Edible Shoots

     My mom never made cheese. She never knew what it was like. But she did make a lot of butter and ghee from the milk leftover after we had supplied the neighborhood. Free home delivery was our responsibility. We kids did it well without causing any concern for customer care or ultimately our bossy mom.   We raised chickens, goats, rabbits, and cattle. We also grew a fair share of our own food, like edible leaves, veggies, and tubers, mostly annuals but also perennials. Everybody contributed towards the labor, therefore we hardly ever needed to hire a farmhand. There was no such thing as waste on our homestead. In fact, there is no such thing as organic waste on this planet we call home.   Mom boiled the unsold milk and let it cool off. She then added a little buttermilk as culture  and kept it overnight for turning the earthen milk pot into a pot of buttermilk.  Once she was free from farm chores, she would sit back to churn the curds into little sc...

My granddad on my mother’s side had his own paddy fields. He sold them piecemeal to marry off his eight daughters. However, he continued to farm on fields he took on lease. Nothing could stop a man from doing what he had done all his life. He had his own pair of plowing bulls, two pairs at the most. Like each of his ten children, these bulls too had their own names, no different from those of men.        After every harvest, my grandfather would send a share to each daughter’s house. Having been brought up by a veteran rice farmer, each of his daughters knew very well how to put the paddy to the best possible use. My mom was no exception. She boiled some of her share, at times with bulbils of yam as a treat for us kids. She spread some of it under the sun on a bamboo mat to dry, before gathering it up into a sack and sending us to the miller to make flour out of it. The carriable portion to a teenager, having packed up in a repurposed plastic bag and sealed wit...

63 “Plant Once & Forget” Fruiting Plants for Your Backyard in Kerala I love plants, especially fruiting ones. But I can’t nurture them like I do my own kids. For example, I may, or may not, care to water them in summer. What to do? Well, I’ve stumbled upon the perfect solution drawing on veteran planters and personal experiences. Here I am to share it with you happily ever. If we are away or too busy to give time to our green friends, the six-months-long dry spell in Kerala can be a trying time for many fruit trees we wish to come to fruition in our backyards. Many may wither and die back depending on the water retention capacity of the soil they are in. However, thanks to the six months of Monsoon, we can still grow a lot of fruit plants depending solely on the rain in this, God’s own country. What matters most is the choices we make and a little bit of homework before we line the plants up on the ground. Here is a range of drought-resistant fruit plants for your next...

      The picture we conjure up in our minds when we hear the word "home" is usually not far from the conventional roof-over-our-heads. However, it can hardly be stranger than what tribesmen of Habla once called their home. You might have seen an eagle perching its eyrie on rocky cliffs at a high altitude, or wild honeybees suspending their giant beehive in the armpit of a gigantic mountain cliff. But do men do the same? Maybe biomimicry is not as new as we thought it was – even though my natural inclination would be to resist the idea even if the girl I was madly in love with insisted on it.   Please excuse my camera for not being my own substitute pair of eyes, let alone for those who know Habla only through hearing or by reading about it. I understand I am doing an injustice to things I am talking about by showing a picture which is necessarily reductive, detracting from Habla’s true magnificence. However, it is a compromise; less is certainly better th...

        I lifted my pair of eyes from the book to unintentionally meet those belonging to a lady sitting in a circle not far from me. "In her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place". She was just distributing candies to her team from a half rolled down plastic bag. I averted my eyes, looking away, appearing indifferent, wearing a contemplative mask. I readily wear one of those during dreamy breaks I occasionally take during reading. It helps me digest, and by doing so I offer religious obedience to my ophthalmologist's advice.   After a short while, I went back to my book to pick up where I had left off. Time passed. No sooner did I want a break and was about to get up, two candies flew and crash-landed, one on my lap, the other on my book. The one that landed on my book made a resounding noise like that of a boot heel on a wooden panel. The lady looked like could be my mum's age, and was by a man seemed her k...