Eating is an agricultural act - Wendell Berry

Saturday, October 30, 2010

the NE monsoon is here

and has been one rain-filled week.
we have received nearly 20 cm of rain over the last one week. yes. that is quite awesome because it has been evenly spread out over the week.

the pond is brimming over.




and there are a few deep ditches surrounding the pond and the windmill and they too are a-brimmin' over.



and overflowing out of the property headed towards the little village lake.


and the swales are all pretty pictures awash with water.




here are aerial shots.



and more rain is expected during the week leading upto deepavali.
this weather is beautiful and the temperatures have dropped to sub-20s.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wonderful, do you have lots of frogs and dragon flies around? To keep the mosquitoes down?
On swales, does it make more sense to create lots of shorter swales, it is easier than trying to maintain level over a longer distance. Anyway you probably won't worry about water (or lack of it) for a long time. A constant water body with life will make the whole place thrive.

csm said...

anon - yes to both species.
the frogs do help (along with the other variety of insect eaters) to keep mosquitoes down.

'more' sense is not for me to judge.
yes, smaller/shorter/thinner swales are also good. it will depend on the water inflow, total area.
RWH should take 5% of the total land as a thumb rule.

Anonymous said...

the pictures are indeed very happy and satisfying :) i fondly recall the early pictures seen in the point return blog. It's been amazing transformation!

Regards
Raja

siddharth said...

beautiful! can't wait to see it in person :-)

Anonymous said...

Some fish in the pond would make the ecosystem more deeper and wider, and life more interesting!

Unknown said...

You must be so happy to see that your foresight and all the hard work that you have put in, has led to this transformation in the land.

sheila said...

Can't believe that these are the same swales and ponds that I saw in February. Then they were dry and parched. A lot of imagination was needed to picture them flowing. Now it is lush and fertile. Fantastic!