Plant guilds in Vanuatu

"There is an enormous difference in the way we make a design in permaculture and the way an agriculturist would make it.  Really what we are up to is trying to let things function in a natural way."

  - Bill Mollison, Wilton, NH (USA) PDC 1981 -

 

Companion planting, or planting two or more plants who help each other, with each other, is one tool we can use to increase the resilience of our cropping systems. 

For example, planting dill and alliums (onion family) between mounds of potatoes can help attract beneficial insects to the umbrelliferous flowers of the dill, while the allium roots exude antibacterial & antifungal compounds which can protect potato tubers from fungal infection, and give us total yield of three crops from the same space.

Photo: Fruit & nut trees occupy the understory of this coconut plantation on Malekula Island, while swamp taro & cattle occupy the ground level.

In permaculture design we refer to this as 'guilding'.  We can use it to mimic the diversity found in natural systems and assemble our planting guilds by selecting plants occupying different niches; for example, selecting deep rooted plants to row next to shallow rooted plants, or identifying understory trees which can be planted under our canopy.

We can take this a step further by designing for maximum functional diversity; in other words, seeking to connect elements in our system so that the needs (or 'inputs') of one element are met by the products or behaviors ('outputs') of another element in our system. 

Photo: Needs / Products / Functions = Functional Analysis.

By using the 'Functional Analysis' tool to map the needs, products & characteristics of our species palette, we can begin to make these connections to create gropings of plants which are mutually beneficial when grown together.  For example, we can grow vines up a taller crop, select an edible ground cover to ramble in an understory, and intercrop nitrogen-fixing species to provide for our soil fertility needs.

Photo: A guild is a family of plants who work together. At the Department of Agriculture's demonstration plot on Efate, Piper nigrum (back pepper) grows up nitrogen-fixing 'Erythrina varigata' (Indian Coral Tree).

Students were tasked with designing their own localized guilds using these patterns, starting with grouping plant species they are already familiar with in the different niches they occupy, and then looking to re-assemble them by looking for functional relationships between the plants:

See the full gallery on Posterous

Photo: Amsen Wille from the Vanuatu Department of Agriculture presents his group's plant guild designs.

Photo: 1) Banana, cacao & Island cabbage (Abelmoschus manihot) grow in the understory of a coconut plantation, with Sweet potato (known locally as 'Kumala') as a ground cover.  Glyricidia provides fertility to the system, banana & Island cabbage provide a shorter term crop while cacao is maturing, and sweet potato lends productivity  at ground level while serving as a living mulch to protect topsoils.

2) 'Whitewood' (Endospermum medullosum), a locally prized timber crop, creates a closed canopy which few plants can tolerate.  Swamp taro (Alocasia macrorrhiza) can fill this niche and turn it into a productive space - this guild was expanded further as an alley crop between Glyricidia to provide fertility to the system.

3) Citrus is placed with nitrogen-fixing Pigeon pea (Cajanus cajun) as a nurse crop to protect & feed it in its early stages (and yield an edible crop), while pawpaw (papaya), Island Cabbage, and Chinese cabbage (known locally as 'Whitebone') give additional yields in space & time.

 

Bill Mollison said, "If you do something right, it will do a lot more right itself," and we experienced this phenomenon with this practical exercise.

Students were asked first to group plants according to niche, and then to create guilds by looking for functional relationships between these plants - and in doing so they also managed to stack crops in space, stack yields in time, and increase diversity & fertility.

 

"Our job is to put things in the right place and then let them rip."

  - Bill Mollison, Wilton, NH (USA) PDC 1981 -

 

No Dig Gardenbeds & The Village Crazyman

A social pattern that Rick Coleman has observed in his work overseas is that of the 'Village Crazyman':

Everywhere he has worked, Rick has encountered this person - typically slightly overweight (ie well-fed), and the only person in his village who is growing anything with any success - often with raging success, while everyone around has written him off as 'crazy'; simply because of the lack of social proof: 

If that guy was doing things so right, then why isn't everyone else doing it?

