Sowing plans for July 2020

We were quite excited and a bit on the jittery edge as the weekend neared. We were desperate to visit our farm as the sowing season was nearing and we were still under complete lock down. This situation put our plans of travelling to our farm into the “doubtful” category. Though there is no real threat in us travelling in our car as we aren’t going to be in contact with anyone en-route, still there is always this big doubt looming large on whether we will be stopped, questioned and sent back by police personnel.

With all these doubts we still were optimistic enough to plan our weekend trip to the farm; well, because, we just had to. There was no other option; we couldn’t miss the sowing season for the world!

My farm trip checklist looked something like this –

Seeds

Farm journal

Caps

sunglasses

Extra towels

Change of clothes

(3 sets)

Home compost sack

Phone

Breakfast

Lunch

Sowing list

Extra bags

Things for my farm helper

Mask

Keys

Seed trays

If you would like to watch a video instead, then you can click below and watch our YouTube video!

Apart from this we needed to pack our breakfast and lunch as we were planning on hitting the road early in the morning. Papaya for breakfast and Lemon rice, curd rice & potato fry for lunch. Yeah, it might look blah but this works best for us for two reasons – one, of course because these dishes can be prepared quickly when you have to start very early in the morning and the second, is that, we have understood from experience that when we are drained doing physical work and are under the sun all day, we seem to prefer a simple meal. We really don’t feel like having an elaborate lunch while we need to get back to farm work post lunch. So, there.

And if you are wondering about the number of change of clothes for just a half day visit, then I have to presume that you haven’t been on a farm before especially in the month of July in Chennai. It’s hot and humid like crazy, I tell you. You will have to keep changing an outfit every two hours as you will be drenched in sweat! Yuck…but true!

Of course, the important thing that I wanted to be prepare about was my sowing list. Though I knew what I wanted to sow, I still didn’t want to take a chance on missing even one of them due to oversight. Because we never know how the situation may turn out to be and what if we aren’t able to visit the farm the following week. So not wanting to take any chances, I worked out a seed sowing list –

So this was my sowing list:

Tomato	Bottle gourd	Pumpkin	Sword beans	Radish
Lady’s Finger	Ridge gourd	Ash gourd	Winged beans	Beet root
Brinjal	Snake gourd	Beans	Cucumber	Pasalai keerai
Chilli	Bitter gourd	Cluster beans	Palak	Paruppu keerai
Marigold	Basil	Broad beans	Siru Keerai	Thandu keerai

With all these checklists prepared on Friday, I felt more in control. Then we proceeded to lay out the bags near the front door so we won’t miss anything important. (This has become a ritual now, after umpteen missed item episodes) Well, we live and we learn! The only thing left to do was to put an alarm for 5:00 am so we can pack our lunch and be on our way by maximum 6:30 am.

So, we got up on time, only to see that it had been pouring cats and dogs outside. With a little added apprehension of how much of work we will be able to accomplish if it kept pouring like this, we continued with the work ahead. Prepared lunch, packed and got ready to hit the road by 6:30 on dot. As a last minute insight, we packed a couple of umbrellas too for good measure. All masked up we started towards our farm. It was a beautiful rain drenched day and throughout the travel, it kept pouring. We just hoped that the rain would relent by the time we got to our farm; and you know what, it did! Boy, were we lucky!

It helped that we hired a few extra helping hands to take care of weeding while we plunged ourselves into sowing spree. Let’s say we were able to tick off all the things on our to-do list and finished loads of harvest too.

A satisfactory farm day indeed! If you missed the VIDEO, you can CLICK HERE or Scroll up to watch it!

If you had a chance to be on our farm, what would you have sowed that day? Let me know in the comments below!