Day 15 of Lockdown #COVID - 19

8th April 2020

Diary of a new mother 

My entire series of these 21 days will be based on my experience of being in this lockdown and staying home as a first time mother of a 5 month old baby, Anvay. 

Dear Diary,

Continuing with my discussion about sustainable living, Yd and I have discussed at length as to how we can build a sustainable home. This is his favourite topic of discussion and he wishes that by the time Anvay grows-up he is able to fulfill his dream of having a sustainable home for us. He wants to teach this concept to Anvay from his childhood days so he keeps thinking of small solutions which can lead us closer to our dream. This topic is a never ending one and we have many hopes and dreams about building a sustainable dream home for ourselves. In order to fulfill this dream we took our first baby step by setting up a small balcony kitchen garden in our narrow balcony. Yd took help from My Dream Garden and got the balcony garden set up. We have the following plants- tomato, pudina, coriander, curry leaves, betel leaves, palak, brinjal, lemon, green chilly, karpooravalli/French thyme, rose, money plant and some crotons. The yield from

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tomato/ palak/ brinjal is not too much but it is nice to at least take one step towards growing our own food. We understood the hardships that farmers undergo to get a healthy and abundant yield of their crop. Yd’s morning ritual is to take Anvay and show him the balcony garden and introduce him to all the plants by naming them one by one. We were laughing at the fact that the yield from our tomato plant will be just enough for Anvay once he starts consuming them. 

We also had a borewell motor problem in our apartment and were not able to get water up to the tank. During this lockdown, with shops having very less canned water, we were a little scared about the consequence of having no water at home if the repair work was not done within a day or two. We requested our owner to get the sump motor up and running till the main motor could be rectified. When everyone is homebound, water consumption is also increasing.  

This brings me to an interesting juncture that anyone who would have already built a sustainable home would have very little dependence on external resources during this lockdown. They would mainly need grocery items or medicines. The electricity, water, vegetables/fruits, garbage disposal ( waste treatment) would be taken care of by the systems set-up in their house. Leaving you all with a question here, shouldn’t we all think of solutions to make our life self-sustainable?