So to start with I had to construct a vermibed. I began with the tank itself which was to be of brick. We had a labourer doing some odd jobs at that time at our house and he said he knew a bit about how to cement bricks together, so he and I constructed this 3' by 2' by 4' high tank of bricks. We mixed cement and sand in some rough proportion with water. Within a day we had the bricks placed one over the other with the cement mixture holding it all together. This was easy stuff I thought as I wrote out my record of how many bricks and the quantity of cement and sand we had used to construct the bed.
Next day, I dutifully wet the construction twice as instructed in order to have the cement set. Imagine my shock when on the third day I found that our entire tank was shaking and ready to collapse. I rushed off next door to my neighbour Guru who took one look at the tank and told me that we would have to take down the whole thing and start from scratch again. Apparently we had not used the right proportion of cement and sand mixture, or laid the bricks right. Nor had we laid any foundation for the structure. Masonry was not that simple, I realized.
I immediately got down to carefully removing each brick without damaging it as the bricks were to be re-used. Guru, the expert mason, then came over to construct the tank, and I helped. In fact, we built two tanks that day: one large and one medium. I then prepared the vermipits and Yesu, our maid, was instructed to henceforth put all the household wastes (except paper and plastic) into the pits, alternating between the different ones.
We also started vermiculture in a wooden crate. Eventually the crate was used as a seed bed and a fine crop of jackfruit seedlings was raised in the box. The other two vermipits (of brick) function well, and all our household waste is processed by the earthworms.
At the end of February, I was eager and ready to set out again. Although some contacts for the study of bee-keeping had been made by my dad, I was personally not very much interested in the subject. Crocs, snakes and the wild had gripped me and I was longing to get back to the Croc Bank.
I also had another totally unrelated and unconnected programme that I wanted to accomplish, namely to improve my eyesight by taking a course on eye care and learning eye exercises at the Eye Clinic at the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.