What would you do if you have over half an acre of land at your disposal, along with enough resources to make decent alterations and additions to it? Ask any Keralite and the reply you might possibly get would be plans of planting rubber, tapoica, cocoa, vanilla, or any other cash crop that is in trend at that point of time. Or maybe someone with more than enough resources would talk of building a farm house or something with landscaped garden, swimming pool, fountains and stuff.
Project Orchard started off as a dream, a small ‘what if’, a nagging question deep within, which resulted in this experiment, which I hope would go on for quite some time. The primary question was do we, read my family, really own this piece of land? I mean, it was there for ages, when even God wouldn’t have thought about our family tree. I was pretty sure i don’t own this land, but is merely a custodian at this point of time, till maybe life decides otherwise. So, then came this more important question, how am i going to make it any better, better than the day this small piece of land was entrusted to my trusteeship.
And viola, Project Orchard was conceived. The idea is to create a biodiversity reserve, which would help in sustaining the local indigenous life forms, like say squirrels, spiders, birds, bees and even a few pests. Letting nature take its course would have been the easiest way out, but considering the fact that my family live in the same compound, it was not really possible to make it into an ever green forest or something. That is when this wonderful idea of the orchard came up, which solidified into having a collection of all the fruit bearing trees I can lay my hands on.
Once the idea was in place, it was time for some dilution. My mom, one of the stakeholders in the property wanted to know, what would be the utility for the family from all this. Considering the fact that she was the one who was going to fund the project, I had to give a better reason than how about a supply of squirrel bitten fruits round the year. So it was decided to make nutmegs the hero of the whole project. Being a cash crop and a spice with high market value, nutmegs is a dilution i was willing to make, given the fact that nutmeg trees would act as natural air conditioning, making the climate of the property a little cooler. So it was decided some 20-25 nutmegs would be the prime crop of the property, with all the fruit bearing trees playing a supporting role, from a financial point of view.
Now that all the starting glitches were addressed, it was time to go ahead with Project Orchard, my dream project dedicated to my daughter and the generations to come.
