above is a picture of an introvert reaching out to a stranger

Why am I Blogging?

Hi, I am Rid and welcome to our blog. Our being me & my lovely wifey — Evie.

I want to talk about why I am writing publicly, I never wanted to be a Blogger. Honestly, I’m a hardcore introvert, and my idea of good day consists of a long walk, a swim, going to work — and not being in crowded spaces.

So why blog?

Short answer

I write because writing helps me think, I often read a lot and find myself processing things by writing it out in short stories or summaries. And having someone read it will make the thinking process clearer, as now there’s an audience who’s reading it & must understand the content quickly.

Here are a few topics that we’ll be talking about:

1. We’re building a house in India, & this is to document how we went about it and share tips with those seeking to build their own places.

2. Evie & I will be moving into our new house & making it a home that means building a new lifestyle, fresh habits, this is new for us & we want to share our journey.

3. We both read a lot & we want to share snippets from our favorite books.

4. We make tea for a living. & we want to convert our estate to a regenerative agriculture model. We want to share what’s worked for us & what went down the drain.

5. Learning to love what I do for a living didn’t come easy. I had to consciously learn to fall in love with my work & this is a topic that’s rarely discussed — “hey bro, have you fallen in love with your work yet.” Asked no bro to another.

Long answer

Building a new house

Building a new house means you’re building a new life. Many things change — or at-least that’s the intention. But building a house itself is not easy, especially if you live in India where just about everything is up for negotiation; what prices to expect for mason, & what are the rates for putting up an iron roofing VS concrete roofing, what are the advantages of each. Tiles or marbles? That thing we liked on Pinterest, & will the builders be able to get that quality of finishing here. These are the questions we struggled with. Home is for life, getting it right matters.

Evie will be mainly talking about this through videos and pictures.

Making the house a home

in our new place Evie & I will be living differently from how we live now. We live with our family here. We’ll be eating differently, building new daily rituals, & living in our tea estate means we have an opportunity to give a lot more time & attention to it, it’ll be easier to connect with our team on a deeper level.

Evie likes chaos, she wakes up & thinks “today what do I want to do, this seems fun,” then she’ll go do that. For me I like habits. If I don’t have any plans I would happily sit down and relax all day, read books, play video games and then feel shitty-guilty for wasting all day. So as we go about building new life, we’ll talk about what our days look like.

Books snippets

We both read a lot. From Fantasy to books on designing drainage of farms. This was the initial reason to write a blog in the first place. It’s a good place to bring summaries.

Regenerative Tea Farming

Regenerative agriculture means farming in such a way that the quality of the soil improves every single year. This is different from contemporary farming or even organic farming as they deplete the soil & the plants depend on fertilizers & pesticides. Organic farming is similar as in they still use pesticides & fertilizers it’s just that they have the prefix “organic” — organic fertilizers & organic pesticides. Don’t get me wrong — going organic is a HUGE improvement over chemical based farming, but it’s not enough. If you don’t need organic fertilizers to grow trees in a forest, you shouldn’t need NPK or Urea to make sure the yield is sufficient; the soil has everything needed to keep a forest running for millenia. Without any loss in “yield”, fertility or debilitating pest attack. Where have we gone wrong with our soil health?

Regenerative agriculture is the answer to this, it improves soil health and transforms your soil into forest soil. Luckily for us, the most crucial element to measure soil health is also the simplest to measure — Carbon. Coal is pure carbon, so the darker the soil, the richer it is. And the added awesomeness is that we are taking CO2 from the air and putting it back into the soil — reversing global warming — and making a nice profit while at it. We will get deeper into how to do that in a few later posts.

We all know that “modern agriculture” is bad for the environment, but few know that it releases more CO2 in the air than it absorbs. What?! Growing plants is causing more CO2, don’t they breathe CO2 and release Oxygen? Sadly the modern part is demon here — the pesticides, fertilizers, weed-poisons; there are even chemicals to make the fruit grow bigger, sweeter, redder — they all consume a lot of energy and heat, and all of that goes into the soil, increasing carbon cost and making the soil toxic. On Earth we are all Carbon Based Lifeforms, that means every single cell in the body of every living thing has carbon in it, whether its an you or me, or a strawberry, rice, mushroom, earthworm or a blade of grass; a goat that eats the grass; every single cell, if its alive, it has got Carbon in it. So taking out the Carbon from the CO2 and putting it in the soil means you’ve more life in the soil.

The general practice followed by 90% of agricultural estates today degrades the soil, notice the color — the darker a soil the better, pale white soil is bad. We have been improving the quality of our soil, making it richer and darker with every passing year. And we want to share all our knowledge and experiments free of cost, with the hope that you can capture carbon in your soil, fight global warming and make money while doing all that. Ah a side-effect is your soil will become like forest soil, so no more pests, weed, dryness.

Learning to fall in Love with your Work

This is a topic I find difficult to discuss, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. When I first came back from Singapore, I hated tea — and for a good reason, a huge portion of people in the tea industry like to complain about how bleak the future is and that the “good old days” are long gone. Now being a sane person, getting into an industry that’s got a bad future ahead seemed like a really bad idea. Not to mention that for me life took a big turn — from Singapore, where life is as fast it as comes to Golaghat where we still have the occasional bullock carts is a big change. Its almost like time traveling.

So after moping about for a bit I realized that I have 2 choices, either go through the time here like a bad day-dream until I find an alternative somewhere else. Or make the most of it and figure out how to enjoy this quieter way of life, while getting good at making tea.

I hope this blog will help you, whether you’re building a new house, struggling with finding joy in your work. Whether you are a fellow tea grower trying to make your farm better. And lastly, I am hoping this will help me be a better writer and exchange ideas with you.

Thank you for reading our blog — evienrid.com