OUR JOURNEY WITH YASH FARM THUS FAR

Published – April, 2019

Our journey into sustainable living started sometime in the early part of 2015! I’m pursuing a career in the hi-tech industry for close to 3 decades and wife Shyla (Co – Founder of Yash Farm) is a homemaker, who now has the added responsibility of managing operations of Yash Farm for the last few years 🙂

We have been experimenting (learning through mistakes), volunteering at various organic farms, attending workshops etc to get to where we are right now. It has been an exhilarating journey so far. The challenge to convert this 1 acre land barren land (due to excessive Eucalyptus tree cultivation by earlier folks) into what it is today was a colossus learning experience for us. In this process we have dabbled with sustainable living and now are practicing it to the best of our abilities.

In April of 2016 we stuck water within 370 feet below ground and set-up our borewell, we were pretty naive and did not know much about borewell recharging nor much about Rain Water harvesting techniques. We just went ahead with planning of broad layout of the land and start our eco-friendly dwelling designed and constructed using earth architecture techniques. We used soil excavated from our land to make mud blocks, sourced most of other construction material like stones, dust and some cement from local quarries and suppliers. Wood (Kalli maram /Rose wood)has been extensively used and we got in refurbished wood from Pondicherry & Chettinad area.

Photos are dated to 2016, and it shows the early days, when we started construction on a barren land surrounded by Eucalyptus and few Coconut trees on the southern side and another patch of barren land to the northern side. We did work with the team for the next 1 year to get something close to what we were visualizing. Well this was just the shell and it took us another 1 year to get closer to the final product, just the dwelling units devoid of any vegetation.From this state to the final state was very arduous and painful journey involving many coordination points.