Fagunia

05/05/2024

A few of this year’s summer blooms at ! 🌸🌺🌼🌷🌺🪻💐🌹

www.fagunia.com

17/04/2024

We have been focusing on our herb garden and trying to increase the variety and yield from it. We just harvested a lot of them. They will now be dried to increase their shelf life. The strawberries that we also harvested from our strawberry patch got polished off in no time :)

www.fagunia.com

02/04/2024

As the summer ahead looks to be a long hot one this year, water is on everyone’s mind these days. It has been on our mind as well for the last couple of years to increase water storage for the farm. With an ever increasing variability in weather patterns that we have been observing over the last few years, we wanted to enhance our ability to tackle climate change related water risks and build our climate resilience to tide over extended dry periods.

As part of our permaculture practice, we have been trying to slow down, store in the soil and efficiently distribute and use the water we get from rainfall and from our supply with the least amount of loss. But surface storage of water was something we had been missing out on due to the difficulty, costs and limited space available for making water storage structures in the mountains. We finally managed to get this surface water tank made on a portion of our farm using a relatively low tech, simpler approach, which got completed today!

Now that the tank is ready, we will test it out over this summer and if it manages to work well for our needs, we also plan to channel, filter and collect rain water in it going forward, take steps to reduce evaporation loss from it and maybe even add additional similar water storage options if needed.

Read more: https://fagunia.com/permaculture-farm/

31/03/2024

We love it when guests take over our kitchen. Our current guest Ritu made a delectable Khow Suey, using only the ingredients available at our home and on our farm. We gorged ourselves silly! Thank you Ritu for whipping up such a delicious meal.

22/03/2024

So happy to be featured by Condé Nast Traveller India!

Fagunia is a three-bedroom homestay in a remote part of Uttarakhand where you won’t find cars or crowds

18/03/2024

We love it when our guests come back to stay with us, again and again. We were super happy to host Radhika for the fourth time this weekend. Thank you so much Radhika for trusting us every time with your vacations. We especially loved hosting you this time with your childhood friend Sheena. Thank you for choosing us to celebrate 45 years of your friendship!

12/01/2024

🍙 It’s been almost exactly a year since we made our wood fired dome pizza oven by ourselves.

🍕 We have used this time to up our pizza game by learning the art of making good Neapolitan pizzas. From making the pizza base freshly at home along with the sauce and sourcing the best possible cheese and toppings to controlling the wood fire burn, dome oven temperatures and cooking times, it was a lot of learning by doing.

👩🏼‍🍳 We have also loved sharing our joy of making these homemade pizzas with our guests through our signature Fagunia Experience. We had a lot of fun churning out pizzas for them and also getting everyone, young and old, in on the pizza making by adding their favourite toppings.

🎞️ Here’s a photo dump of some of the pizza action that we have been up to over the last year.

🍞 And oh, we utilise the residual heat of the oven after the pizzas are made to bake our homemade bread. Waste not that heat!

🧀 Our aim for the next year is to perfect the art of making our own mozzarella cheese fresh at home.

🌟 Join us on our pizza adventures by opting for a special wood fired pizza making Fagunia Experience during your next stay with us.

🙋 TAG that pizza lover friend of yours in the comments below!

For more info: https://fagunia.com

01/01/2024

To new beginnings. To another year filled with beautiful memories with people you love and cherish. To making time for slow, thoughtful travel to open our minds and hearts to discover our true selves. From all of us, a very Happy 2024 to all of you!

26/11/2023

On popular demand by our guests, adding another product to our range of farm fresh : Spicy Chilli Pickle made at home by from our Himalayan farm grown, organic chillies using a family heirloom recipe.

We initially made this pickle last year for personal and use. The overwhelming love we received for it from our guests motivated us to offer it as a small batch, microlot product that guests can take back home.

On your next stay with us, do explore our vibrant Fagunia Microlots shelf with diverse farm fresh, homemade and handmade products from local self help groups for some excellent gifting ideas for your friends and family for the holiday season.

11/11/2023

Two years back, we started making Aipan for Diwali. A traditional art form of Uttarakhand, Aipan is made for special occasions to bring good luck and fortune.
While these days, you can buy Aipan motifs off the shelf, we make our Aipan in the traditional way by hand, using geru mitti and wet rice. The ephemeral nature of these natural materials makes our Aipan exist only for some time before they gently fade away. This way, we look forward every year to create new Aipan. After all, that is one function of tradition, to repeat and keep alive meaningful markers that connect us a culture. So here it is our Aipan wall for this year, created by .

