We had this not so unusual problem of hundreds of thousands of ants marching through the house, the front porch and side yard. They were clearly up to something big (a siege?) and we left them on their own for a couple of days. Their business was still unfinished. Nisha got tired of being up against an ant hill every day came up with a solution.

She cut a few small pieces of fresh lemon and placed them at critical junctions.  In under 2 minutes, all but few had retreated to their bastion.

Later I googled and found that lemon juice is an ant repellent. But extracting the juice doesn't seem to be necessary. And the lemon pieces are re-usable just in case the ants decide to re-route.

This has worked 5/5 times for us on small black ants and small red ants. Wait till they evolve!

After researching on green buildings for a while, we had decided to check out COSTFORD, an institute founded by the Gandhian architect, Laurie Baker in Trivandrum, Kerala. Sajan, the chief architect, looked at me and said, “I was expecting someone who is around 50 years”. But he quickly warmed up to our story and said his reasons to stick with a non-profit though he could make much more money with his own practice were pretty much the same as ours. He then sent me to the Center for Developmental Studies (CDS) designed and built by Laurie Baker to look at its architecture.

I went around CDS and heard many stories about Laurie Baker. A civil engineer accompanied me around and explained to me their method, purpose, time, costing etc which are lucidly captured in this interesting hand-written manifesto by Laurie Baker. 

Nisha mixing limestone. See more pictures >

We were introduced to Subash Palekar’s Zero Budget Farming (which is a catchy name for Natural Farming) by friends at Siruthuli, a local eco non-profit,. In this, we found a ready-to-walk bridge between Fukuoka’s spirit, Permaculture  guidelines and the specific needs of our farm.  Subash  Palekar has documented his intensive experiments over a span of 8 years in a series of books.  And we really like his definition of Natural Farming which is ‘to use or activate that which is already in natural existence”.

The soil was dry and hard from grazing, the motor attached to the bore well that irrigates the farm doesn’t work (someone stole the wire that powers the motor!), the first phase of south-west monsoon had failed and there is a scarcity for farm laborers. So most local farmers advised us against multi-cropping that natural farming embraces. We thought we’ll wait for some rain.