Being gender neutral ... 

I always associated the term  Batter to 'idli' and 'dosa'.

The other day I was watching an interview where Sachin would constantly repeat the term 'Batter'. 

I put it down to bad english although this was not the Sachin from the 1990's but a very mature, well heeled, sightly middle aged but the usual baby faced Sachin talking about how he and Rahul Dravid foxed bowler Chris Cairns with some of their shrewd and rather funny antics while Rahul was at the crease and Sachin at the other end at a match in Mohali.   

Interesting piece of story telling that one.  And a must watch. 

That is when I learnt Batter is the new gender netural term since the gentlemen's game has now caught on with the ladies as well. Although with the ladies' version the fanfare and bankrolling is nowhere near to what the gentlemen's version of IPL commands. 

Talking of gender neutral terminology, here is one one such place - the play arena 9 badminton place in whitefield  that clearly struggled between  

'to be gender neutral' or 'not to be gender neutral'.

But they managed to get to the point.  

      You cannot be always be gender neutral ...