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Welcome to the latest episode of "What’s Going On in Jadan." Tonight, we will look at some of the activities in our organic gardens. It is a fairly simple process, so I will take you through it from A to Z and show you some pictures of the sorts of things we can produce here in this region of Rajasthan. In organic farming, the principle is that we do not interrupt the natural, native cycles. This means we use natural fertilizers and avoid chemical sprays. If you examine the soil where you live, horticulture will have different classifications for it. Whatever soil you have, it is possible to enrich it naturally, which might also include bringing in some topsoil from a different area. In Jadan, as you can see in this slide, we have a fairly clayey soil. This is fine for some grains but not so suitable for certain vegetables, especially root vegetables. To cultivate vegetables here—which is our main aim—it is necessary to bring in different kinds of what we call ūpar kī mīṭṭī or topsoil. This is an example of some very good topsoil found in another area of Rajasthan. It is a red, sandy soil. Locally, in the Pali district of Rajasthan where our ashram is situated, we have this fairly typical sandy soil. The advantage of this soil is twofold. First, it contains few weed seeds. Second, it is friable soil with the beginnings of organic potential inside it. The beginnings of organic matter in soil are referred to in agriculture as humus. (Not hummus, the spread from Morocco.) We use an organic fertilizer here that we call gobar. It is produced by cows; it is their waste product. But there is no need to waste it, as it is really precious. We collect this from the cows and, when it is well matured (at least five months old), we make a powder, usually by running a tractor over it. We then apply it to our vegetable beds, sometimes in homeopathic amounts, sometimes larger. This cow dung is the backbone of agriculture in India. It establishes a balance of different nutrients in the soil. These nutrients are called, in agricultural terms, NPK. This mixture of basic nutrients is called the NPK complex. It is essential for healthy leaves and plant growth. If you do not establish this balance in the soil, you get a poor result, like this poorly developed vegetable seedling. So, we have topsoil, and we need fertilizer, sunlight (which we have in abundance here), and sweet water. Having enough sweet water in a desert area is quite rare, but Swāmījī was so merciful to create a beautiful reservoir for the ashram and all the outlying areas. This has allowed us to diversify our cultivation over the last few years. We will look at some of this diversification shortly. Now, let us look at how we prepare a growing area. There is an old-fashioned term in agriculture called tilling or tillage. This means that before planting your seeds, you go through the soil by hand and remove any obstacles. It is a very loving relationship with the soil, with the earth. You are paving the way for a good harvest; it is the groundwork, the foundation. To do all this work in organic farming, we need many hands. The gardens are run by a team of local villagers and some of us yoga students from the ashram. If we are so inclined, we have the opportunity to go there and develop our horticultural skills. Some of us have no experience, while others have quite a lot from their own cultures and countries. We have an ornamental garden as well as vegetable gardens. This is called the Śiv Bāgh. Swāmījī created it to make a beautiful environment for us to practice our yoga. This slide should have come earlier, but it is another example of our water harvesting here—sweet water. Returning to the subject of water: we have a flood irrigation system in the ashram, and actually throughout much of Rajasthan, particularly in areas without much rain-fed cropping. It may seem an extravagant way to use rare water, but with this sandy soil, if you do not saturate it, it will bake dry within a couple of days, and the hardness will strangle the seedlings. Other components, along with your dung, water, sunlight, and willing hands, are tools. On the right-hand side of the table, standing up on the leaves, is a very traditional, old-style tool called a kodālā, taken from the verb kodanā, to dig. It is an Indian hoe, and it is one of the main tools we use to work the soil. Earlier, we saw some slides of a liquid fertilizer made from cow dung. This is actually from a gobar gas plant, a biogas plant that produces a kind of slurry which we use to fertilize the fields. This is another example of our tools. We have one tractor that we share with other ashram jobs. Here you can see it in action using one of our big disc plows. This plow churns up the soil after the monsoon and buries the weeds inside it. It is one of the many organic systems we use here to create a green manure that will later become humus in the soil. The other workers are the bees. These are some native bees that come to the vegetable flowers in the mornings and evenings and help with pollination. This is our team. They have a great understanding of how to produce food on this land because most of them have their own family land, usually quite small plots (sometimes really big ones). There are usually three growing seasons for agriculture in India. One of these is in the monsoon, and that crop is usually rain-fed. They produce crops like sesame, millet, sorghum, and wheat for the cows, as well as mung beans, which are later made into split mung dal. This