For many people, the isolation that the lockdown brought with it, created a need for community, and a reconnection to nature.

Questions such as ‘where does our food come from?’ became very real, and with that a sense of answerability too. The response to this for Solitude Farm was to continue with renewed vigor what we’d already undertaken over many, many years – a project to create ‘community gardens’. This had been intended to inspire people to grow their own food and adopt for themselves this narrative of finding a Road Back to Nature, through what food grows locally.

With that in mind, we went around the Auroville communities and created collective gardens. The result of this over the period of a year was that people became quite familiar with local plants and their various uses, like the ‘Mushroom Spinach’, green Papaya, Banana flower, Banana stem or Hibiscus and Butterfly Pea flowers. They also gained confidence in cultivating vegetables such as Spring Onions, Lady’s Fingers, Winged Beans, Radish, brinjal, tomato etc..

The communal efforts had progressed to such an extent that when the project had completed its first year, and we held a meeting to determine how we would continue in the following year, participants shared a wide diversity of seeds they had saved, significant proof that real learning had taken place!

In some communities people had been living collectively, albeit without interacting very much with one another beyond daily greetings. For many such individuals, the community garden project had thus developed into a very real interaction, based on a very real need – the most common and basic one in fact, which is food. To collectively participate in addressing that common need inadvertently nurtured friendships, understanding and compassion. People even started to cook and eat together.

To simply start a little garden by yourself and invite one’s neighbors and friends to participate, even once or twice a week, has a beautiful potential to create a harmonious society with true collective values.