Happy New Year and Happy Harvesting !

Here is wishing all our blog followers a happy new year. May the new year brings peace, happiness, and prosperity to your lives. With Pongal around the corner, it should be a great season with a bountiful harvest for those doing rain fed agriculture. 

Monsoons were fairly good this year. Rains were not heavy, however they were regular which worked very well. Often with heavy rains, a lot of water is drained out and wasted. Short but regular showers ensures that the water percolates deep into the soil. As a result, we stopped irrigation from September onwards. Our EB bill dipped by 95% from the previous months, many of the bores had minimum readings.

January has not been very warm so far, with the mercury rising gradually. However, it will take another month before we start feeling the heat. 

The biggest challenge post monsoons has been taming the weeds. However, with the timely intervention of rotavator, we have had good success keeping the growth under control. Mango plots are looking good. 

Flowering has kicked in as well. First flowering was noticed in the second week of December. We hope to see flowers turn into fruits in the coming months.

Our little kitchen garden in the shadenet has been churning out veggies consistently as well. Bottle gourd, bitter gourd, tomatoes, snake gourds, cluster beans and okra have been plenty this year. 

We have about 250 odd trees of Amla that were already planted when we started this back in 2011. It was great to see them fruit for the first time as well. It will take another month or so before they are ready for harvest. 

Coming months should be busy for us with the harvesting and our marketing initiative. Stay tuned for updates!