is some sesame. Maybe some of you have never seen what sesame looks like; it grows in little packets. This is a little fellow just trying to have a feed. This is something he should not bring into the ashram at all—the one behind the packet. They are naughty squirrels. He is having some bājrā, millet. In organic farming, we have many problems because we do not use pesticides, insecticides, and the like. The other day, I went to the hospital for a blood test, and the doctor there proudly told me his brother owns a seed shop in our local village, Jadan. I said, "Oh, good, we can buy our seeds from there; it's closer than Pali." He added, "Yes, and you can get any kind of chemical fertilizer or pesticide that you like." I explained that we were organic. He said, "Yes, he has organic sprays too." Well, we have to do something, because if you do not, then these little fellas just take over. Not only little fellas—we have things like this, Douglas, and bigger things. Can somebody help me? I have just jumped a few slides. Oh, maybe that is okay. These hopping things are really annoying because they eat green leafy vegetables like our salad and our pālak. Unless you can hop really fast, they are hard to catch. You cannot pick them off like some beetles; you cannot just cat-lick them up and take them for a drive somewhere. So, we have to try to make some kind of repellents. We train these snakes to chase after them. No, just kidding. We will come back to the bio-sprays in a minute. We grow vegetables, as I said, and we are trying to grow some fruits. I thought I would talk about vegetable trees before we go into other kinds of vegetables, because it is really interesting. In India, we have vegetables that grow on trees. This is one of them; it is called gūṇḍā. It looks a little like a gum berry because it is a gum berry. It is called a gum berry because when you prepare it to become a dehydrated sabjī, there is a gum inside that is like glue. Once you have done it, you never want to do it again, but it is extremely nutritious. Once dehydrated (dried in the sun), you can keep it for years. Previously, during droughts in Rajasthan, local people who could not grow vegetables kept stocks of these types of things in their houses. This is another kind called kaṛī. It has beautiful ornamental red flowers. In European supermarkets, you can buy these vegetables pickled in brine (salty water), called capers. This is one of the most holy trees of Rajasthan. It is very beautiful, very strong, grows very big, and is extremely resilient to drought. It provides your surrounding area with lots of nitrogen because its roots fix nitrogen into the soil. There was a tribe in a village near Jodhpur called the Vishnoī tribe that tried to protect some of these trees during the time of colonization, the British time in India. These trees are so sacred to this tribe that about 350 people lost their lives when some British officers were trying to cut them down. As with many trees in our ashram, it has medicinal bark, and, as with many trees here, it is thorny. Thorny trees seem to do really well in desert areas. Back to the pests—the jumping pests. I was in the field today checking our fenugreek leaves. I was away for a week in Jaipur, and they had all been cut down. I said to my helper, "Have you been cutting the fenugreek for the salad mix?" She said, "No, the rabbits ate it all." Somehow that does not bother me because there is enough for everybody, and rabbits are really cute animals. Monkeys, on the other hand, can go through a garden area and decimate everything within five minutes, especially if Pulpurījī feeds them chapatīs. I think they are welcome here. We were talking about bio-sprays earlier. We have a lot of this type of tree in Jadan. It is called the nīm tree or Mārguṣa. It has an unpronounceable Latin name, something like Azadirachta indica. We use the leaves from this tree. We soak them in water mixed with some crushed garlic, cow urine, the leaves of a local plant called ākaḍā, some leaf powder from this same tree, and some oil from this tree. You mix these together in a 200-liter drum, leave it for five days, strain it, add it to your diluted mixture, and then put it in your spray machine—either a manual spray backpack or a petrol-operated mist blaster. It is a very effective and cheap bio-spray. We are lucky to have it here. It is the most common tree of Jadan Ashram. It also provides a very tasty and sweet fruit in the summertime, which is funny because the leaves are extremely bitter and are a liver cleanser and blood purifier. We have talked a little about the trees. As was mentioned the other night, we have planted quite a few thousand over the years. Because of the strong connection of the Indian people to nature, they understand that each tree has a particular symbolism. Certain trees are regarded as holy, like the kejṛī. Certain trees are auspicious ones, held dear to Lord Śiva—or we can say, beloved of Lord Śiva—such as the fig tree, the Ficus benghalensis, or the pīpal tree, the Ficus religiosa. This one here is Kalpavṛkṣa. Kalpa means wish-fulfilling, and vṛkṣa is Sanskrit for tree. I just want to show you this beautiful tree guard they made. Other trees are medicinal. This is the castor tree. You can buy the oil in the market; it is a good moisturizer as well as a purgative. Sometimes the boys in the workshop, which is close to this tree, ask me if they can take one or two leaves. Once I asked why, and they said, "Because we have got some swelling," like when you have strained something. As