Monthly updates
March 2025
Poultry
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.
Vegetable garden
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!
Orchards
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!
January 2025
Poultry
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.
Vegetable garden
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.
Orchards
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.
