Mentioning how well the vegetable garden was coming along in the last blog was definitely tempting fate. Woke up a couple of mornings later to find that most of the beds had been completely eaten and the rest thoroughly stomped on. During the night a big male Sambar had found his way onto the property and had a wonderful dinner.
The Sambar is the biggest of the Indian Deer, a male can weigh over three hundred kilos and stand one and half metres high at the shoulder. The males are solitary animals who fight other males for control of an area and then mate with any females that come into that territory. Females tend to stay together in small groups, comprising of two or three adult females along with their young.
The big male that controls the area around Basunti I have seen on a couple of occasions, he truly is a magnificent beast. What did amaze me was how he managed to get into the garden. Basunti is surrounded by a two metre high thorn fence and on the cliff side, with a cactus fence with thorn bush stacked in the one area that is possibly accessible. This male had managed to climb an almost vertical cliff face, that I had great difficulty getting down, let alone climbing up. Food in the jungle is very scarce at the moment, so it was worthwhile risking serious injury to have a very full stomach.
This new way of access has now been blocked and most of the beds I have now replanted, with backup plants that I keep in pots. This is something that I have learned to do, because you never know what’s in store when trying to grow things in the middle of the jungle, inside a wildlife reserve. What I can’t replace is the three beds of Beetroot that the Sambar seemed to enjoy the most, not a scrap was left in any of them. This is a great shame, as I was really looking forward to my first Beetroot and Wild Rocket salad of the season.
Every three years I replace the thatch on the Yoga Shala roof. This is done by the same father and two sons team, that did it when I first built the place. They are the only people that I have found that still do this work, as it is becoming something of a dying art. The time they spend at Basunti always fills me with trepidation, as all three are very heavy drinkers. The father is the worst, he arrives shaking like a leaf, downs half a bottle of some viscous looking local concoction and is then as steady as a rock. Much to their amusement, I insist that they at least tie themselves on when working on the top roof, as I live in constant fear that one of them will fall off.
On Sunday I drove to Harike Pattan in the Punjab, as I had read that they had Water Hyacinth growing in the wetland outside the town. A journey that I thought would take eight hours ended up taking eleven. The journey was delayed as we had problems finding the place and also on the way back, a huge procession of tractors and trailers, stuffed with devotees, was blocking the road for about ten kilometres. Some sort of Pooja was taking place and everybody was also being given food. The good thing about this is we at least got a free lunch, consisting of Dal and Chapattis all washed down with incredibly sweet tea and for some reason an orange. The journey was a success, ended up with three bags of the Water Hyacinths, which I am going to put in the moat around the Yoga Shala.