Gardening

It is not often that you see a man and a woman employee working together as a team in an Auroville forest or garden. But Elumalai and his wife, Surya, are different.

Now the Town Hall has a circle garden. It was started by Krishna from Solitude Farm around six months ago. “Despite Auroville being home to many inspiring and different experiments, the community still by and large does not realize that the essence of our existence lies in our relation to food,” he says.

The Auroville Urban Farming project was started by Riccardo, a long term volunteer studying Food Security in Auroville, with the aid of Luigi in late 2014.

Recently, a survey was made of the various home garden projects in Auroville. The authors were Katt Grant, Segar Duraikannu, Vimal Bhojraj and Martin Scherfler.

Climbing the steps to the roof at Maitreye through a maze of white tiles, one would not expect the lush, verdant explosion at the top. On my first visit in December, there was green everywhere: lettuce seedlings bursting from their small containers, melon plants cascading from horizontal pipes, even a small papaya proudly pushing the other plants out of the way.

Have you walked behind the Town Hall lately? You might be surprised by what you see. Nestled in that dense urban area, surrounded on all sides by buildings, you can find young banana plants, bountiful bougainvillea, creepers climbing up the walls of Citadines, a robust vegetable garden, and a drip irrigation system supplying water to young fruit trees.

As part of its efforts to highlight alternative and sustainable solutions for an urban future, Auroville Green Practices has launched the colourful publication My Pumpkin Roof.