Mary Mary, Quit Contrary - How does your garden grow?
With Sweat and Labor and great endeavor
And tired Mama's in a row
Where I am living for my two years in the Peace Corps everyone has a garden in which they grow all of their fresh fruits, vegetables, and cash crops. The garden is the first and foremost activity for everyone in the village. In fact, there are no Markets where produce is sold in my area. If you want fruits and vegetables, you grow it yourself or get some from your family. The stores in my village offer some shelf stable foods such as rice, ramen, and tinned meats but no produce. Before coming to Vanuatu I have always had a kitchen garden and brought with me fullup seeds of veggies that I like to eat. But now that I know I can't just go to a market to buy food whenever I want, I have to plan ahead on how I'm going to secure food for myself. In the long run, that means planting a garden that is more than a hobby and fun but will produce sufficient quantities of produce to meet my dietary needs.
With that in mind, I decided to plant my garden where everyone else in the town plants theirs instead of making a small kitchen garden next to the house. In my village, which is common throughout the country, the gardens and the houses are in separate areas. Around the houses are free roaming chickens, both free roaming and tied up pigs, and tied up cows. The animals will get into a garden and spoil it. So if you have the space and want to plant close to your house you have to fence it off - and there is no box home improvement store nearby to get the supplies. Fencing materials, like almost everything else, has to be shipped in from Port Vila usually when you or a family member has gone to Port Villa to make the purchase and send it home.
For the most part, houses in the village do not have the space around them to plant a garden. My village layout is mainly houses situated close together with plenty of footpaths between. You need an acre or two of land to plant enough food and cash crops which is why gardens plots are outside of the village.
Also as I plant my garden in the same location as everyone else, using a section of my host Mama's plot, I am learning and using the same techniques as my host family. I am also learning the attitude that most villagers have towards White People. First is the surprise that you're willing, and capable, of making the trek to the gardens which for me is a 2.8km walk into the jungle.
https://youtu.be/6z2J8zJdiAY
Once you get to your site, you have to clear it for planting. This means taking your machete to the undergrowth and hacking it all out. Next you go after the trees by cutting out the bark of the tree marked for removal, piling under brush debris alongside, and burning it. In a few weeks the tree is dead and dried and is then chopped down. The ashes are considered to be good fertilizer and seeds will be sowed there. Once the seedlings are large enough, they are then transplanted to another part of the garden.
While I was assisting with the burning of the underbrush on my first trip to the garden, my host parents kept telling me to go take a break, or to spell. Finally my host mom told me straight out, "Mi blak man, yu waet man. Mi wok had. Yu spell nomo." which means "I'm a black person, you are a white person. I work hard and you just take a break." This attitude is reflected from my neighbors who all find it Amazing! that I would want to and am capable of taking on the onerous task of burning under brush or going all the way to the garden. So now I have something to prove. That I am capable of hard work without falling to pieces. I consider this to be a good second goal opportunity.
What I have chosen to do in regards to starting my seedlings is to stick to what I know has worked for me. Getting replacement seeds is not easy. So I use cardboard egg cartons - which are in good supply here as eggs are occasionally available for sale. When you buy eggs you do so one or two at a time. No one buys a whole dozen eggs. So the store has lots of old dozen egg cartons from prior sales. For some seedlings I plant the egg carton directly into the ground after scoring the bottom to help the roots pass though, but only for those that can handle being close-up to each other like the peas and cucumbers. For my broccoli and carrots, they get transplanted out of the egg carton. I like this method because I keep the seedlings at my house where I can keep an eye on them.
Once you have the trees out of the way and you want to start planting you do not go through the whole area, turn the soil, take out the roots and whatnot, make nice rows, and sow your seeds or transplant your seedlings into the rows. It would be impossible because there are no plows or roto-tillers. Instead you work one spot at a time turning just as much area as you need using your machete, spade, or hoe. In my garden, my host mama gave me some kumala stems which are planted into a small area that is turned using a spade, three cuttings into the area. You then space these out several feet apart. After, she gave me some corn, still on the cob which had been dried, to be planted in areas nearby the kumala. That way, as the corn grows, you pile some new dirt along the base of the stem from the turned area of the kumala circle.
All work in the garden is done by hand, no machines or equipment beyond a few hand tools. The ground of the garden that is newly being cleared is full of roots from all of the plants that had occupied the space, it was a jungle at first. Once you get underneath all of the old roots and stumps the soil is perfect for growing things. Hello, jungle on a volcanic island. Even though the conditions are good for growing from rich soil and plentiful rain, there are dangers to your garden not producing which comes from the Giant African Land Snail, rats, the dry season, and cows.
Cows? Let's start with this one 'cause I've got a story you can't make up. One of my uncles was in his garden and a cow got into it, making a mess of things. The cow wasn't responding to my uncle when he was trying to get this cow out of his garden, and in fact, decided to lay down and take a nap. So of course the thing to do is to fashion yourself a spear out of bamboo and try to kill the cow. I find out this story as all of the Mama's are heading out to the bus (bush, or jungle) to butcher the cow - meat for everyone!! Except, the cow took off into the bus and has not been seen since. Aw - no steak for dinner!
