During the last month, our birds contracted a virus and fell terribly sick. The egg production came down drastically with almost no eggs. The little eggs that we got from the sick birds were discarded. With intensive care and help from the entire team, the birds are now doing well. The fourth batch of birds (one-day old chicks) will arrive in two weeks! This will replace the oldest flock which will complete two years at the end of the year.
During the last month, our birds contracted a virus and fell terribly sick. The egg production came down drastically with almost no eggs. The little eggs that we got from the sick birds were discarded. With intensive care and help from the entire team, the birds are now doing well. The fourth batch of birds (one-day old chicks) will arrive in two weeks! This will replace the oldest flock which will complete two years at the end of the year.
We have started experimenting with permanent tarps on the bed to manage weeds. The farm has done this in the past with pumpkin, ladies fingers and pineapples. This time, however, we are using burlap instead of plastic. These sheets are expensive but absorb less heat and therefore keep the soil cooler. They also will naturally decompose and dissolve in the soil (hopefully, not too soon!).
We have planted a new orchard of dwarf Jackfruit. The design of this orchard was done using the Syntropic frame. We are growing Jackfruit, Papaya, Subabool, Mexican Sunflower, Lemongrass, cow grass and Rosella in this patch. The soil was prepared by first growing Sunnhemp and then ploughing it in at the flowering stage. Irrigation is through in-line drips.
This is the fifth orchard preparation this year (after Coco-Banana, Ramphal-Pineapple, Avocado-Papaya, Lemon-Tubers), as part of our larger project of developing orchards on the farm.
July-August is a very busy time in the nursery (even more than usual). We are continuing to plant more fruit seeds like Jackfruit, Papaya and Avocado, preparing cuttings of Mexican Sunflower, propagating Agathi, Subabool, Lemongrass, Mint, Chives and so on. This is also a good season for vegetables as the summer heat is gone and there seems to be good rain this year. For this season, we are growing beans, pumpkin, watermelon, cucumber, brinjal, ladies fingers, basil, basella spinach, arugula, yams and tapioca.
Abundance is our food processing activity. The last months have been exceptionally busy with trying to use as much mango as possible to conserve what we could not sell. We also processed lemon, basil, cashew and some flowers and herbs. Things have slowed down now as the mango season comes to an end. While AuroOrchard used to do some food processing in the past, this work is entirely new in its current form and we are happy that the community is appreciating these products through positive feedback and repeated orders. We hope this to be not only a processing activity but a way of exploring how we can conserve and better appreciate the food that grows in Auroville, helping us to harness the abundance of the farm.
After years of consideration, the farm is finally launching its first formal educational program. This is a series of four courses in the year focusing on different aspects of farming. You can find more details here.
In the last couple of months, three new projects have taken shape on the farm. One is continuing the research on natural beekeeping towards exploring how small amounts of honey can be harvested from these hives. The next is on aquaponics for growing greens throughout the year. And the third is on integrating technology in our farming systems- especially for irrigation to start with. All these projects have a huge potential for learning for the farm as well as Auroville.
This Mango season has been bitter-sweet. While we are grateful for all the delicious mangoes we were able to enjoy and distribute to the community, the yields were exceptionally low and many of the mangoes started to rot as they ripened. The multiple rains early this year kept the young fruits moist which damaged the crown of the fruit and also created the perfect conditions for borers and fungus.
We also continue to deal with the challenges of lack of market for a diversity of mangoes, some being native, like Neelam, Ratnagiri, Malgova, Totapuri, Iruttu, Kalapadi, Kader, Manjeera. Most people only want Banganpalli and Imampasanth and we had very low yields of these varieties this year.
To be able to use the damaged mangoes, we also started making pulp and drying some mango ourselves. Our kitchen team has been working very hard to keep up with the season. So far, we have harvested around 4 tonnes of mango this season.
Motivated by the good turmeric harvests, we are trying a ginger plantation in the Mango Orchard. We have also planted around 500 new pineapple plants and we continue to plant turmeric and pumpkin.
The Turmeric, Yam and Taro are now well grown on the raised beds in open spaces within the orchard, as well as under the shade of the existing trees.
The Coconut-Banana intercropping is beginning to show some results. We have started harvesting the first banana fruits. We are also experimenting with Black velvet bean as a cover crop in this area.
We have started harvesting Tapioca in this area. Once the tapioca is fully harvested, we will put the entire area under green manure. Pineapple harvest will start soon!
We have begun processing the cashews and are now offering cashews on the basket.
We will soon begin with the pruning and management of the cashew orchard for the next season.
The Avocados are also not very abundant this year. Harvests should start in another few weeks!
Our new Avocado orchard which was planted as an experiment with Syntropic method is coming up beautifully. Please read the details here: Syntropic Agriculture.
The last couple of months have been challenging due to limited market for free range eggs. The schools are closed and overall less consumption in Auroville eateries has led us to sell the eggs at a loss for some time. We are grateful to the Auroville Bakery for helping us during these times and we are happy that even if we lost some money, we were able to distribute good quality eggs to the bakery.
The hens continue to roam around happily!
We are also installing a new water system for the coops to address the needs of our growing flock size.
