Skip to main content

Tomichan’s Farming

 

Sunday Raving

When I left my job in Delhi a year after Modi became the supremo of Indraprastha, one of the many gawking phone calls I received was from a Malayali working in Delhi as a teacher. The old gen Malayalis are very inquisitive by birth. Their top priority is to find out what’s cooking in the neighbour’s kitchen. [The new gen is just the opposite. They don’t bother about what’s cooking in their own kitchen. They are busy with their smartphones even while eating and will be happier if nothing is cooking in their own kitchen so that food of their choice can be ordered via Zomato or something.] So this guy whom I had met a couple of times at one of CBSE’s evaluation centres called me to find out whether I was still surviving. He is a typical Malayali who loves to hear bad news about others. So I told him, “I’m in a remote village cultivating brinjals.” Like all Malayalis who are experts with innuendo, he understood it was time to hang up.

I was living in a rented house at that time while teaching in the most prominent school of the area. There was no way I could cultivate brinjals. Later when I built my own house, I did cultivate brinjals, bitter gourds, ivy gourds, tomatoes, okra, tapioca, Taro root, and a few other things including mint. Most of them were utter failures. But I haven’t given up. Even now I have some brinjal of my own.

Brinjal

My latest experiment is with pepper. I bought two bush pepper [കുറ്റി  കുരുമുളക്] saplings from a Kerala government horticulture nursery and planted one of them in a pot and one in the garden.

Bush pepper - potted yesterday

Now, the lesson I learnt from my farming experiments so far. It’s immensely entertaining, taxing (almost as arm-twisting as governments), demanding in the form of water and manure and regular weeding… After all that, you may get a few brinjals and ivy gourds. I seldom get back the amount I spend on them. Nevertheless, I keep digging. For the heck of it. And to be a good follower of Albert Camus, my guru, who taught me that the universe is necessarily a hostile place and it is every man’s (and woman’s as well, I guess) duty to carry the Sisyphean boulder up life’s hill.

For my latest bush pepper experiment, I have spent a princely sum on the various materials required in addition to the free soil. Coco peat, dolomite, bone meal, vermi-compost, and neem cakes. I was about to order North India’s sacred cow dung from Amazon when Maggie told me it’s free, though not sacred perhaps, from my brother’s cowshed.

My Moovandan

One of the two mango trees I planted five years ago started giving us fruits two years back. Now it’s soothingly productive. The second one which I bought from a “scientific” nursery is yet to put out even a single bloom. The one which produces delicious Moovandan fruits had come free from my sister-in-law. Sometimes, the unscientific things are far better.

Comments

  1. Plants are relievers of our stress. Good to see those pictures and your narration. All the best.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Plants are like family members, unpredictable but good mostly.

      Delete
  2. Hari OM
    What production! I have to make do with plots in my bay window, having no garden to speak of. Managed tomatoes, capsicums, chillis so far. Yes, cost is more than buying the produce at market... but the joy of knowing they are untouched by other hands, to eat as fresh as fresh can be. Oh my... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, there's a unique delight in collecting your own produce. Moreover, watching things grow with your touch is a pleasure.

      Delete
  3. Enjoyed this farming piece immensely with the tadka of your inimitable sarcasm. I've met some wonderful Malyalis actually. Though you are likely to know better, but isn't it a lot of generalisation? I know many others who love to see humpty dumpty falls of their acquaintances.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Being a Malayali myself, I took the liberty to caricature a trait of my people. Caricatures are necessarily exaggerations. But I must also point out that Malayalis tend put on various layers of polish while dealing with others.

      Delete
  4. Yes. Kitchen gardening gradually takes over one's life!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's why Yuval Harari says that the agricultural revolution was a folly.

      Delete
  5. I have a small balcony where I have my plants and they bring me such delight

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. For those who live in cities, plants will mean a lot more than rustic people like me.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Coming-of-Age Poems

Lubna Shibu Book Review Title: Into the Wandering Multiverse Author: Lubna Shibu Publisher: Book Leaf , 2024 Pages: 23 Poetry serves as a profound medium for self-reflection. It offers a canvas where emotions, thoughts, and experiences are distilled into words. Writing poetry is a dive into the depths of one’s consciousness, exploring facets of the poet’s identity and feelings that are often left unspoken. Poets are introverts by nature, I think. Poetry is their way of encountering other people. I was reading Lubna Shibu’s debut anthology of poems while I had a substitution period in a section of grade eleven today at school. One student asked me if she could have a look at the book as I was moving around ensuring discipline while the students were engaged in their regular academic tasks. I gave her the book telling her that the author was a former student in this very classroom just a few years back. I watched the student reading a few poems with some amusement. Then I ask...

How to preach nonviolence

Like most government institutions in India, the Archaeological Survey of India [ASI] has also become a gigantic joke. The national surveyors of India’s famed antiquity go around finding all sorts of Hindu relics in Muslim mosques. Like a Shiv Ling [Lord Shiva’s penis] which may in reality be a rotting piece of a Mughal fountain. One of the recent discoveries of Modi’s national surveyors is that Sambhal in UP is the birthplace of Kalki, the tenth incarnation of God Vishnu. I haven’t understood yet whether Kalki was born in Sambhal at some time in India’s great antique history or Kalki is going to be born in Sambhal at some time in the imminent future. What I know is that Kalki is the final incarnation of Vishnu that is going to put an end to the present wicked Kali Yuga led by people like Modi Inc. Kalki will begin the next era, Satya Yuga, the Era of Truth. So he is yet to be born. But a year back, in Feb to be precise, Modi laid the foundation stone of a temple dedicated to Kalk...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Life of a Courtesan

  Book Review Title: The Last Courtesan: Writing my mother’s memoir Author: Manish Gaekwad Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 185 Writing the biography of one’s mother who was a courtesan is not quite a pleasant task. Manish Gaekwad undertakes that arduous task in this book and does a fairly eminent job with it. ‘Courtesan’ may not be quite the exact translation of ‘tawaif,’ which is what Rekha, Gaekwad’s mother, was. A courtesan is essentially a sex worker whose clients are wealthy men. But a tawaif is primarily an artiste, a singer of ghazals as well as a dancer. Sex is part of that job, no doubt. When a woman sings lines like Apna bana le meri jaan / Haye re main tere qurbaan [Make me yours, my love / I am your sacrifice] to a man, sex becomes a natural climax of the show. Rekha is a tawaif. She tells her own story in this book. The author writes the narrative as if his mother is telling him her life’s story. Towards the end of the narrative, Rekha asse...