Currently residing in Cochin, Annie started uploading videos regularly on Youtube from 2015 bolstered by the encouraging comments of the viewers. Annie says that with each new video she makes, she feels the same kind of excitement and happiness she did when she started.

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It was the fear of losing the pictures and videos of her precious garden that made Annie Yujin start a Youtube channel. Her need for cataloguing the growth of the 1-acre home garden in Kerala and sharing its progress with a larger audience further made her commit to the channel.

A native of Edakkunnu in Angamaly, the Economics graduate created her first YouTube account—Krishi Lokam in 2012. It was not long before Annie became a celebrity YouTube content creator.

With over three lakh subscribers and over two crore views, Annie now earns a lakh a month from the channel! While conversing with Annie, her passion for gardening and her channel was palpable.

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“I am very passionate about gardening and that is why I started showcasing my own home garden to people. It was all easy in the beginning since it did not involve me speaking into the camera, but slowly I started doing that as well, and it helped me emerge from being a very shy person to someone who felt reasonably confident of facing a camera,” she tells me.

Currently residing in Cochin, Annie started uploading videos regularly on Youtube from 2015 bolstered by encouraging comments from the viewers. Annie says that with each new video she makes, she feels the same kind of excitement and happiness she did when she started.

Her first video on her channel was about the benefits of guava and the video titled ‘Guava in Kerala Home’ got her about 8,500 views and eight comments. I then looked up her most recent video titled ‘Peanut Butter fruit’, which, within a day of being posted, has 7,500 garnered views and 31 comments.

Looking back, Annie says, “If you look at the first few videos, they are all very amateurish, I did not have any idea about any technique. Over the years all that has changed and with the help of my husband Stephan, I am able to make much better content now.”

So what does Annie grow in her one-acre garden? She says, “We have various kinds of fruit trees – sapota (chikku), mango, guava, peanut butter fruit, passion fruit, various kinds of jackfruits, litchi, banana. We also grow vegetables like bitter gourd, snake gourd, tomato, cucumber, brinjal, and carrots (seasonal). Besides all this we also grow aloe vera and nutmeg.”

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So far Annie has not thought of turning any of this into a commercial venture and does it only as a pet project but the videos of her garden that she painstakingly creates has many admirers on Youtube which earns a lakh a month.

“Now that my subscriber base has increased, with each click and advertisement that is placed on the videos I earn money. There are some months in which I make Rs 1 lakh and sometimes a little more, it all depends on the traffic and the likeability of the videos I make. I have noticed that Decembers are usually good and the traffic increases at that time.”

To understand the kind of content Annie puts up on her channel, I spent some time watching videos. The one on how to select a rose plant from a nursery was particularly interesting.

In the video, she says that before buying a rose plant it is essential that we find out what type of rose plant it is, what the size of the flowers will be, and whether the flowers have any smell. She goes on to talk about the health of the plant and urges us to spend sometime at the nursery before buying the plant. She also shares tips on how to check if the soil is good for plant growth.

In another video posted almost a year ago, Annie explains to her viewers how one can make organic pesticides at home. Many of her videos also show her interact with local farmers trying to understand the best practises they follow. Annie’s well of patience is very clear in the way she attends to the minutest of details in her videos and her replies to the queries in the comments section on her YouTube channel.

Spurred by the response this channel received, she also started another channel called Tips For Happy Life.

If you would like to watch and learn from her videos, you can click here to subscribe.

(Edited by Saiqua Sultan)

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