we do in the West with heated cabbage leaves to make a poultice, they do with the castor tree leaves. That is enough about trees for now. Just a little about the flowers we can grow here. The most common ones are marigolds, in different varieties, colors, and sizes. Unfortunately, this photograph does not do justice to their beauty, but we can grow them very well here, and we sell them to local markets because they are commonly used in India to make mālās, the flower garlands used for altars and to decorate holy people, saints, and guests. This again is the Śiv Bāgh, the ornamental garden. These are some of the flowers growing there. Now, just to say something about the vegetables. We have three growing seasons in Jadan, which is different from Europe. In Europe, things in the garden go to sleep in winter, although an active gardener will prepare the beds in autumn for a head start in spring. Here we have three growing seasons: summer, monsoon, and winter. Every time we start a new plantation, we pray to Lord Gaṇeśa for success. We perform a pūjā and usually offer some flower or vegetable from a previous crop in that pūjā. Each group of vegetables has its own beauty, unique flowers, and character. These kinds of gourds are usually creeping, meaning they spread around the area rather than putting down a long root, climbing a trellis, or producing an edible leaf. This is like a kind of zucchini or squash. This is another kind of summer, or rather monsoon, vegetable with beautiful white flowers. This is a climbing one; you will notice a fence covered by the vegetables. These gourds were so big the fence fell over, so we had to put supports there—you can see the bamboo poles. This is the kind of yield we got from those big ones. This is another summer one; it is very delicious. In summer, the body needs cooling types of vegetables like melons and cucumbers. That is the very heart of organic farming: you keep it seasonal and do not try to manipulate nature to give you a winter vegetable in summer. You do not try to trick it into giving you, for example, potatoes in 45-degree heat. Here is another climbing one. It looks like that, and good old baingan (eggplant), one of Swāmījī’s favorites. Nobody likes it other than Swāmījī, but it is one of those things you can grow all the time, regardless of flood or drought. You can also play football with it, so that is a kind of cameo, like a superstar baingan. That was a nice, big gourd we had this year; it tastes a bit like asparagus if you really use your imagination. This is pālak. You have probably heard of something called pālak paneer, a famous Indian sabjī dish (sabjī means vegetable). If we get seasonal seeds, we can grow this most of the year round, except for a couple of months when those naughty, hopping insects eat it all up. Mogrī. Niranjanjī is the Mogrī superstar of the ashram; he is the only one who likes it because it has an interesting taste. But it is good if you have a cold because you cannot taste it. Matar (peas). It produces nice flowers in the garden but never any peas. This is a really interesting bean. I mentioned earlier about nitrogen fixing. Trees can do it, lightning can do it, and certain kinds of legumes can do it. This is a legume that does really well in Africa. Again, it has a beautiful ornamental flower. You can grow it up a fence to make an ornamental curtain, or have it running across a whole cultivation area like a field, and that will fix nitrogen into the soil while supplying you with nice green beans. At the end of its cycle, you can plow it into the soil. In organic farming, this is called a cover crop. So, in the following season when you cultivate a crop there, you have plenty of nitrogen in the soil. In normal chemical farming—when I say normal, I mean it is the norm, though it is not normal—you can buy chemically synthesized nitrogen or NPK formula (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium). They are in such a concentration that it is not possible to find that in an organic manure. Therefore, they are called chemical fertilizers because the molecules are somehow manipulated into a very concentrated form. That gives good results in the short term. I think it is like if you wanted to take vitamin C and took the whole bottle at once; you might get a big boost, or maybe get sick, but afterwards your organism would not be so healthy. When you do this to the soil with chemical fertilizers, the soil eventually gets sick. That is what the bean looks like—the lab lab bean. After some time, when it dries, you find inside a beautiful black seed with a white line down it, ready for sowing the next year. In the winter, we grow a lot of root vegetables, but they take a long time to establish. So, in the meantime, we grow lots of salad vegetables. For the first part of the winter, that provides our organic kitchen with produce. Presently in Jadan, we have a daily supply of things like endive, chicory, lettuce, baby spinach, and herbs like coriander, parsley, mint, fennel, some fresh green beans, and tomatoes. This is our winter garden this year. We were also able to grow onions, garlic, things like beetroots, daikon radish (mūlī), and spring onions. Those are tomatoes—it has gotten a bit funny again, sorry. I must be pressing the wrong thing. So, tomatoes go into the salad mix. These were the tomatoes from last year. We do not stake them; I just sort of spread them out and let them do their thing, and they are happy that way. Just a little word about chilies. For the last two years, we had a chili plantation. Chilies