Growing Sadhana Forests in India and abroad

On December 19th, 2013 Sadhana Forest will turn 10 years old. Auroville Today spoke with founder Aviram about the project’s activities and progress.

Sadhana Forest started after Aviram, together with his wife Yorit and their daughter Osher, came to Auroville in 2002. They went to the Forest Group in 2003 and were granted about 70 acres of largely barren, unused land to develop. Since then they have been living and working to develop the forest.

They have now covered about 55 of the 70 acres, reclaiming about five acres each year. Aviram explains that a lot of effort goes not only into planting trees, but also into water conservation. In fact, most of the manual work goes into the latter. Without first preparing the land to prevent runoff of rainwater, the trees won’t do well unless a lot of effort is put into irrigating them, which is not cost-effective and not sustainable. With good water conservation, tree planting becomes less important, because there will be a lot of natural regeneration. Sadhana Forest has made hundreds of small bunds around trees, dozens of kilometers of contour bunding, and some large water catchment ponds with the help of Kireet from Gaia’s Garden….. (To read the rest of the article CLICK HERE)