This post is about the first few bits of infrastructural work we did on our homestead in the hills.
I'd described previously how I'd figured out how to move to Kodaikanal to live and operate out of the town. The first thing we needed to do while I was there was to get a fence around our piece of land. Our land is in between the land of two local farmers. The top half is on the border of a reserve forest and the bottom half borders a stream. The most common wildlife in the area are wild boars, goats, horses, cows, dogs, monkeys, bison and a lot of birds. The fence keeps most of them out except monkeys and bison that can easily get through. Luckily they keep to the forest and haven't bothered entering the land. The fence is constructed by salvaging tree branches from the forest and connecting them with a chain link fence. We also grew a few trees next to the fence to add structural support and create a living fence. I would've loved to do the fence entirely from organic material, but we needed the fence to go up fast. In addition to keeping animals out, we needed to establish our presence in the area. The locals had gotten used to using our land as a kind of thoroughfare and though we didn't mind the occasional grazing, we needed to show we were there to stay and needed to keep our area secure.
The next step was to terrace the beds on our land. We hired a machine to follow the slope and contour of the land to carve out the basic shapes of the land, but needed to refine and reinforce them by hand. Kodaikanal is boulder territory and we made the most of the local materials we had. We broke down large chunks of rocks and used them in combination with earth bags to reinforce the terraces to prevent soil erosion.
The terraces vary in height, as they follow the slope and contour of the mountain our hill is on. The final step after reinforcing the terraces with rocks and earth bags is to plant trees along the edges. The roots will take hold and further prevent soil erosion. The terraces survived the heavy monsoon, with only one collapsing slightly. Once the trees have grown a little larger the terraces should be solid and survive all weather conditions.
Once we had our fence and terraces, it was time to prepare the beds for the growing season.
We started with the bare minimum while planting our fruit trees, providing a little bit of saw dust and mulch around them. In retrospect I should have planned a succession of nitrogen fixing trees first, but we were really eager to start. Our soil looks so bare because a lot of the soil was mixed while terracing our beds. For anyone new to homesteading,
Don't let your contractor mix your top soil with your subsoil!
Unfortunately it was too late to rectify that mistake, but we did what we could to build up our soil health again. We used a technique called double digging to aerate our soil, planted a few vegetable seeds and waited for them to germinate before mulching the beds to provide a protective cover that retains water, builds micro-organisms and increases soil health.
The vegetables we planted were done as experiments using various companion planting methods I'd read about. We also decided to start with only 3-4 beds initially as we were still new to farming and wanted to know what worked. The combinations I tried were tomatoes and carrots, the three sisters ( corn, beans and squash), nutrient fixing plants like amaranth and fenugreek and of course a combination of fruit trees. After the planting was done, I returned to the city to do another design project and await the growing of our veggies. Stay tuned to find out how that went, and what grew the best!
