First Phase Completed on 30th August

Me and tree completed its first phase of planting big saplings on the barren mountain of pedhya cha bhairoba as mentioned in the previous post.We were supposed to plant 40 saplings but Aloysius Nadar provided his trax for transportation of saplings from the government nursery to foothill of the mountain so we saved on the amount of Rs.250/- and that helped us add 10 more saplings.

(left to right) Aloysius Nadar and Gautam Firodiya

Plantation wasn't easy as we thought,carrying the saplings from the foothill to the top,sapped our energies.Initially we were only six guys Gautam Firodiya,Aloysius Nadar,Sagar Shinde,Dattaray Shinde(this guy had come from malgaon some 40 km from satara),Chetan Nalawade and me,so it took almost 10 trips for each of us to carry the saplings and tools to the mountain top from the foot.

(left to right) Gautam Firodiya,Chetan Nalawade,Aloysius Nadar,Dattaraj Shinde and Pushkar Firodiya

We had hired a labour to dig pits 1.5 X 1 ft for planting in the saplings at the rate of Rs.5/- per hole,this turned to be a bad bargain:initially we assumed that we could make in atleast 20 pits by ourselves and so we would need to pay him only Rs.150/- for remaining 30 which would be Rs.50/- less than his entire day wage of Rs.200/- but we were physically exhausted by our trips uphill and he had to dig all 50 so we ended up paying him Rs.250/- that was Rs.50/- more than his one day labour charge.But we have noted this and will not repeat the mistake next time :)

The first sapling planted

Some how after regrouping our energies we started planting the sapling but after 32nd sapling we had given up succumbing to the exhaustion and decided to plant remaining the next day .This exhaustion could have overcomed if we would had carried some refreshment and water bottles(this was another thing worth noting)
But then Harshad Firodiya,Ajay Borate and Vishwas Kunwar joined us and helped us achieving our target of planting the remaining 18 saplings,they did get refreshments and water for us.Even the group of the senior citizens joined by the end of it and everything ended as planed




The senior citizen group who are going to take care of the plantation



This is how the mounatin looked on 30th August 2009