January
2008
Permaculture and Bio-intensive Farming1
Before coming to Tanzania, I never so much as tried to grow a houseplant. Although tolerant of roommates’ needs for greenery over the years, I paid these unwelcome lifeforms as much attention as I did the various vermin that managed to cohabitate with me. Oh, and by unwelcome lifeforms and vermin, I don’t mean my roommates. While nothing other than the prospect of fresh basil ever managed to peak my interest in living with plants, I was no stranger to green-thumbed enthusiasts.
Growing up, I watched my mother experiment with any number of green projects in and around the house. I have vague recollections of her tending a vegetable garden in the backyard, and even vaguer recollections of the occasional home-grown tomato and carrot accompanying a salad I would try to avoid eating anyway. A typical overweight, junk-food craving American kid, I failed to share my mother’s wonder with harvesting nature’s bounty in our own backyard. It’s not like we were raising a herd of cattle after all. My principal memories about the short-lived vegetable garden were that my mother was the only one interested in the project and that it took up valuable real estate for backyard football. “American” football, I would be forced to add here in Tanzania.
After that, I watched my mom gradually pick away at the lawn, replacing one edge with some bushes, another with flowers, leaning more and more towards bulky, tropical, indigenous varieties. Then one day, she snapped. Her benign displeasure with the typical suburban lawn broiled into an all-out holocaust. All grass in the front yard was ripped out, exposing the chemically-sauteed soil beneath. Like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, she moulded the earth into strange ridges and shapes as the neighbors struggled to find a genuine compliment. “It looks like a really big project!” The rest of the family was equally unnerved, though we knew far better than to intervene. It’s not like any of wanted to get recruited with “You think YOU can do better?!”
And so, we stayed tentatively optimistic watching as week after week went on, with bare patches of dirt gradually giving way to long ridges of dirt mounds. It was some kind of botanical scultpting project that we were better off keeping quiet about. And yet, little by little, there was progress. Surrounded by clean-cut, chemically saturated, suburban lawns of St. Augustine grass and neatly groomed hedges, our house sported a wild assortment of local vegetation, unruly to be sure and all the more pleasant for it.
Here in Tanzania, the typical yard is something else entirely: rows and rows of maize (not be confused with juicy American sweet corn), widely spaced and occasionally intercropped with beans. You can also find a number of scattered fruit trees: lemon, avocado, blood fruit. Farther away from the house, people also grow a good bit of tea, pineapples, potatoes (Irish and sweet), tomatoes, and greens (eg., spinach, cabbage, cassava greens). As I have come to learn however, the typical Tanzanian yard could use as much of an overhaul as suburban America. Ok, not really, it’s nowhere near as poisonous and wasteful as chemically-treated suburban lawns.
If the typical Tanzanian yard could use an overhaul (at least judging by those at UL Secondary), it would begin with soil improvement. In the arid badlands of Dodoma and Singida, it’s an easy case to make. There’s little rain and quite sandy soils. Down in the southern highlands it’s another story entirely. Everything grows … rapidly. Gardening seems far more about weeding than fertilizing. That being said, there’s still a number of benefits – even with such loam soils – for permaculture and bio-intensive farming.
Permaculture or Permanent Agriculture is really all about putting in perennial plants: fruit trees, fruit and vegetable vines, medicinals such as aloe, natural fencing through trees and bushes, and erosion-control grasses in a structured way so as to maximize water collection, contributing to improved soil structure and also providing fruits and other agri-goodies year in and year out.
Bio-intensive farming, on the other hand, focuses on digging deeply, amending the soil with compost and manure, spacing plants closely together and using intercropping techniques so that different species help one another. Practically speaking this means more food on less land. This is especially valuable for people living with HIV/AIDS and frankly anyone else physically unable to travel a long distance to do farming. Close plant spacing and deep (double) digging also translates into less weeding as the microclimates between plants suppress unwanted competitors. So, it’s really a great system, even if water and good land are as abundant as they are in my region. The only real hinderance is that double-digging is labor-intensive and time consuming. Although it saves a great deal of work later, it involves a substantial initial time investment. The only way to really sell the system is to use it yourself and let the results speak for themselves.
Unfortunatelty, with teaching and everything else, I’ve been able to do very little. As far as gardening goes, the only thing I have managed to do over the last year is composting, all of which became overgrown with fallen bamboo from my decaying fence and covered in vines and grasses. Turns out I couldn’t have planned it better. In preparation for the upcoming rainy season, I started cleaning up the yard and setting up new compost piles only to find that 18 discarded avocado seeds had germinated into roughly 12 inch seedlings. I have grafted high-quality branches onto this root stock. I’m now developing a new backyard gardening plan based around composting, soil improvement, mulching and natural fencing.
As my garden stands right now, I’ve got passionfruit vines, oregano, garlic chives, rosemary, carrots, tomatoes, irish potatoes, songu (a local fruit bush whose leaves make a medicine for typhoid), maboga-maboga (a form of pumkin plants with edible leaves) and ununu bushes (thorny bushes that makes good natural fencing and produce very few but very tasty blackberry-like fruits). I’ve also done some tree maintenance on the lemon and avocado trees in my yard. I think I’ve brought the lemon tree back to production, but we’ll see.
The real bright spot for the upcoming year however comes from an idea my headmaster floated at the end of the last term: a vegetable garden for the school’s roughly 30 orphans. (HIV prevalence in my region is between 13 and 20% depending on whose statistics you believe.) Using my site-mate’s farming expertise and exemplary demonstration garden, we will be training the school’s orphans in permaculture and bio-intensive farming techniques and giving them seeds to start a garden for their own nutrition as well as for sale (profits to offset their school expenses and their guardian’s living expenses). As I told the headmaster, as long as we give the students a break from the other chores of the school to work on their garden, it should be an easy sell. After all, if you have to work anyway, who wouldn’t choose to eat better and get some more money in the process?
On a personal note, I’m back in South Africa for the time being getting the metal plate removed from my collarbone. This means I’ll be online every day for at least the next week or so. So, feel free to drop me a line.
Peace, Dr. Josh