Learning about permaculture on a Nepalese farm

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After having spent 2 days in 5 buses crossing the border from India into Nepal, we finally make it to the small village of Patiswara, where we will be spending the next week on a traditional nepalese terraced farm. The principle aspects of permaculture farming is to intelligently design your farm/garden in order to use free ressources and minimise the impact on the environment. With that in mind, we learned a lot of interesting things during our week at the farm. For example, ash is a great source of potassium and can be used as a fertiliser or mustard is a good insect repellant. During our time at the farm we learned how to build a stove, a green house, we transplanted eggplants, watered and watched spores slowly develop into mushrooms and helped with overall maintenance like watering, ploughing…This really taught us many things and we have since thought of a few different ways we might bring home some of the things we learned!

Our week at the farm was incredible for many reasons. Every morning we got to wake-up with the amazing scenery of the terraced hills giving on to the not so distant glaciers in the background! The farm belonged to a very small village, we therefore got to kick back and enjoy the feeling of being lost in nature, which was pretty incredible after all the hustle and bustle in India! The farm also had other volunteers there, whom were all so nice and a lot of fun to hang out with! We developed routines around our day such as playing a lot of yatze (dice game), chai time were we would go to a small tea house in the village and get tea and waaaay to many coconut biscuits and of course our nightly bon fires! We also got to enjoy many dhal bahts, the staple of nepalese food which consists of rice, lentils and veg cooked in many different versions. One might think this gets repetitive or boring but it’s a weirdly addictive dish! After our week at the farm we leave with Stephanie, a french canadian volunteer who will also be joining us on our next adventure in the Nepalese mountains!