31/10/2023

Ever since we began, the cuisine at has been an eclectic blend of Pahadi and Andhra cuisines with some North Indian influences. For long, we have been experimenting behind the scenes to offer authentic, soft, and freshly cooked fluffy idlis with homemade podis, chutneys, sambar and filter coffee. And we are happy to share that we are finally ready to offer this Andhra style idli breakfast to our guests.

Come, stay with us to start your day in the best possible way with a piping hot South Indian breakfast 😀. For latest availability, please check: https://fagunia.com

10/10/2023

Simply, a beautiful day.

https://fagunia.com

07/09/2023

Freshest and quickest experience, only at . Our brinjal crop is ready for harvest, today we harvested the first few and made a delicious Baingan Ka Bharta (Roasted eggplant mash).

The joy of cooking and eating something harvested fresh from the farm just elevates the entire experience.
https://fagunia.com/permaculture-farm/

04/09/2023

Loving the post monsoon weather drama at ! We can stare at the magnificent performance put on every day by the ever changing cloudscapes all day long.

Come, stay with us at to experience this heavenly show first hand. To book, call or WhatsApp us on +91 85952 19857 or check latest availability on www.fagunia.com

24/08/2023

One thing we have been slowly doing of late is introducing farm activities to interested children of our guests. It is a special joy to see their infectious ethusiasm on our farm!

Shiv (in the photo) is one such bundle of energy. We were hosting him with his family for the third time. We have literally seen him grow up with each trip, right from when we first hosted him as a cute toddler. Shiv, on this latest trip loved going on to our farm, and very eagerly helped us in harvesting some of our peas crop too! Later, he enjoyed eating the fresh peas, both in raw and cooked form 😀.

Read more about our farm: https://fagunia.com/permaculture-farm/

07/08/2023

A dreamscape that the monsoon season painted at .

27/07/2023

Monsoon means moth season at Fagunia. We get to see an amazing variety, from tiny to huge moths, during this season. And this year, we are thrilled to bits to have our first sightings of the fascinating Owl or Brahmin Moth and the dazzling Golden Emperor Moth. What gorgeous beauties they are!

Moths are extremely important pollinators, as important as bees and butterflies, if not more. They help with pollination in the night. New evidence indicates that many plants are dependent on night pollination by moths. As they are mostly active at night, moths are not well studied unlike day pollinators, and therefore we still know very little about their total number, variety of species, their life and the detailed role they play in the ecosystem.
https://fagunia.com

17/07/2023

Happy Harela! Harela is a festival celebrated in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand. About ten days prior to the festival day, seeds of seven different kinds of grain are mixed and sown. On the day of the festival, the yellow colored seedlings are carried to a local deity’s temple, worshipper and celebrated.
Harela traditionally marked the start of the sowing season in the mountains and is celebrated in the hope of a prosperous harvest. The festival probably also allowed farmers to test the quality of their seeds before the sowing season began.

13/07/2023

Throwback to our recent Fagunia Experiences where we introduced the joys of baking fresh bread to some of our guests. Lots of learning and fun!

Do consider signing up for a bespoke Fagunia Experience during your next stay with us. Read more and sign up: https://fagunia.com/fagunia-experiences/

29/06/2023

Excited to share a guest article authored for our blog by Shikha Khandelwal, founder of Pawcation India, on 5 pet friendly homestays in Nainital district. Do click on the link below to check out all the homestays featured by Shikha in the article. All these homestays love to host pets and are also unique in their own ways.

Thank you Shikha for agreeing to author this article, which hopefully will be a useful resource for all pet parents.
https://fagunia.com/pawsome-getaways-5-pet-friendly-homestays-in-nainital/

24/06/2023

Start of the spectacular monsoon sunset season!

08/06/2023

Super excited to launch our newest Fagunia Experience! Our guests at can now opt for our Wood Fired Oven Pizza Experience and enjoy delicious Neopolitan style thin crust pizzas during their stay!

