THE GARDEN.doc

THE GARDEN - BLOG BLONG MAMA VIVIENNE

 

We now have a vege garden up and running (well, maybe only walking pace so far). It’s only taken 3 months! It is understandable really that it has taken so long. When we first arrived we were too shell shocked by the heat to even consider going outside to do anything as physical as digging a garden. Also we didn’t think that we would be staying in our present house for more than a couple of months, so it didn’t seem sensible to put any effort into establishing a garden near this house if we would soon be shifting to the other side of the campus, or even further away to Navota Farm.       So anyway, it has cooled off a bit, mainly in the evenings, but we can cope with a bit more physical activity now if we pick our times and shady spots. In addition we have been told that we will be staying in this house until at least the middle of the year.

          Now the need for a garden is more than just the need for a hobby, or the need for physical exercise, as it may have been in NZ. Here we are struggling to keep up with our families vege needs on a day to day basis, so the need is more significant. We get into town once a week to do grocery shopping and at this time we also go to the local open air fruit and vege market. The ‘grocery’ shop is not a supermarket as we know them in NZ. It, like most of the shops in Luganville, is owned by Chinese, and has a real variety of stock for sale from pots to spear fishing gear to sewing supplies, clothing, sugar and beer. The one that we use for most of our food buying has the best selection available here in its 3 aisles of foodstuffs. Most of it is from Australia, and some from Asia. There is a small amount of imported fruit and veges. We buy onions, garlic, and occasionally potatoes and carrots if they look reasonable. We also sometimes buy frozen peas, but our freezer space is very limited.

          The rest of our fruit and veges come from the market and that varies lots from week to week. We can usually, but not always, get spring onions, small green peppers, cucumber, Chinese cabbage, kumara, avocado, tough beans, corn (not sweet, maybe maize) bananas, pawpaw, oranges, mandarins, lemon/limes, grapefruit, coconuts, as well as veges that we don’t want to buy like kava roots, manioc, taro, huge yams, cooking bananas and banana leaves, island cabbage (we buy it sometimes - it is similar to silver beet) and things that we have no idea what they are. Sometimes if we are really lucky we can get lettuces and small tomatoes. Today for the first time I saw and bought a pumpkin. When I write the veges in a list like that it actually sounds like a lot of variety, but really it isn’t and we can only buy enough to last us a few days at most. We have a small fridge and that enables us to keep a few things fresh like peppers and lettuce if we can get it. Otherwise nothing stays fresh very long.

          The second opportunity that we have for buying fresh stuff is at the weekly Saturday market held not too far from the college here. The college usually sends its bus down to the market for the students and staff to buy supplies. It is much smaller than the town market and what’s available varies heaps in both quantity and variety from week to week. The cost of the fresh produce is generally very reasonable.

          So we were very keen to supplement our diet with fresh veges from our own garden, and particularly to grow the salad type veges that we are really missing. The cost isn’t so significant but it will also help to keep our food bill down as the rest of the grocery items are quite expensive.

          Where do you start in establishing a garden here? Well, all the staff and students are allocated space to have as gardens. This is to help them financially as many students have little or no money in reserve, and having a garden reduces their dependence on bought goods like rice and flour. Most of the garden land is down the road a bit on Navota Farm land and is used for growing the bulky things like taro and manioc. Some land in the college grounds has also been ploughed up for use by the students this year and has just this week been planted in a variety of seeds provided by the college. I complain about our limited food availability but really when I compare what we have to what the students live on - often just bread at breakfast, and rice with a tiny amount of tinned fish for other meals - what have I to complain about? This is the single students who eat together and roster the cooking I am meaning. The couples and families do their own thing, mostly in their outside “bush kitchens”.

          Our allocated garden space is not far from our back door. Anything that is not actively kept tidy very quickly begins to revert to jungle here, so this piece of garden didn’t look much like a garden, except for the wildling taro and manioc plants, grown up from small pieces of tuber left in the ground. There are also some pineapples and the odd banana, lemon, coconut, and pawpaw trees. These are actually dotted all over the campus, apparently wherever they have come up. All the students do various duties around campus, including most of the ground maintenance and lawn mowing. As staff we are able to ask for students to come and help clear the ground for the garden, which we did. The main tool for any job in Vanuatu is the bush knife (machete). Many people carry one with them all the time. The guys all came with bush knives in hand and set to work. They slashed away at the overgrown garden and brought it under control in no time. Wilson, one of the students also managed to slash his big toe - quite a nasty cut. I felt bad that he’d done that in doing our job for us. They also turned the soil over (with shovels, not bush knives!) so that it was ready for seed sowing, and transplanting some of the small plants that I had already raised in pots.

          We are very close to the coast here and the soils are thin and coralline. In our spot there are lots of small pieces of coral and also some large chunks in the soil. The soils are very light and friable. The rain sometimes falls very heavily but always drains away very quickly. We are learning about the importance of shade and keeping up the water to our seedlings. Some of the first things we planted didn’t come up, or didn’t survive because we had a very hot, dry spell earlier in the month and the garden suffered before Jon put in a hose to bring water closer to the garden and we bought a sprinkler.

          Another major problem that we needed to deal with is the chickens that wander freely around the place. On the first day after the guys had cleared our patch,  some ladies walked past and commented in Bislama, most of which I didn’t understand. I did pick up the bit about “fowl I scratchem”. In other words “watch out for the chickens they will scratch everything out”. So the next step was to get a fence up around our plot. Jon used his Navota Farm contacts and a few days later the students and farm manager came down with a tractor and trailer load of logs fresh from the bush, some still complete with epiphytic orchids. They then dug these logs in by hand at intervals around the garden, nailed up split bamboo horizontally between the posts, and stuffed dry coconut palms in between. And there you have it - a chicken proof fence. Well it is so far - I’m sure a really determined chicken could get in but there are easier pickings elsewhere.

          We have planted corn, broccoli and carrots which didn’t come up, lettuce and Chinese cabbage seedlings that don’t look too great, cucumbers which came up marvelously but then proceeded to disappear until I put some cans around the last few to protect them from whatever (you should see the size of the land snails here!), tomatoes that I raised in pots, dwarf beans, peppers and radishes looking good so far, climbing beans just coming up, and watermelons planted out from pots too. The melons and some other things are subject to attack from small brown beetles, but most things seem to be suffering more from the heat than anything else. Locals put up shade frames over their seed beds which seems a sensible plan to protect them from the heat of the sun. The dry season is coming when water will be an issue as it is hard to keep enough water to the garden already with the low pressure and sharing the water with the neighbours. I want to make compost and mulch the thin soils. Most rubbish of any kind is burnt here. I need to rescue some and add organic matter to the soil.

           In general I am really enjoying getting out into the garden despite our early failures and the mossie bites. Sometimes one does feel rather shut in in this place as we are not very free to come and go, and there isn’t really anywhere to go to just here anyway. So at least I can escape from the house out to the garden. Unfortunately I can sometimes still hear the kids arguing from there!! I don’t think too much about the wildlife that is rustling around me. Usually it is just a little gecko, but sometimes there is a large frog or a land crab or even a rat. There are snakes in Vanuatu, but they are not venomous. We have only seen one on display for tourists, not in the wild. I am getting used to using the machete as my main tool and have a blister to prove it! Hopefully we will soon be able to provide both our family and others with an abundance of fresh veges. The kids have also been involved in sowing seeds, etc and Connie was delighted that the beans she planted were so quickly out of the ground. Simon planted the radishes which are also flourishing. Crunchy, fresh veges in no time, yeah!!