The main threats to your crops are the Giant African Land Snail (GALS) and rats which are invasive species that eats everything. The snail is a world wide pest problem and as I started researching it, it is kind of an incredibly entity. The snail will eat over 500 forms of vegetation and can produce 1,200 new snails per year. Once it enters a new ecosystem it will do some serious damage. And of course, it is hard to kill, trap, or manage in any way. Florida has spent millions of dollars on dealing with their GALS for just one example.
Rats are also into everything. There is a grove of cacao trees along the way to the gardens and almost all of the fruits on the trees have the holes from rats getting into the chocolate seed pods. Sacrilege! Every coconut tree shows their signs with holes in the side of coconuts on the ground at the base of the tree. After the hours and hours of hard labor under hot jungle conditions, you may find the fruits of your labor being consumed by the snails and rats.
The second use for the garden beyond food for your family is cash crops to support your family. Kava is the main industry here. Kava is the Vanuatu drink for ceremony and inebriation. It produces a mild sedative effect, is a bit of muscle relaxant, and when it 'kicks' (when the inebriation kicks in) it has a mild euphoria. Sounds great, right? But actually drinking the stuff is another matter. You can find out more about kava
. The kava drink is made from roots of the kava plant by grinding, mashing, or otherwise infusing water with the essence of the root. When it is sold outside of the country it is sold in a powder form. There is a refinery in Port Villa which will buy up dried kava roots from villages like mine and process it into the powder form. The market prices for goods intended for export are set by the government and are advertised by radio. Kava took over as the main cash crop from kopra (dried coconut meat) based on the market price, which is currently at about 1 kilo of dried root selling at 3,000 vt or $30 US. To compare, Kopra sold at one bag for 2,000-3,000 vt but the market price as since dropped to 1,000-2,000 vt. In addition, making Kopra is super labor intensive where as Kava is much easier to process.
When you are in the garden, due to the jungle growth around you, you cannot see any of your neighbors. So as you toil away and you get the urge, sometimes you just singout a "Ooo!" or "Woo!" to just kind of say - "I'm here, you there?" When you hear someone singout you give a shout back "Ya, I'm here too." This is an extension of the singout that people will do in the village when you anounce yourself as you enter someone's family lot, when you call out for a certain pikinini (child) to be sent your way, that sort of thing.
Ultimately I have to ask myself "How can I apply what I am learning about gardening to the WASH & Nutrition program?" First, I was struck by the fact that there are no water, sanitation, or hygiene facilities at the gardens. If you want a drink while working hard all day you bring water with you or find a green coconut. If you need to take care of business, you use a shallow hole in the ground. If you want to wash your hands, you wait until you get back to the house. And yes, people do eat while at the garden. It's easy to roast some yams or taro for a midday snack. But when I brought this up to my program manager it was pointed out to me that the gardens may be outside of the scope of what I could realistically do. You can not tackle every problem you see. You have to focus on what you were assigned there to do, and in my case, it is to assist the village itself. What I can do, is to enable the Health Committee to be knowledgeable about the issue, to learn from me as I take on those same concerns in the village proper, and for them to then apply it to the gardens. That would be the best result especially in terms of sustainability of program goals.
The next thing I thought about was the nutrition and food security aspect. The Nutrition portion of WASH & Nutrition is to improve community health by way of reducing the instances of Non-Communicable Disease (NCDs) such as diabetes, heart disease, and stroke by improving the overall nutrition intake of the population. The second portion of the Nutrition program is to increase micro-nutrients to prevent early childhood malnutrition and the resulting health problems. The main tool I have for this is a program called Ademup Kolar (add-it-up color) which is trying to change eating habits to make a plate of food which is one half veggies and fruit, a little over 1/4 starches, and a little less that 1/4 protein. So my first thought is, how much does one half of your plate of veggies and fruits represent in terms of time, land space, and energy spent in the garden growing those items? And is it feasible to grow enough fruits and veggies to make half a plate of those items three times a day for every member of your household as well as keep up with the growing, processing, and selling of kava?
Right now I need to do a bunch of research into the food security of the country and figure out how that applies to my area. Is there a way for our gardens to produce more? Can better methods be introduced to increase yield and decrease physical effort? Am I in a position to implement or introduce improvements in gardening? Can people afford to take time away from the cash crop to then put that time into food crops? Or maybe the answer isn't in changing how things are grown at all and the answer to better food security is somewhere else. I just don't know yet. But I think that educating people on healthy food choices may not be enough when that is also asking them to then increase the amount of food that they grow.
So as I go to the garden and storian (story-on, have a conversation) with others about what they grow, as I complete my survey and find out where people get their food and how much they grow for themselves, I will keep thinking about how all of this can be applied to improving the nutrition of the village. And hopefully for myself as well because I too have not been eating a healthy plate for lack of access to clean proteins, healthy starches and fullup veggies and fruits. Man I can't wait for my broccoli to grow!!! And if it dies and doesn't produce, I will be the saddest volunteer you have ever seen. But lets hope for a bumper crop.
I've been taking some videos of my garden adventures -check 'em out !
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