The pizzas will be baked in our handmade oven that was made all in-house by us and our friends with a lot of love and labour. We cannot wait to share our love for homemade wood fired pizzas with our resident guests. For more details and how to opt for this Fagunia Experience: https://fagunia.com/fagunia-experiences

05/06/2023

Happy ! Here’s a quick recap of some of the ecofriendly efforts we have adopted while making and running .
⛰️ During construction, we followed and used the already existing contours/slopes of our site and did not cut any new slopes to reduce building pressure on the mountain slopes.
🪨 Almost all of the stone and most of the wood used in making the home was recycled or up cycled from the earlier pre-existing house at the site or sourced from our land itself. To enable this reuse, we didn’t change the layout of the home.
🛏️ The majority of the furniture in the home is refurbished and antique.
💦 We kept landscaping to a minimum and used only local grass for our garden to reduce watering and not use any chemical fertilizers.
🏡 We kept the size of the rooms compact to retain warmth and reduce energy usage for heating.
☀️ Solar water heating, solar power backup and LED lighting reduce our electricity consumption. We also do not use fuel burning generators for power backup.
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♻️ A recharging soak pit helps in on site treatment of our grey water. Our black water (sewage) waste is safely and sustainably decomposed through a recycling twin pit system onsite that converts sewage into natural fertilizer for eventual use on our farm.
🥗 Our wet waste is composted, we reduce our plastic use and safely incinerate in an on-site closed incinerator whatever plastic waste we generate. We also encourage our guests to take back any single use plastic they bring with them.
🌏 We hope to build on our efforts to live and host sustainably and thank all of our guests for their support and understanding towards that.
📚 In case you are interested in reading more about how we went about making an ecofriendly home in the mountains, do read the article on our blog through the link below:

https://fagunia.com/building-an-eco-friendly-home-in-the-himalayas/

31/05/2023

It’s raining onions here! We have started harvesting our onion crop and thankfully it has been a bumper crop. Some of our guests also got in on the harvesting action!

Fully organic. Mountain onions. Grown chemical and pesticide free with only cow dung as our soil enhancer.

Given the amount that we have harvested we have had to make extra storage to make them last for our use. We are also hoping to sun dry some of the crop and make onion powder and sun dried slices for different uses in our cooking.

In addition, we are also thinking of selling some of our produce directly to interested folks in Delhi NCR. DM us if you are interested and we will work out the logistics so that you can also partake in the goodness of our farm fresh, organic onions.
https://fagunia.com

25/05/2023

Anil’s parents are visiting us and we are making the most of their time here by learning to make family recipes of authentic coastal Andhra food. Hoping to add a few of them to our menu soon. Today, we made some Karivepaku Pachadi (Curry Leaf Chutney), using fresh wild karipatta that grows in the forest around us. The Pachadi is delicious to eat with some rice and ghee. And it is thought to be good for the tummy too.

Fun fact: In our village, the curry leaf is called junglee ghas and no one here eats or uses it as they feel it has a bad smell :)

12/05/2023

Glimpses of our sun drenched, semi-al fresco dining area with custom made biergarten style seating. Here’s how you can while away the time between meals in this chilled out space during your next stay with us:

🎯 Have a darts championship with our dart board. Psst, it is not as easy as it looks to hit the bulls eye!

📚 Lose yourself in a good book from our eclectic and wide ranging book collection.

⛰️ Stare all day at the stunning mountain and forest vistas around.

🐦 Identify the many beautiful birds that visit our fruit trees and kitchen garden using our handy bird identification books.

☕️ Try out our curated selection of fine teas and a french press coffee from our all day DIY tea-coffee station.

♟️ Relive happy childhood memories by playing one of our many board games like poker, chess, carrom, codenames and more from our game shelf.

👉 Book your stay: fagunia.com
☎️ Call/WhatsApp: 85952 19857

25/04/2023

Photodump from our latest Fagunia Experience! took our guests Sonal and Aashish through the intricacies of baking bread at home. Loads of learning. Lots of fun. And at the end of the experience, two beautiful loaves of whole wheat and herbed bread were the happy result. Swipe left to see all the baking action. Sign up for a special Fagunia Experience on your next trip to Fagunia. For more info: https://fagunia.com/fagunia-experiences/

22/04/2023

Eid Mubarak to all of you from all of us! May this bring joy, hope and prosperity for you and your loved ones.

11/04/2023

We recently made our first Mandala Garden! Made with a keyhole design, we sited this garden at the beginning of our work-in-progress multi-layered food forest. The garden is meant to inspire us on our journey as well as warmly welcome guests to . Currently, the mandala garden is home to a variety of herbs like marjoram, celery, oregano, thyme, sage, lemon balm, peppermint, parsley, mint, coriander, rosemary, chives, basil as well as other plants such as strawberry and beans. At the centre is a small water feature, more about this in the next post. On your next stay with us, ask us for a tour of our farm and our permaculture plans. We will be happy to take you around.
Read more: https://fagunia.com/permaculture-farm/