are an integral part of the Indian diet; there is no Indian meal without chili. We supply them to the local market and also to the workers. Last year we got one ton of chilies, and this year we made a bigger plantation. After some time, the chilies start to turn red; they start out green. From the red ones, we make a dried preparation. We dry the whole red chili in the shade, and when it is completely dry, we remove the stem. Then we either sell whole red chilies or chili powder. That is red and green chilies. Another thing we try to do is make Ayurvedic preparations. This is a latest idea: to make a healthy tea from the dried leaves of the lemon trees. Tulasī, you have probably heard about, is really well known in the world these days. There is a lot of research going on about it; it is highly medicinal. A lot of research is being done in the field of cancer. It is also known to be great for coughs and colds, against malaria, and as a general health tonic. We harvest the leaves here once a year, dry them in the shade, and then make a powder. It is a very popular herbal tea. Another one is called ḍasṭumba in Hindi, or bitter apple in English, because it is extremely bitter and does not look like an apple. It is in the melon family and makes an extremely effective gastric herbal preparation when combined with fenugreek seeds, wild celery seeds (known locally as ajwain), and black salt. It is also a very effective medicine for horses if they are suffering from colic. Tinospora cordifolia, also known as nīm giloī, likes to grow up the neem tree; they have a special understanding. Here you can see the vine going up. This herb is exported all over the world from India, and it is a very effective liver tonic. This is a beautiful sītā here, with a very special thing she found in the field the other day. This is a wild thing, a wild cucumber type of melon. We get thousands upon thousands of them growing in our fields during the monsoon. Like many cucurbit family plants (cucurbits meaning cucumbers and melons), they like lots and lots of water. When this is processed as a food, you cut the top off with a knife and lick the top you have cut off. If it is bitter, not sweet, you throw it away. You keep the sweet ones, cut them up, and dry them in the sun to be stored away as another dehydrated sabjī. It can also be cooked fresh and makes a delicious vegetable dish that Swāmījī loves very much. This is an idea for the future: we hope we can provide the local area with some Ayurvedic products from our fields. As I said before, we have started with some teas already, like mint tea, tulasī, basil, now this new lime (lemon leaf) tea, and we have also got some neem powder and some chili. It is traditional in Indian ashrams to have organic cultivations and to provide some Ayurvedic products for the local communities, to nurture the divine sciences of Āyurveda and provide a fresh and cheap source of medicines—deśī davāī, meaning local herbal preparations, tribal medicines. Just something here about taking care of the trees. We have looked at the vegetables. I wanted to finish this talk with hope for the future in our Ayurvedic products. I hope that one day we can diversify our fruit production. This is a three-year-old lemon tree, just coming to its fourth year. We have two orchards of these, approximately 140 lemon trees. It looks really promising that this year we are going to get fruit. They have not started flowering yet, but some are giving lemons anyway. To help a nitrogen-greedy tree like this, we put a good dressing of organic manure and compost on it every year. As with many trees in the ashram, we make these funny round circles called gamalās and fill them with sweet water about twice a month, or even once a week in the hot time. In the cold winter, maybe just once a month. It is another kind of flood irrigation with the same principle: you saturate the soil, and the tree is satisfied for a longer time. Papītā (papaya) is another possibility. You can also make a vegetable dish from the green papayas. That is a bit of a sick one; it is not always easy. These types have to be removed completely. This is a leaf curl virus, and there is no cure, as I have been advised by our local authorities. If you do not remove the tree, I promise you it will not get better, and as with many diseases, it can spread to other trees. Finally, a little about some of the grains here. This is one called corn. We can buy this in the market all over the world, but it is not usually this hard. I think the hour is almost up; I will just come to a finish here. We use it as a grain, then grind it into fresh flour to make chapatīs with, or crack it in the mill to make porridge. This is the sorghum wheat we spoke about earlier; it provides the horses and cows with organic fodder. So, I hope you have enjoyed having a little window into the agricultural life in Jadan. This beautiful climbing plant that you can see through this window came from a seed given to me twelve years ago. It is a very holy and medicinal plant called Abrus precatorius, locally called gulāṛī. It is one of the few plants that can really endure droughts and floods; it has been through a lot and yet stays green for most of the year, providing beautiful seeds and flowers. Hopefully, it is a symbol of the good things to come. A footnote: this is a leaf of the banyan tree, and a reference to the Bhagavad Gītā, in which Lord Kṛṣṇa said, "Of all the trees, I am the banyan tree." He is present in all aspects of nature, and the divine light is inside all vegetation.