Africa, Peru, Mexico, Palestine, Mongolia; wherever he went, sooner or later he would eventually run into this person, and when he did… it would be time to ask lots of questions & take furious notes… and ironically enough, when Rick returns home to his productive permacultural bio-dome smack-bang in the middle of the declining pastures in Gippsland (considered prime dairy country in that neck of the woods), guess who the neighbors consider to be the crazyman?

Photo: Our new friend Sawi is Da Man!

When we first met Sawi during our tour of Ifira Island on Day 1 of this consultancy, it was clear that he was doing some very good things - but it wasn't until we had conducted our site visits to Araki Island & Dixson's Reef that it started to become clear that we had found our 'Crazyman'.

One consequence of the relative material affluence of this small community is a preference for buying cheap, processed & imported foods, and Sawi is one of the few residents of Ifira Island still growing his own food: trained chickens, free-range-non-foraging pigs, cyclone yams (not a typo), fruit & nut trees, hessian-crete walls (hessian bags dipped in concrete and used as a sort of plaster), thermal-efficient roasting oven, handmade fishtraps, compost heaps, nursery operations - he's got a lot going on.

Check out these no-dig garden beds, made from treestumps, compost, & leaf litter, growing 'cyclone yams' (wild yams which can store in the ground for many seasons and can act as a backup food supply in case of cyclones), at least 3 different varieties of Island Cabbage (Abelmoschus manihot, aka Edible Hibiscus), an unidentified shrubby edible, and interplanted with colorful varieties of Coleus to attract beneficial insects:

Photo: No-dig Gardenbeds on Ifira Island in Vanuatu.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Photo: Three different varieties of Island Cabbage (Abelmoschus manihot, aka Edible Hibiscus).

Photo: Mushrooms thriving on the decomposing log borders.

Appropriate Design & Knowledge Transfer

Appropriate Design.
Google 'Appropriate Design' and the first few results you get are a handful of Green Design Firms  Self-Sufficiently Sustaining their Sustainability through 'appropriate design'.

As a kid growing up, the word 'inappropriate' was often used to describe my behavior - so what exactly is appropriate design, and who or what exactly are we being 'appropriate' to or for?

 

"Local relevance and local needs are often considered key to appropriateness. A technology or practice is considered "appropriate" if its costs and benefits are appropriate to the locality in which it is used. "  - Appropedia.org wiki -

 

Local relevance.
Traditional Cultures have co-evolved closely with the place a peoples have descended from, shaping both people and place.

For example, the extensive taro cultivation of Ancient Hawaiians evolved to as a response to the peoples' efforts first to survive, and then to thrive within the ecological limits of the islands; in turn, the terraced lo'i (taro paddies) and kauhale (family housing clusters) in the ahapua'a of Ancient Hawaii forever altered the wild tropical rainforests that Ancestral Hawaiians would have encountered upon their first arrival by voyaging canoe.

Similarly (though in a radically different part of the world), the nomadic herding culture of the Mongols evolved as their people's response to first survive, and then to thrive in the extreme conditions of their place. 

Animal herds are the peoples' primary energy storage (food supply) which can survive -40C winters; animal dungs provide fuel for fires, and provide fertility for the grasslands in the delicate balance that is life on the steppe.   Over the millennia, the Mongolian landscape has co-evolved with the movement of animals & people across its rambling, arid highland plains.

The notion that 'lands belong to people' is a symptom of disconnect between people and land in modern culture - all traditional cultures that are still intact today have a shared notion of 'belonging to their land' - in other words, a universal recognition that their ability to thrive as people is nested within the ability of the landscape around them to thrive:

We take care of the land, and the land takes care of us.

'Local relevance' takes us back to this idea of designing solutions which utilize locally available resources to solve the specific challenges presented by a locale's landscape, and the culture which has co-evolved within it; in other words, solutions which are appropriate to place and culture.

Knowledge Transfer.
Gardening techniques & tricks that have been developed for a seasonal agriculture may not be appropriate for a culture that has developed a perennial agricultural system in response to its landscape.

