u/iyarkaiyoduoruvelai

Update from the Vellore farm (Tamil Nadu, India). A few weeks ago I wrote about a hailstorm we lost mango to. This week I want to write about something that worked. We had 1,500 Napier and CO-4 slips arrive after 4 days in transit, half of them pale yellow and stressed. The traditional Tamil protocol for situations like this is a panchakavya soak 12 hours, starting at 4 AM, stirred every 2 hours to keep aerobic. Sprouts appeared in 40 hours, faster than the textbook baseline. Wrote it up at length on the farm Substack, full protocol + the rain that arrived exactly when we needed it. Sharing for anyone working with stressed planting material in any system.

https://open.substack.com/pub/iyarkaiyoduoruvelai/p/forty-hours-how-transit-stressed?r=8aorp4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Saturday afternoon was a normal day. Good, even the kind where you finish what you planned and feel the heat sitting differently at the end of it, slower, manageable. I did not think about what was coming.

By late afternoon the clouds started forming. Not the usual piled-up clouds of early summer, these came fast, with wind behind them. Then hailstones. Then heavy rain. By 7 or 8pm there was no power. We sat in the dark and listened to it work.

Sunday morning I walked the farm. The floor under every tree was covered. Mangoes green, semi-mature, two or three weeks before their time had come down through the night. Not a few. Not a scattered handful. Under every tree, from the first row to the last.

By the end of the third storm we had 200-250kg of fallen, fully intact, semi-mature mangoes and three different decisions to make. 75kg went into pickle. 50kg got distress-sold to a shop at ₹10/kg (PGS certified, didn't matter, that's a separate thing I'm sitting with). About 100kg we gave to the neighbours, free.

The post got harder to write than I expected. Not the technical part, the part where I realized I now understand why farmers dump their produce on roads when prices crash. Wrote the full essay here → https://iyarkaiyoduoruvelai.substack.com/p/three-days-three-storms-three-different

(Following on from my last post about Nammalvar's mulching — same farm (Location : Vellore), different season, different lesson.)

Mid-August last year I followed Nammalvar's mulching principle on our farm (Location Vellore), left all our mango pruning at the base of the trees in the paathi (round basin around the trees). Standard practice. The principle is sound: whatever you take from a tree, give back.

7 months later the dry branches were still sitting there. Sandy loam doesn't decompose mulch fast enough through the dry months. By March, termites had colonized the dead wood and climbed the trunks of all 320 trees.

No trees lost. Saved them with the same slurry I posted about for stem borers (slaked lime + cow dung + neem oil) — but the bigger thing I'm sitting with is: when does following a teacher's principle work, and when does your own soil tell you something different?

Wrote the full essay on what we learned, including what we're testing instead next season → https://iyarkaiyoduoruvelai.substack.com/p/what-320-mango-trees-taught-me-about

(Same farm as my push-pull and stem borer posts — would love to hear if anyone else has had a Nammalvar/Fukuoka-style principle backfire on their specific soil type.)