Since my childhood, I’ve always fantasized living on a farm.
May be it had to do with the fact that I grew up on Enid Blyton books, where
kids go for fruit picking and chase geese and calves and carry pails on milk.
That’s one of the reasons I seek out farm stays, to live out that fantasy,
albeit for short periods.
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| Homes in a picture postcard-like setting! |
I got the opportunity to stay on 2 orchard-farms during this
trip to Himachal and loved every bit of it. All houses in Kharapathar and Ruhil-dhar,
where I volunteered for apple harvesting and grading, are farms too.
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| Traditional Himachali Home. |
The houses in the villages I visited were made the
traditional way, primarily of wood and stone. That’s because wood was in
abundant supply in Himachal, which had and still has a dense forest reserve.
The houses are two storied with the lower floor housing the cows, called the
‘gaushala’ and the upper floors serving as the residential area, the store-room
and for the kitchen. The roof is sloping allowing the snow to fall off and is made
with slate stone which also serves to weigh down and protect the structure
against strong winds and storm. Traditionally, bathrooms and toilets were
constructed outside or detached from the main residential area of the house,
although now-a-days, they are constructed at one end of the house.
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| The 'Gaushala'- a prime place in a Himachali home. |
Every house has a minimum of 2 cows, which supply abundant
quantities of milk, thanks to grazing on rich grass growing on rich soil. If
there is milk, there has to be butter and ghee, which are used in copious amounts
at every Himachali meal. Butter and ghee is served with almost every dish and
ghee is poured from a kettle not with a spoon!!
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| A motorized equipment to churn butter and buttermilk. |
I noticed that cows occupy a prime position in Himachali
homes. A member of the family or a hired person is dedicated to taking care of
the cows. Duties include taking the cows out for grazing and milking them twice
a day, cleaning the cow shed, ensuring that grass is given when cows are in the
shed and attending to miscellaneous needs of the cows. The first flat bread
(roti/chapatti) that is cooked at home, each day, is fed to the cow. Also
vegetable and fruit peels, but never left over food, is collected and give to
the cows. Taking care of cows is not an easy task in terms of the energy and
money spent, but still people keep them and they are well taken care of. In the
farm at Ruhil-dhar, there are 6 cows, out of which only 2 give milk. But they
are lovingly taken care of as much as the milk giving cows and there is a
reluctance to give them away.
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| A bottle gourd on the plant. |
Now, to talk about the vegetables grown in the farm. I think
that’s the best part of staying in a farm. You reap what you sow, literally,
and eat food fresh from the farm to your plate. Almost all vegetables that can
be grown in these areas, are grown on the farm. Potatoes, colocasia, tomatoes,
green chilies, brinjal, bottle gourds, cucumber, pumpkin, bitter gourd, not to mention apples, apricots, and also other things like beans, corn, etc. It
felt so wonderful that you decide what you want to eat in the morning and just
go and pluck vegetables behind your house and cook it in the kitchen.
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| Corn cobs harvested from the farm being dried on the roof. This will be ground later to make flour for makkai ki roti. |
The taste
of the food prepared from ingredients fresh from the farm is beyond
description. It exudes a freshness and taste that is sorely missing when I buy
from my vegetable vendor in Pune. And the same food drizzled over with ghee and
butter made from your own cows, takes the taste meter shooting up to the sky!
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| Freshly plucked rajma beans. |
So for aloo parathas for breakfast, potatoes were dug out
from the farm that very morning, for pathroru in the evening, a dish made with
colocasia leaves, the leaves were cut in the afternoon, for karela fry or
pumpkin curry for dinner, the respective vegetables were plucked in the early
evening.
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| Cucumber, apples, apricots freshly plucked from the farm. |
Winter is a difficult time for people. In Kharapathar,
situated at a height of 8000 feet above sea level, there is 4 feet of snow
everywhere in winter, thus making it impossible for people to move out of their
homes. In the absence of a central heating system, people gather in the
kitchen, around the hearth, for warmth and bond over steaming cups of tea and
piping hot food.
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| What a variety of colours. |
Winter is also the time when leopards, foxes and bears come
down from the forests to residential areas in search food. One evening, I sat
and listened wide-eyed, as my friend’s grandpa narrated stories, Jim-Corbett
style, of his encounters with leopards and bears. The animals usually come for
cattle, fowl and dogs and also attack humans when the former are scarce. With
his wrinkled face, weathered by the hard mountain life, the smoke from his
cigarette forming curls around his face, he replied calmly, “What is there to
be scared of wild animals?”, when I asked if he was scared of the leopards and
bears.
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| Colocasia leaves. |
Farm life in the mountains may seem romantic to a city bred
girl like me who occasionally visits, but there is no denying it’s a hard life
out there. In the absence of proper public transport, people are required to
walk long hours. It’s better now, with some families owning cars, because in
earlier days, walking to the next village, for 4-6 hours was no big deal. And it’s not just walking straight down the
roads. It’s walking either up or down on rough terrain, equivalent to a
difficult trek. Taking care of the kitchen garden, tending to cows, the
household chores, cutting grass for the cows, stocking up on dry wood for the
winter, for the hearth and fireplace, everything involves physical stamina. But
there is no substitute for clean air, fresh spring water from the melting
glaciers, food from the rich soil in your own kitchen garden and splendid views
from anywhere you look. And that is what makes life on a Himachali farm fantastic!
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| Splendid views all over. |
