Elsy George’s pocket of vegetables and herbs in Edappally is as much a story about her love of Nature as the generosity of neighbours. “Our neighbour has been generous enough to let me use the garden in the vacant compound for my little garden of vegetables and herbs. Neither is there an agreement not does he expect anything in exchange,” Elsy says of her neighbour who does not want to be named.
The list of vegetables and fruits she cultivates is long — two types of turmeric, papaya, sweet potato, plantains, lady’s finger, brinjal, types of chillies, bottle gourd, string beans, pepper, amaranth, types of yam and colocasia, herbs such as different kinds of basil, betel leaves, waterhyssop (brahmi), long pepper (tippali), Malabar nut (adalodakam), Indian borage (panikoorka) among others. She was among the farmers, under various categories, in the city, honoured by the Cochin Corporation for urban farming for the year 2022.
The recognition makes her emotional. “I was not expecting this, not at my age. I am overwhelmed by the recognition,” says the 72-year-old. She was chosen for, besides the garden of vegetables, herbs and fruits, for keeping hens, goats and a biogas plant — for self-sufficiency.
Elsy has been farming the 15 cents of land for 25-odd years trying to recreate the ‘paradise’ of her childhood spent in Koratty, near Thrissur. “My father, a military man, was a farmer at heart. He created a paradise, farming grain and vegetables. Everything we ate, he farmed. Onam harvest was the best, everything on the table came from the fields. Although he died when I was barely eight and I don’t have very many memories of him. But I do remember my agrarian childhood. I inherited my love of farming and Nature from him,” she adds.
From planting to watering to de-weeding and harvesting, Elsy does everything herself. “I have no helpers, only God’s help. And that is all I need,” she says. Most of what she knows, she learnt from books and magazines, she sources seeds and saplings from the Krishi Bhavan at Vyttila. All her ‘farming’ is organic, even fertilisers — neem cake, bone powder and lime stone powder. “I don’t shop for vegetables, I use what I harvest and share with my neighbour. It gives me great joy and happiness,” she says.
The biogas plant ensures that all waste becomes fuel and the slurry too is put to good use. She confesses she is not a ‘farmer’ in the conventional sense. “I just do my bit and this is what keeps me healthy. Rather than watch television, I prefer to spend time nurturing my plants.”
She wakes up at 3am. After her morning prayers, a visit to the church and chores, she changes into her green or blue gardening clothes and heads out to the neighbouring plot to tend to her plants. “I normally wear white, which I cannot work the soiI in. I don’t have a fixed time, nor do I notice the passage of time when I am here. I spend all my spare time here,” she says. The houses share a common wall, which makes it easy for her to keep an eye on her plants.
Elsy is obviously the happiest among her plants, she points to the passion fruit creeper on a mango tree and says happily, “look at the fruits, I just saw them today. Since the mango season has passed I don’t look up so much.”
It not just the plants, her eyes light up when she talks about her 15 hens. Her eyes well up when she talks about selling her four goats as she had to travel and there was nobody to look after them. “I loved them as if they were my children. It breaks my heart to think about them. I asked the person I sold them to where they were. He said ‘the goats have gone far away!’ I know what that means,” she says with tears streaming down her face. Her husband, George has promised her that he would get her a kid goat.
The hens are cooped in an extension on the terrace of her house. She has formulated solutions to keep out the smell that would emanate from a hen coop.
Her dietary needs (of vegetables), she says, are met by what she grows. “I don’t want anything more, I am content!” There is, however, one thing she would like, but which she knows might not happen — she would like to raise a Vechur cow.