Pebble Garden

Transforming an Eroded Land– Nature Shows the Way

Pebble Garden is an eco-restoration effort that has completely transformed a severely eroded land - stripped of all vegetation and topsoil by past deforestation – into a thriving biodiverse forest and a productive seed conservation and food garden.

Acreage: 8 Acres | Stewards: Bernard and Deepika

Since 1994, Bernard and Deepika have worked at Pebble Garden hands-on, using absolutely no external inputs of soil, biomass or compost and achieved this transformation by simple powerful methods based on observing and replicating natural processes. The primary method has been to identify and use select pioneer species to produce biomass insitu and then recycle this biomass in various creative ways to enable plant growth.

Maintaining Varietal Purity - Seed Conservation Methods at Pebble Garden

What We Do

The Garden area of a 1000 sq m was created by an intensive process in which soil literally had to be ‘built’ to create raised beds. These beds support a plant collection of more than 100 useful plants ideal for Home Gardens. These include rare and outstanding traditional varieties of vegetables from across India, forgotted indigenous tubers, neglected fruits, perennial and wild leafy greens, medicinal herbs and flowers.

'A Garden for Everyone’ is an outreach initiative to share these hardy plant varieties, with home gardeners and farmers throughout India. They are shared within known organic farmers’ collectives via organic fairs, seed melas and through personal contacts and references and local farmers on request.

Aspirant farmers, students and visitors on open days every Saturday get to learn the Soil Regeneration practices and Seed conservation methods used at Pebble Garden. As part of the traditional seed revival movement in India, seed workshops and training programmes and the book “Reviving Vegetable Diversity” out in 6 Indian languages have contributed to a collective effort to revive our agricultural heritage.

The forest area of Pebble Garden has a heritage grove of ancient Diospyros melanoxylon (Karingali), outstanding regeneration of Red Sanders. Located on the top of the Usteri watershed, the forest is indispensible to rebuilding soil and fertility.

A place of continuous learning, Pebble Garden, also has a charcoal/wood vinegar production plant and conducts research on terra preta.

A tour is offered every Saturday at 10:30am.