Aanandaa Permaculture Farm is a leading resource for permaculture education. If you are looking for information on permaculture design in India or globally, you should subscribe to these channel.
Founded in 2011, the stewards of this land, Manisha Lath Gupta and her family, have converted a barren piece of land into a lush green forest, using permaculture techniques and principles. They have done extensive rainwater management and sequester upto 40mn litres of rainwater each year. They have planted a multi layered forest of over 6000 trees, and regenerated the topsoil by mulching.
The land is now abundant with food, and species of birds and insects. Manisha is a Permaculture teacher and content creator, and you can see several helpful videos on permaculture design, concepts and implementation on this channel. She believes, that everyone can build a permaculture farm.
Videos
Learn how to make an A-Frame to mark out contour lines for digging swales. Swales are an important feature to manage water and surface run off on your permaculture farm.
The first step in designing a permaculture farm is rainwater management. Very often we do not give rainwater too much importance. But a good permaculture design starts with rainwater.
Learn how to make raised bed gardens in a few easy steps! It is an important aspect of permaculture and has many advantages as mentioned in the video!
When it rains at Aanandaa, water flows through the channels we built at the farm. We follow the permaculture principles of slowing it down, soaking it in and finally storing the water in pools & ponds. Watch this video to get a glimpse of how this works.
We answer some questions submitted by you on FB and IG hoping to give you some tips and insights into how we work with nature!
Sometimes you have a papaya plant filled with flowers, but it doesn’t give any fruit. Why? Because it probably has male flowers, which are important for pollination but it will not translate into fruit. Watch this video to know more!
Manisha answers questions submitted via our Instagram page – an assortment of questions about the operations of a farm
Watch how Manisha & Agam’s vision in 2010 actually led to a 10-acre food-forest in 2020. It is all about believing in your goal and working hard towards it!
The key to a productive food forest is soil. And soil always likes to be kept covered. If we uncover soil by tilling, it will quickly grow weeds. To prevent this, we like to keep our soils mulched. For mulch, we use wood chips that we make from the cuttings of our trees. In this video, we mulch the beds in which we have planted zucchini, tomatoes, chilies, and garlic. Picking freshly cut wood chips from our machine, we carry them all over the farm in our wheelbarrows and mulch our beds. We show you how in this video! Enjoy!!
Growing tomatoes is an art and a skill. We have been growing tomatoes at Aanandaa for several years now, and each year we have gotten better at it. In this video we share our learning about growing tomatoes. If you get a few steps right, you can get a bountiful harvest of plump, juicy and big tomatoes – fit for the market, and of course fit for yourself. Start with some good seed of open pollinated seeds. Make seedlings in your own nursery. After 3-4 weeks they will be ready to transplant. Remember to plant them deep into the ground. And most importantly, trellis them up. As they grow, remove all the vertical branches emerging from the armpit of the leaves. This will ensure the plant does not become a bush, and you get less vegetative growth and more fruiting! Watch this video to see the tomatoes growing at Aanandaa!
Other
When Manisha and her husband acquired a piece of land in the hope to grow clean food and harvest freshwater, they did not know that their lives would change forever, in more ways than one. They established Aanandaa Permaculture Farm as an example of working with nature to create a self-sustaining & regenerative ecosystem. They challenged the local wisdom of chemical farming and convinced their team to adopt a chemical-free path to build a food forest.
Watch how Manisha explains the details of converting a barren piece of land into a thriving ecosystem, and why she believes that permaculture is the pathway to self-sustenance and harmony.
Manisha Lath Gupta is a Permaculturist, Entrepreneur and a former Marketer and Banker. She is currently the founder of Aanandaa Permaculture Farms – where she employs the sustainable practices of permaculture to reconnect with and give back to nature. She is also the Co-Founder of Mojarto.com an online portal for artists, galleries, and collectors of Indian contemporary art to buy, sell and exhibit their work. In her earlier roles, Manisha has held crucial leadership roles at Uber, Clix Capital and Axis Bank This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community
