[Dale & Pati Duerksen] SUBJECT: Gardening in Kaikan

AUTHOR: Dale Duerksen and wife Pati are retired and currently work with their two daughters and families (Gates & Burgdorff), in a medical aviation program in the jungles of Guyana, South America.

DATE: September 8, 1997

While gardening in the States may usually be considered to be just a pastime or hobby, in an isolated mission field where there is no well-stocked grocery store nearby, gardening becomes a more urgent activity. Our meals are generally very drab
[String Beans: Success]
String beans, one of my successes
unless we manage to grow some or our own fruits and vegetables. And in addition to our interest in our own cuisine, we also want to teach the local people how to have a greater variety in their diet, which we expect to produce better health. However just lecturing our neighbors about growing a better variety of food crops won't do much good. An impressive demonstration of how to do it no doubt will be the most effective teaching method--but that is much easier said than done!

I have found that the tropics provide a formidable challenge to gardening. First of all, many of the things we are used to growing in our gardens in temperate climates just won't thrive down here in this hot humid climate, so it takes a lot of experimenting to find out what will grow well and what won't. I haven't been here long enough to test very many things yet, but so far I have had success with turnip greens, string beans, soy beans, and tomatoes, while melons, squash, carrots, onions, and cabbage have been complete failures.

No less important is the problem of the preparation of the seed bed. Tropical soils have a bad reputation of being very poor. The reason is that most of the nutrients are tied up in the thick jungle growth. The common concept down here is
[Preparing a compost pile]
Careful preparation of a compost pile
that in order to prepare some land for farming or gardening, you must cut down all the vegetation, and then as soon as it dries, light a match and burn it all up. The ashes serve as a fertilizer, and things grow well the first year, but then the heavy rains wash away the rest of the ash, and after that the soil isn't worth much anymore. Nobody seems to realize that you can return the vegetation to the earth from which it came, and thus you can maintain soil fertility year after year. Or maybe the natives just aren't ambitious enough to go to all the work of making compost and putting it back into the soil. Anyway I am trying to demonstrate what compost can do for plants, and I hope it will be impressive.

Clean cultivation to eliminate competition from weeds is a good gardening practice, but that will expose the soil to the problem of erosion when the heavy rains come. I thought a good mulch would help solve that problem. But I failed to take
[Fertile Papaya Tree]
Our fertile Papaya trees
into account our neighbor's chickens. Any thin layer of loose vegetation is an irresistible invitation to a chicken to come see what bugs and worms might be hiding under the leaves and dry grass, so I barely had the mulch in place before the chickens were out there gleefully scratching everything all to pieces. I couldn't report to the sheriff that my neighbor's chickens were invading my living space and molesting me, for there is no sheriff here. Neither would it do for me to go to my neighbor and fight it out with him, because I have invaded his culture, and that is the way they raise chickens here. If they penned up their chickens, they would starve to death, because they have nothing to feed them. The chickens must find their own food--and I would have to figure out some way to outsmart the chickens to save my garden.

After giving the problem some thought, I got an idea. There is a lot of bamboo available here, so I sawed several sections about 8 inches long. These were easy to split with my machete, so I split them into many strips each about a quarter inch thick. Then I spread the mulch again and stuck my bamboo pegs through the mulch into the ground about every 5 inches in the hope that it would discourage the chickens from scratching. It did, and it was a complete success.
[Bamboo Sections]
Bamboo sections protect seedlings

Another problem that frustrated me for a time was an unidentified assailant that would nip off my young plants shortly after they came up. It never ate any part of the plant. Whatever the creature was, it seemed to just enjoy biting the tender juicy stem almost at ground level. Once again I looked to bamboo for a solution. I sawed the bamboo at 2-inch intervals to form rings 2 inches high that I could put around the tender young plants, hopefully to protect them until they became big enough and tough enough to survive. I'm happy to say this also worked.

Yes, gardening in the tropics is a real challenge, but when you conquer the obstacles, the joy of success is even sweeter than when everything comes easy.

You may write to Dale at: gates@andrews.edu

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