Life with the Hyde's in India

Hello all,

Well, as I am sitting here at my computer the sun is shining from an almost cloudless sky after a heavy downpour yesterday afternoon. The temperature is a comfortable 31° with a slight breeze. That’s 88°F for those of us who don’t do centigrade! Tonight the temperature will fall to 22°, which for us is very comfortable. It must be hard living somewhere like the UK to understand just how normal these temperatures feel to us now. In the middle of winter it may get down as low as 6° at night which for us really is COLD, stove lighting weather. Daytime it will be around 26°, that’s about 47F. By then of course monsoon will be well past and we will have had all the rain were going to get for the next year. We have adapted. Isn’t the human body amazing, the first year we were here in India we wore T-shirts and complained about the heat through winter. It’s funny when you look back at it everybody wandering around in jumpers scarves and blankets wrapped round their shoulders and there is us basking in the beautiful weather! Well I can honestly say 47°C this summer was hot but not unbearable, we have seen 50°C + now that is hot. Yes, we have adapted.

We always seem to be running some sort of experiment here. I have to admit my favorite so far has been setting up our recycle system. Now we put very little in the skip. It has even inspired one of our neighbors to do the same. We compost all we can including the chicken waste, cardboard and paper is recycled into composted or chicken bedding. Glass and plastics and metal we give to a man who collects recyclable materials as his business. Many of our projects are made from material we have around the place, we installed an overhead watering system for the back garden made 90% from recycled material.

Very fine misting in the back garden made
mainly with recycled materials. Guess where
we will be standing in the summer heat!

 We have just completed laying the pipes to make the very front bed next to the road easier to water,

Our pipes laid ready for automatic watering

again recycled materials. It cost us a few new fittings but that was about all. We both love to do things like this, it makes our life easier and there is so much satisfaction when a project works.

This year in the garden has been a biggie for us.

Since we came to India we have had varying degrees of success growing some of our own food. To be honest sometimes it just hasn’t been worth the effort when local markets are so cheap when in season. However the use of pesticides in great quantities by the farming industry has always made us cautious to say nothing of the vastly superior flavor of our own crops. We have tried very hard to remain organic in our own garden but this year has been a monumental struggle.

We planted at least a month early, well before the monsoon had finished to hopefully improve germination rates. It is a risk some farmers take to get better prices for their crops. It should be noted however that many crops are destroyed by late monsoon storms. Something else we had not fully considered also makes sowing at this early point dangerous for crops… Billions of pests and diseases can hit without warning. At this point we are beginning to understand why so many farmers use so much pesticide. The rate of infection is astounding. Overnight crops can be decimated by pests that weren’t there when you went to bed. White-fly, a horrible black caterpillar about 1 cm long that does nothing but eat and moulds are the worst but by no means the only problem we have had. The odd snake doesn’t really count as they keep the mice and rats down so we leave them alone they leave us alone. Our latest visitor was a quite large black cobra. Deadly if you get bitten but not a problem if you just let them go their own way through the garden without interfering. After all not so many years ago where we are living was jungle. We also get a female panther every year. She hunts around the colony when the street dog puppies are born to feed her cubs then moves on. I know it may seem sad to see so many puppies disappear each year but if she didn’t hunt we would be overrun with wild dogs. We have only seen her once and have found her paw prints in our seed beds. It’s lovely really to think of her wondering about but it is also best to be very very careful at night during her hunting season.

WEEDS

 Weeds, I don’t know what you think of weeds but for  me now it describes an area of ground that turns into a jungle the moment you turn your back. They are however appreciated by our chickens. (Another experiment happening there).

The growth rate is amazing, warm humid conditions really make a difference. I have seen weeds grow easily 6 inches in a day… No I’m not exaggerating.

We planted our leak seeds and waited patiently for them to pop up. The grass grew, the weeds grew, we weeded (carefully). Eventually they came up and from that day to this it has been a constant struggle to keep the grass and the weeds around them under control. Christine is outside right now replanting them to grow on in our raised beds. We are hoping for a good crop this year because by planting earlier we have extended their growing season before it becomes too hot again for them. This is the reason we have planted them early this year.

Over sowing. Because we don’t have a lot of ground available for vegetables we use a lot of tubs, planters etc. year after year we have complained about the terrible germination rates we have been getting from seeds purchased here. This year I have to hold my hand up it was me, my fault, I did it! Every tub planted, every crop we sowed without exception germinated far more than we are used to. Consequently every tub was a forest of little seedlings desperately trying to reach the light. Our germination rate this year has been incredible. Normally we would expect 15 to 20% germination, this year it must be over 70%. We are learning so much from this experiment.

