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The annual temple festival puja concluded with final abhishekam yesterday, which was livestreamed. We also took still photos of the preparatory homas to energize the main kumbha water for Mahalingeshvara and smaller kumbhas representing various shaktis and Siva’s five-fold powers of Isana, Tatpurusha, Aghora, Vamadeva and Sadyojata.

Jai Ganesha!

Today, April 1st, we officially began the Samvatsara Puja, starting with the Krittika Homa in the morning. In the afternoon, the Samvatsara Homa commenced in the presence of Satguru. Tomorrow is the final day, and we will be live-streaming the concluding puja. The link above is for everyone to click and join. Aum.

Newly delivered palm tree material

The ever-accumulating main piles

The longer the material stays in a pile, the more it breaks down into rich dark soil

Various plantings recently covered with mulch

Probably not!

Mulch is defined as “material (such as decaying leaves, bark, or compost) spread around or over a plant to enrich or insulate the soil.” Much of our monastery land has a small layer of topsoil and then hard clay underneath, so enriching it is very helpful. Though we have a large property, even if we collected up all the leaves and chewed up all the fallen branches (which would be a huge job), it would barely make a dent in our needs for mulch. As we’ve interacted with tree trimming companies over the years, a great boon came our way, whereby nowadays all the companies who are trimming trees in our general vicinity will deliver the ground-up material to us for free. If they took the material to a county refuse transfer station they would have to pay a fee, so it’s a great deal for them too.

Besides keeping our vegetable garden beds and fruit trees covered which you’ve seen in the past, mulch is used for many plantings on the grounds, basically as much as we have time to transport.

For decades we’ve had a lone teak tree in the far corner of the property, but it is shaded out by many nearby trees. Later we began a plantation across the Wailua River on the leased land we call Himalayan Acres. Then, one or two years ago the Siddhidata Kulam planted a row along the road near their new building. These, along with the adjacent banana trees will provide a noise and visual buffer between us and neighbors in the ensuing years. Many of these teak trees are now about 15 feet tall and growing fast.