Physics teacher telescopes sustainable practices into twenty square feet

Lakshmi Periakaruppan also shares the experience of living green with her neighbours

Lakshmi Periakaruppan latches on to a sustainability formula, turning it over and over again in the mind just the way a monk would, a mantra. The evidence: It often slips into her conversation.

The simple reason for her to persist with the idea is that it has worked gloriously for her, turning a poky little service area at her home in Saligramam into a huge self-sustaining medicinal cabinet, and also something of a food basket. It is in fact not a less-known formula. It is: “Eat, Grow Repeat”. Grow bags wait for the stem of anything that has gone into her cooking.

“I would cut off the stem and grow it.” And that is how she has an adequate supply of greens, particularly Ceylon pasalai keerai and red ponnaganni keerai. Besides, the grow bags also merrily hold a few medicinal herbs: Karpuravalli, thooduvalai and vallarai among them.

The grow bags promote as much sustainability below as they do above. The peels and other organic discards from the kitchen are composted in bins, again placed in that 20 sq.ft. space. The compost grows the herbs and the greens. Though Lakshmi cannot back it up with scientific proof, she believes the bio-enzymes she makes have also been supporting the growth of these plants. “Certain plants cannot tolerate the sprinkling of bio-enzymes on their leaves and stems, even when these bio-enzymes are diluted. As I do not know which plants these are, I take the safe route of sprinkling the diluted bio enzymes (made with peels of citrus fruit varieties) on the soil in the grow bags. I did it just for experimentation, and I could see this is helping the plants, as many a time, after treating the soil to a sprinkle of bio-enzymes, plants that were not budding before had budded,” she explains.

A physics teacher with Chettinad Vidyashram, Lakshmi is fascinated with the idea of closing the loop by making use of all the organic waste. She finds the process of composting cathartic and probably even epiphanous, going by how she describes it.

“One cannot express the happiness that results from looking at the ‘black gold’ and feeling it in one’s fingers. What you throw away are the peels and remains of vegetables and what you get back is so earth-smelling. When you touch that, you actually feel so happy,” she says.

What is remarkable about Lakshmi’s experience is that she is trying to share it with others in the neighbourhood.