Locals call these cala lilies they are beautiful

Motie getting on now, about 13yrs, he has his own
blanket in the corner of the living room and comes
and goes as he pleases.

Hanging baskets up again looking very pretty

Side view of our kitchen garden
raised beds at rear of house

Geetas plants can't remember the names but
she loves them

A type of lily that smells gorgeous

Our tomatoes far right with melons on the left. Perfect for light but awful soil hence
the grow bags. Herbs will go in the space

Love this plant adds color to the garden

Roses growing up the chicken enclosure

View of our rockery and plants

More cala lilies among the rockery

Carrots and kohlrabi in the background, with our water butt collecting water from
our RO water, we do not waste anything. Christine adds chicken manure to it for the garden.

Chris's peppers great success this year, I bet they
will be very hot.

Capsicum 

We tend not to grow native Indian vegetables because they are so easily available in the market. We concentrate on vegetables that are not so easy to get especially UK varieties. As an aside, we were in the UK recently to renew our visa’s and took the opportunity to buy some UK seeds that we don’t see here. Runner beans, we planted, they grew rapidly up the climbing net we had erected. Great excitement waiting for the first baby bean to develop. About 3 or 4 weeks in we suddenly noticed the leaves going brown, in two days whatever it was spread across the entire crop. We thought we had lost them but with the help of our pests and diseases app the problem was identified as a leaf miner that we don’t get in the UK. Presumably our beans had no natural immunity. Repeated spraying with soap water and milk mixed seems to have them under control but only time will tell as we have lost all our flowers. Ah, the joys of gardening.

Beetroot pickled,  Christine's first
attempt and it tastes yummy

Many of the crops are doing splendidly; our kohlrabi in particular seems to be very happy with the new planting time. Cucumber, melons pumpkin and tomatoes are all doing well although lettuce in particular has suffered badly from being eaten overnight or hammered to death by the heavy rain. Tomatoes are difficult here with many varieties succumbing to fungus diseases and mould so this year we planted six different varieties some hybrid some old favorites like Money Maker. Of the six we have lost four varieties to fungus or mould. The two that remain are hybrid disease resistant varieties… Lesson learned.

Just for a laugh.

Imagine the scene, 3 AM in the morning a light creeps under the closed bathroom door. Inside dressed only in a pair of shorts a man sits on the WC facing the cistern, his arms inside the cistern seem to be doing something. If I was to die at this point was on earth would anybody think! Actually I couldn’t sleep, we’ve had a leaky cistern for weeks so it seemed the ideal opportunity to fix it. With it repaired and working again I headed back to bed. Christine mentioned a few days later that it seemed to have stopped leaking. The Phantom plumber strikes again.

One of the things we both miss about the UK is a good northern bitter beer.

Christine is 100% a northern lass and enjoys a good bitter. Mostly here it’s fizzy stuff in a bottle, very drinkable but not northern ale. Another thing we brought back from the UK was a couple of tins of homemade beer ingredients. Yorkshire bitter. Well needless to say since then despite the difficulty of getting ingredients (thank you Mel for getting us some more tins on her visit to the UK) home brewed beer is now available at the Hyde abode and very nice it is. 

This is where the magic of brewing
beer begins complete with heat
blanket taped in place to aid brewing

A fine bitter and doesn't give you
a headache next day

     

We have been looking into brewing using natural ingredients which are available here rather than the tins of prepared concentrate which is not available here. Yet another voyage into the unknown for our stomachs! We will update you. We also make fruit wines which are usually pretty good although there have been one or two that are best described as yuk! Banana springs to mind. Cranberry is gorgeous especially with a roast dinner so is Blackcurrant.

Chickens.

Christine keeps chickens, it’s an endangered Rajasthan species well adapted to the heat of summers here and a good layer. One problem with them they stop laying and moult as soon as the day length shortens. Research tells us that they need 14 hours of daylight to be able to continue producing eggs. We have installed two big LED lights in their run and are switching them on as the daylight ends. This appears to be working as several of the hens have come back into lay. We have been looking for a battery operated timer so that the lights can be switched on in the early morning giving a more natural transition from dark to light. Our major problem has been we have many and I do mean many power cuts it is a daily occurred that we just live with. We have a battery backup system and inverter to keep our freezers and fridge running but a timer obviously would need resetting every time the power fails. We have just found a very cheap battery backup timer on Amazon.

Our lighting has been installed 

 The chicken lighting is going automatic. This will be better for the chickens and save us from having to remember to switch the lights on and off. We will keep you updated as to the results of this experiment as time goes on.

