Homesteading – A dream…

Let me start by saying that I didn’t even know what the word “homesteading” meant. So, when I was searching high and low about what this desire of mine to grow my food, cook from scratch and the desire to live a life of self-sufficiency meant, that’s when this word kept cropping up. And that’s how I learnt that there was a word for what I wanted to do.

I wouldn’t say the idea of homesteading  just cropped up one fine day…I guess the desire was dormant for a long time and then it started showing up more often till it became hard to ignore anymore.

So just like anyone starting something new, I read up a lot about homesteading. I also understood how difficult it is to start something without much guidance or reference points or any step-by-step manual to help us guide along the way. And this is precisely why I decided to chronicle my journey of homesteading through my blog here.

For anyone who has been following my posts, knows how my farm looks like now. But do you know how it looked before? Let me walk you through it…Don’t worry, it’s a short walk. I wouldn’t want to bore you but it’s important to understand where we started to see where we have reached since then.

This is the little coconut farm we bought on an impulse on a bright sunny morning and since then the dream of living on this farm just doesn’t let me sleep.

The first thing for me was to come up with a name for our beautiful coconut farm and I am not going to lie, the name “Kalpavriksha” just popped-up in my head instantly. I always liked that name and the meaning behind the name was too good for me to pass up. The word Kalpavriksha means a “divine wish-fulfilling tree” as per Hindu Mythology. Mythology aside, in Sanskrit coconut palm is considered as “Kalpa vriksha” which is defined as “the tree that provides all the necessities of life”. So that just did it for us; An apt name for our farm.

Now that the naming was done, we had a lot to figure out. Fencing, electricity and water-supply for the farm…which were the most basic things needed to be put in place to start our farm dream going.

As the purchase of the farm itself was a stretch for us, we decided to stick to some basic fencing which wouldn’t cost us an arm and a leg…

As getting electricity supply seemed like something that would take quite a while, we decided to go ahead with setting up a borewell first to take care of the water needs. Somehow that didn’t take as much time as we anticipated and we were greatly successful in getting a local vendor to set-up a borewell for us.

The work started bright and early and after a few observations on how deep the water is found in this area, the work men got on to their job. After inquiring around we found that the nearby bores had water at less than 50 feet. Hence, we thought we could also go for shorter depth and started with 9 inch bore using a manual drill. After drilling for about 10 feet, they found it to be all rocks and after spending almost 10 hours, we had to give up and go for some alternate option. After further contemplation, we decided to make it a 12 inch bore for about 150 ft and use much more powerful drilling machines the next day. The machines were so powerful that within a couple of hours we had dug up more than 100 ft and saw water gushing out. What a sight that was!!!

We were thrilled to bits to see the water gushing out after the successful setting-up of the borewell. This happened on 4th June 2016.

So far so good…we thought. But not for long. The wait for electricity supply is taking way too long to get processed through the local government bodies. And I mean way…too…long. Almost a year and a half! For what it’s worth, let me share that it was 26th Dec 2017 when we finally got the electricity connection!

Can you believe it? It was really depressing to see that due to this one hitch, we are unable to start our dream garden sooner! But once this was done, we didn’t waste anytime pressing on with our plans ahead and like they say, the rest as you know, is history!!!

If I could do this, I am sure you can make that dream of yours come true too!

Onward and upward!

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