The lush greenery quickly following the first few downpours of the season surrounds you at the clay-tiled Vanvadi house at the foothills of the Sahyadris in Maharashtra. With fireflies lighting up the night sky, bird calls of different tenors and the steady gurgle of the streams filling the air with music, the place is a welcome change from the city’s monotony and chaos. But that’s not the only reason why you should drop in to say hello to Bharat Mansata, writer-editor at Earthcare Books, one of the members of the Vanvadi collective forest-farm.

The clay-tiled Vanvadi house at the foothills of the Sahyadris in Maharashtra. Pics/Neesha Noronha

Cultivate vegetables
All this month, Vanvadi welcomes volunteers to help with their ongoing plantings. Of the 65-acre tract, only about four acres have been set aside to cultivate vegetables, fruit, millets, rice and sesame. The rest is now a magnificently regenerated forest, rich in biodiversity. “We have already sowed the seeds for our food crops this season. But we need help with our live hedge plantings for which we have cuttings/seedlings/ seeds of about 12 species. Several hundred out of more than 1,000 tree saplings raised in our nursery this year also remain to be planted. With a respite from the rains, we will do some more vegetable sowing. And from July 25, the transplanting of rice and millet seedlings is expected to begin,” he explains.