Geeta has just come bustling in from school. A happy chatty little girl who seems to love every aspect of life. She is just completing her midterm exams we eagerly await the results she has worked so hard over the last year to catch up as much as she can we are both so proud of her. I have just been reminded of a promise I made her yesterday that we would crack a coconut this afternoon…. 

Ah samosa's Geeta having break 
on way home from school

She's growing up quickly

She loves the fresh coconut milk and then attacks the coconut flesh with gusto!* Christine keeps talking about writing an update on Gita tracing her development from when she first arrived here to the present day. Quite when this will get done your guess is as good as mine but over she has promised so I guarantee it will happen.* Update. We peeled all the outer fiber from it, drilled holes with a screwdriver in the eyes and Geeta happily started to drink the coconut milk…YUK it seems our coconut is rotten inside! We broke it up and threw it in for the chickens, they seem to enjoy it so at least somebody got somebody got something out of it.

Christine and I are both well allowing for the fact we both have arthritis and asthma. I suffer from IBS which can complicate life. As winter approaches we both feel more pain but it is nothing compared to the pain we both felt when we visited the UK over Christmas. Remember the adaption? It works both ways we are now no longer able to cope with the cold wet winters of the UK was very evident to us on our last visit. We both ended up with lung infections and the joint pain meant that our painkiller intake shot up. Christine had her toe bitten by one of our lovely 5 cm centipedes last week, big fat toe and lots of pain for a day of two. In many ways it’s our own fault that we get so many insects and wildlife into our garden. Squirrels lizards bees and a multitude of different birds visitors regularly. We watch as pairs of birds make their nests in our bushy shrubs and hunt through the grass looking for bugs to eat. I have also given up being totally paranoid about a heron that occasionally visits taking some of my fish from a pond, it has to eat as well I suppose. Update. Yesterday sitting having acquired evening drink on our front door porch a large and I’d mean large insect crashed into Christine who brushed it away, it dropped the caterpillar it was carrying and bit her hand. Within moments she was beginning to itch and suffer pain. She took antihistamines to keep it under control but this morning she had to go to the local chemist buy a stronger version. Her hand is quite swollen and in the area of the bite she is oozing  serous fluid which at least is relieving some of the pressure. A few more days will see it healed. The joyous Indian flora and fauna strike again!

Update; Christine has been taking an antihistamine. Itching and swelling has reduced considerably but we have just read the leaflet for side effects. Vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, lack of coordination, headache, blurred vision. Christine has had two days of hell. It’s a bugger when the cure is worse than the problem. Won’t be taking that again.

My daughter Frances is marrying her long-time boyfriend Sean at the end of this month. We are both very sad due to lack of funds (to be honest… No funds) we cannot be there but there is good news. The wedding is taking place at Rising Brooke Church Stafford and will be streamed live on the Internet so we can see it happen. With modern technology we are hoping to combine a small get-together here with their reception there and have two-way involvement. May God bless their union with happiness and health. They have both walked a tough road through life and really deserve the happiness that having a loving, understanding and trust worthy partner can bring. 

Frances and Sean, difficult to get photo 
where they are not pulling faces, thank you
Amanda for taking this one for us.

We wish them every happiness in their marriage.

Geeta has a few days holiday now so one of the things I have promised to do with her are some science experiments. Primarily magnets. She already understands how a magnet works but I want to show her some of the things you can do with them. It should prove interesting!

On a very personal note.

Sometimes we are judged to be rich foreigners. This I must stress is by people who don’t know us. They have no idea of the struggle we go through every month to make my pension last, to pay debts, rent, electricity and all the other bills a family faces each month. It’s been a very long time since I was able to take Christine out for a nice meal at a restaurant. For her birthday she was going to get her hair done and maybe dyed….. We had the money put back for her to do this but it has had to be spent elsewhere. There was a young Indian mother, just given birth prematurely, no blankets no nothing. She couldn’t even feed herself or the baby. Christine bought the blankets and food for herself and the baby. We later heard through the village grape vine that both mother and child are doing well. This is the sort of person that God gave me for a wife. She never complains just does her best every day to make our lives as good as she can. She is a remarkable woman. We were talking today and I said to her “the number of people who are alive today because of you and what you have done since we came here is fantastic’. Most people myself included are proud to say if they have contributed to saving one life, Christine has directly saved at least four lives, four people (at least) alive today because of her, yet she never mentions it and if somebody does she rapidly passes over the subject, as I said a remarkable woman. I may not be a rich foreigner with a flash car and lots of money in the bank but I am a multi-millionaire in so many other ways.

We try very hard to live our lives according to gods teaching. We both believe in living a life in faith and accepting whatever God puts before us.

Well that’s about it for this blog, I hope you have enjoyed it.

God bless you and keep you safe,

Chris, Geeta and Christine