Growing food, growing people

The Circle Garden Project, initiated in 2010 by a small team at Solitude Farm, began as one fun way to bring people together. They made videos called “The Rock and Roll Circle Garden Show” and posted them on YouTube, showing the process of creating simple, abundant kitchen gardens in your own backyard with some friends. “And then,” Krishna says, “One day I realized that this is something that people really love. You could see that people are crying to rediscover the relationship with their food. And when you watch people doing the gardens together, they’re inspired to work together in an authentic way. You can go out and have a drink or go to cinema, but this is another thing, an authentic interaction that is also missing from our lives.”

It was this realization that continued to nurture the project, which expanded as more Aurovilians joined. The team would select a site, and the public was invited to plant the circle garden. At the project’s peak, thirty people showed up to plant one garden. To create a circle garden, the team would build up earth to a diameter of a three meter circle, and then plants a variety of short, medium and long duration crops within it. The crops are heavily mulched and watered preferably with wastewater. Sometimes a site is selected by choosing an existing fruit tree or hibiscus bush and creating the garden around that. When the crops are watered, the centre tree also received water. After building one circle garden, the team goes next time to the home of one of the volunteers and helps to start their garden. And around and around it goes.

The Circle Garden project has touched many lives, and transformed the outdoor spaces of numerous Aurovilians, most notably Claudine in Dana, Amir and Elumalai in Evergreen, Kalsang and Namgyal at the Tibetan Pavilion, and more. From individual homes and apartment complexes, it moved into schools, where successful projects were launched at Deepanam, Nandanam, and TLC, among others. Says Krishna, “Masanobu Fukuoka said that the society that doesn’t know where its food comes from is a society without culture, and that humanity without culture is going to die. So this is a very healing process.” It is also a process that has had several offshoots, including Riccardo and Luigi’s work Urban Farming (City Centre) project and Martin’s work at his home garden in Surrender and his efforts on promoting urban farming through Auroville Consulting.

More recently, momentum has waned due to a lack of a more permanent team. But Krishna’s efforts to bring people together in other ways have only increased in recent years. Since 1996, he has run Solitude Organic Farm, hosting hundreds of volunteers and visitors annually. Since 2007, the Solitude team has served organic food grown on the farm at the Solitude Organic Farm Café, an eatery which is a natural extension of the farm itself. And in recent years, Solitude has also been the host for permaculture workshops as well as the Lively Up Your Earth! annual eco-music festival. Indeed, Krishna’s years of energy and effort have inspired many projects highlighted in the AV Consulting Home Garden report.

But Krishna emphasizes that urban farming and home gardening efforts aren’t just about growing food, because it can’t stop there. “First you have to ask yourself, ‘What do I eat?’ There is so much we can do when we open our eyes to what is here and now. All of our solutions for well-being, for health, for nutrition, are actually here.”

Krishna truly believes that for Aurovilians green papaya could create a social revolution. “By using something that’s almost free, that’s in absolute abundance, that has zero ecological cost (no food miles, no carbon footprint), we can begin to change people’s consciousness. If people slowly start to have green papaya once a month, then slowly we will change how we approach our food. Imagine dynamic ways for people to interact around green papaya, such as ‘Green Papaya Night’ at the Unity Pavilion. The community could come together to share food and in this spirit of creating community, we could begin to open up to each other and things might begin to change.

“But that means the cooking aspect has to be understood,” continues Krishna. “And it’s not just about what you already know how to cook, and it’s not just about trying to recreate European recipes, it’s about opening your eyes to what is local food. That’s what Localiscious has been trying to do.” [See AV Today, June-July 2014, No 299-300]

The question then turns to examining everyday products that we use, where they come from and how they impact the environment. Solitude Farm is already producing its own non-polluting soap, using local materials such as tamarind leaves, neem leaves, citrus leaves, citrus peel, soapnut, chica and ash. They don’t sell it, but instead want people to come to the farm and participate in the soap-making process, a project they want to do in the near future. “Soap-making is another way of bringing people together. That’s why everything is interrelated. There’s no point in just talking about urban agriculture without looking at cooking, without looking at what types of soaps we use, without looking at how we eat together.”

Ultimately, healing our relationship with food is an effort to grow people. “People have to develop an understanding. And that understanding is a relationship to nature. But that nature is us. It’s actually a deeply spiritual work. We’re actually discovering who we are.”

How do we heal this relationship with where our food comes from on a collective level?

Krishna envisions the community gravitating around a central hub that’s based around this healing: a centre with food growing, a café serving local food, a small shop selling locally-made food products, and a community space. He hopes that this is what the new FoodLink project, opposite Certitude, will look like.

“Those four things together have an enormous power of change. Imagine a place where there is a beautiful café, a café that works financially with zero ecological cost and no food miles. People come to the community space in the morning for a Laughter Yoga session, and afterwards what do they do? They come to the café for a papaya smoothie. And then they get some of their shopping done, they pick up some chickos or tapioca, or some jam or pesto, and then they check the notice board and see that on Fridays they can sign up for CSA and on Saturday there’s cooking class being held by an Italian volunteer who is going to teach how to make pesto with the excess basil from the week.”

Krishna says that some of these aspects have been modelled at Solitude Farm, such as an economically-viable and much-appreciated organic food restaurant. He talks about how the business model of a café/shop/community space is one that makes a lot of sense. But, he says, it is time for this vision to move closer to the city centre and to be run by a team, including a well-organized volunteer programme. “This vision needs creativity,” he says, “and it’s not conditional on money. It’s conditional on the heart.

“It is every single person’s birthright to have a relationship with where their food comes from and to participate in that,” Krishna says. “But there’s a gap and people don’t know how to bridge that gap. Those bridges aren’t created just by doing a permaculture workshop. We need a central place that encourages people to grow their own food, that says, ‘Stop coming here to buy papayas, grow your own!’

“Everyone wants good food,” Krishna says. “Even the guy who likes McDonalds, if you give him a chance, he’ll go for it. Because it’s inside of him. Real change happens when you eat good food, and then you refuse to go back to food which doesn’t have the same prana. And in the case of getting our community to eat local food, and to start to grow some of this food, if we got this centre happening in Auroville there would be a profound social change.”

To learn more, please visit Solitude Farm’s website: https://solitude.farm/