We are back to the basic crops like Pumpkin, Cucumber, Brinjal, Ladies Fingers, Long beans for this season. Our team is working hard to maintain the vegetable garden with regular weeding, composting and mulching.
We are also starting a new project with the wild edible greens. We would like to propagate these ‘keerai’ on the farm, learn more about them and explore how they can be integrated in our daily diets.
The experiments with mango intercropping are giving good results and we had abundant harvests of turmeric and pumpkin from the Mango Orchard.
The early rains have not been so kind to the mangoes and we lost quite a lot of fruit. The flowering is also late this year and not as much as last year pointing to a much less mango harvest compared to the last two years. Nonetheless, all of us are eagerly waiting to relish the mangoes as much as possible.
We have raised new beds in the lemon orchard to grow Turmeric, Yam and Taro in open spaces within the orchard, as well as under the shade of the existing trees.
We continue exploring the best way to irrigate the Coconuts considering the needs of the trees and water efficiency. Meanwhile Bananas are growing well and have started yielding the first fruits. This comes after two years of setting up this plantation as an experimentation of Coconut-Banana intercropping for this region.
Our 1000 pineapple project is bearing fruit (literally). This year we will be able to offer abundant pineapple to the community.
Here Pineapples are growing with Tapioca, Ramphal and Papaya.
The Cashew harvest this year is better than we expected and we will be able to distribute the first cashews of this season very soon!
We continue to plant more Papaya after losing hundreds of plants in the cyclone last December. We are planting Kumquat and other citrus along with more lemongrass under the Papayas.
Tiny Avocados have appeared on the trees. We are expecting a good yield this year. Avocado harvest is expected to start by late July.
We have also started some new Avocado trees which will start bearing fruit in 4 to 5 years.
Our experiments with the Syntropic method have been really successful. We planted a new Avocado orchard under the canopy of Papaya, Moringa, ad several other biomass species. All these plants were planted densely and put together at the same time. Papayas are beginning to fruit and the entire system is growing beautifully abundantly and synergistically.
This is a highly productive and perhaps the most efficient way to start new fruit orchards.
We replaced our last flock and with that the 3 year plan of transition to a different breed of birds is now complete. As mentioned before, these birds are free ranging, have better constitution and disease resistance and produce eggs of higher nutritional value.
We are also making changes to our free range areas and experimenting with fodder crops for the birds.
This season has been particularly difficult due to the sudden drop in egg consumption in the community. Despite the same situation every year, we haven’t been able to find a solution to this problem.
We are preparing for the July planting and putting most of our beds under green manure- Sunn Hemp. This is also the season to manage biomass and add more and more mulch to the beds.
This season we are again planting turmeric after the great success from last year and the appreciation of the community to have access to good quality organic turmeric. We are also going to plant hundreds of new pineapple plants, some dwarf varieties of Jack fruit and start our first organised trial for ginger cultivation on a large scale.
The second batch of the brown birds has started laying eggs! We now only have one batch of white birds left and they will be replaced next month.
We are experimenting with the free range by adding irrigation and maybe even cultivating certain cereals or millets which the birds can then eat.
This is a great time of the year as all the beds are full and abundant with lettuce, pokchoy, brinjal, pumpkin, cucumber, rugula, beans.
The sweet potato harvest has started and we are hoping to have a good harvest this year.
Turmeric harvests have surpassed our expectations. We planted 30 kg of seed which has grown into 900 kg of turmeric. We are exploring how best to process the turmeric for longer use in the community.
We are struggling with distributing greens like pokchoy. Any suggestions are welcome!
We had a bountiful harvest of lemons this month. This comes after severely pruning the lemon trees in our effort to organise the lemon orchard better and introduce other crops there to diversify the orchard.
The new avocado block is now full of papaya, castor, mexican sunflower, corn, chili, cowpea and biomass trees.
The Papayas and Bananas have been replanted after the massive damage from the cyclone.
Mango and Avocados have started flowering!
We have just bought the third flock of 500 birds. They are of a breed called Hyline Brown. With this batch we will finally shift entirely to brown birds.
They will be moved to the laying coop in three months’ time.
We are also exploring how best to manage the free range of the birds. We may have to sow some perennial grasses and create more sections so that the birds can graze intensively and at the same time, give enough time for each small area to recover from the grazing.
This is the most busy time in the garden for us with a lot of cool weather crops like Arugula, Palak, Lettuce, Celery, Pok Choy and so on, in addition to our regular crops like Pumpkin, Cucumber, Long beans, Brinjal etc. This is a beautiful time in the garden as the soil still smells fresh from the residual moisture of the monsoon, the morning dew and the flowers have begun to bloom.
We finished quite a bit of pruning work with the Avocados and Lemon trees and are now preparing for the Mango and Avocado flowering. During monsoon, we added Kumquat, Pomelo, Amla, Sweet lime to the existing orchards. The last months were also busy taking care of the broken and fallen Banana and Papaya trees from Cyclone Fengal. Hoping for a good harvest this Spring of Jackfruit, Papaya, Pineapple, Banana, Lemon and later Mango and Avocado.
Join our newsletter for exclusive updates!
AuroOrchard is certified organic by the Tamil Nadu Organic Certification (ORG/SC/1906/001683) Department accredited by APEDA (Agricultural and Processed Food Products Exports Development Authority), New Delhi, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India.
