Amrit Mitti

First, a description of the pics ( I still haven't figured out how to insert pics at the appropriate places in the text... they all seem to bunch up at the beginning)...

The tub pic: Dry leaves soaking in Amrit Paani - a mix of sugarcane juice, dung and cow urine.

The other two pics: The same leaves piled up in a heap. This heap will turn into Amrit Mitti in 3 months. We covered the heap with straw and jute cloth, to keep it from drying up.

Amrit Mitti - very rich, nectar-like soil which makes plants happy! We learnt about this a couple of weeks ago at Vanwadi. Now it was time to make it at our home.

We immediately started collecting the stuff we needed. Sugarcane juice was easy. The cow dung and cow urine seemed like a big challenge at first. But then we met Preeti - all knowing denizen of Pune's traditional peth area. She took the extra effort to go hunting for a goshala, and got us the crucial ingredients.

The dry leaves we needed for this magically appeared in front of our home... huge heaps of dry leaves swept off the roads and dumped onto an empty plot. We greedily stuffed a few sackfuls. And not a day too soon, because the next day, someone put a lighted match to the heap and the whole thing went up in smoke. One man's gold is another man's garbage :-(

Then we needed a huge tub, 100 litres plus! Our big and small buckets put together wouldn't add up to that much. So first we went to juna bazaar, looking for used drums that we could buy on the cheap. We found good stuff, but somehow didn't feel like paying money for it (why didn't we? haven't figured out that one yet). Then we put out an alert among friends... and promptly heard from Divya, who offered to get a huge tub from one of her friends and lend it to us. Now this is becoming such a nice pattern.... almost like Aladin's lamp. We wish for something, and it appears.

The rest happened in copybook fashion. Mix everything in the right proportion, let it ferment for 3 days, add lots of water, soak dry leaves for a day, then pile up alternate layers of soaked leaves and soil - 2 foot high. It was fun making the pile ... so many familiar and new faces turned up to help us make it. There was the all-organic-Shammi and green-thumb-Sonali. Kuldip and Varsha and Shubhada and Manish were new folks we met. So many heads put together had to come up with new ideas. Those coconuts you see in the picture, and the wooden stakes standing erect - thats our solution for keeping the heap from collapsing and spreading sideways.

Funnily, the smell of dung had vanished, and the amrit mitti heap now smelt of wet forest floor! Like amrit?

It doesn't end here. This heap of leaves will need attention intermittently... some turning, some watering, some planting of a mixed handful of seeds. More later...