A Self-Sufficient Life at Elements

At Elements, our dream is to inspire everyone to follow their passion, to find their freedom and to be inspired by all the beautiful ‘elements’ in our beautiful place. Living in a little village named Kappalady in tropical Sri Lanka, our aim is to create a warm, comforting hub where people from across the world come over, and connect with each other. Every single day, we learn little things about a self-sufficient, eco-conscious living. And we hope, our guests, even for a little time, be inspired by our self-sufficient initiatives at Elements.

A few months ago, in a warm tropical summer in Sri Lanka, we restarted our little garden at Elements. Being closer to the ocean, not many vegetables and fruits easily grow on this soil, so we had to nurture the soil before it was ready for cultivation. At Elements, we have our compost bin. Once it was done, we started small vegetable beds. While we grew vegetables such as chili, luffa and cucumber which are easily grown in the tropical climate, we also cultivated tomatoes, onions and a plenty of Sri Lankan herbs and spices.

The plants were watered and nurtured daily by our in-house staff. Slowly, little buds started appearing. Many vegetable plants were finally old enough to blossom freely. Gardening is not only about self-sufficient living or having your own food, it’s also a therapy to your soul. A few weeks later arrived the results. Imagine seeing the first few tomatoes with a slight tinge of red on top? Your first few pumpkins wicked-smiling at you? There are the little things we love.

We also have 600 coconut trees, and about 100 of them are cultivated for self-supply purposes. We had also grown a bunch of plantains and pomegranate trees, which take longer to bear fruit. They are also hard to keep away from our in-house squirrel and bird friends. A quick, simple way to protect them is to cover them with your single-use plastic bags which otherwise may end up in the waste bin. Single-use plastic is only single-use if you don’t repurpose them. Avoiding single use plastic is the best method, but if you face occasions you are unable to avoid plastic, repurpose them for something else. Dumping them right away isn’t sustainable.

Of course, the harvest isn’t quite enough to sustain our resort everyday with a number of guests heading from all over the globe. We cover shortages from our village. We directly buy vegetables and fruits from village households, so we can directly contribute to their livelihood. Our seafood comes daily from the village fishmongers, too.

Apart from this, last month, we also adopted a two new friends. Meet Johann and Walter, who are the new resident members.