At first glance in Vanuatu, it may appear that there are no garden beds (that we may recognize) within the village, a shift in our perception reveals a complex & diverse agroforestry system of edible & useful species planted within the village and extending into the surrounding lands.

The fastest-growing traditional crop here is likely sweet potato, which is ready for first harvest in around 3 months; compare that to the Mongolian growing season of 90 days.

So, when working in foreign lands & cultures, we must work to match our design solutions to place & people. 

Photo: Knowledge replicating out into community as one of our student's next door neighboor is now feeding her banana patches w/ organic matter instead of burning it.

For example, in the shallow topsoils of the tropics much of the nutrient is held in the biomass of the plants growing there.  The practice of burning any & all organic matter (in the interests of maintaining tidiness) breaks this cycle, turning valuable nutrients into char & smoke.

Once a foundational understanding of permaculture principles is established (in this case, the principle of 'cycling energy'), students can begin to relate these into locally appropriate action & practice.

 

 

Banana leaf sheet mulch!

Photo: Banana leaf sheet mulch deployed in raised bed garden.  Hana, Maui.

Banana leaves have many uses in the Islands (and in all traditional cultures where banana plants grow), though here's one you may not yet have considered:  a natural, locally & readily available, biodegradable weed barrier for sheet mulching.

In urban and suburban Honolulu, cardboard is a readily available waste product that can easily be upcycled as a biodegradable weed barrier for sheet mulch gardenbeds and paths, though in remote Hana there is nowhere near the amount of waste cardboard available for us permaculturists!

There is, however, and abundance of banana plants (which love the chocolatey-volcanic soils and moisture), and therefore an abundance of banana leaves...

...which brings us to the point of this post:

Appropriate Design.
(an excerpt from Rick Coleman's essay 'The Role of Permaculture in Sustainable Aid')

If you are going to introduce a new technology / technique / tool, these are some things to consider:

• Can you use materials that are inexpnsive or free, that are easily accessible and safe?
• Will it have a tangible positive effect on the community (as well as the aid organization)?
• Most importantly is it able to be repeated (if you build a grand-darble-dooble-funky and leave it, can anyone build a new one?)..
• How can the technology be integrated to solve other problems or be connected to other elements (in the system) and therefore become more productive?

... which, of course, now leaves us with the question:

• What else could we use banana leaves for?

While we ponder that one, here's another example of a locally appropriate material being deployed for use in a sheet mulch garden being built in the drylands of Mexico:

 

 

Banana leaf sheet mulch!

Photo: Banana leaf sheet mulch deployed in raised bed garden.  Hana, Maui.

Banana leaves have many uses in the Islands (and in all traditional cultures where banana plants grow), though here's one you may not yet have considered:  a natural, locally & readily available, biodegradable weed barrier for sheet mulching.

In urban and suburban Honolulu, cardboard is a readily available waste product that can easily be upcycled as a biodegradable weed barrier for sheet mulch gardenbeds and paths, though in remote Hana there is nowhere near the amount of waste cardboard available for us permaculturists!

There is, however, and abundance of banana plants (which love the chocolatey-volcanic soils and moisture), and therefore an abundance of banana leaves...

...which brings us to the point of this post:

Appropriate Design.
(an excerpt from Rick Coleman's essay 'The Role of Permaculture in Sustainable Aid')

If you are going to introduce a new technology / technique / tool, these are some things to consider:

• Can you use materials that are inexpnsive or free, that are easily accessible and safe?
• Will it have a tangible positive effect on the community (as well as the aid organization)?
• Most importantly is it able to be repeated (if you build a grand-darble-dooble-funky and leave it, can anyone build a new one?)..
• How can the technology be integrated to solve other problems or be connected to other elements (in the system) and therefore become more productive?

... which, of course, now leaves us with the question:

• What else could we use banana leaves for?

While we ponder that one, here's another example of a locally appropriate material being deployed for use in a sheet mulch garden being built in the drylands of Mexico: