GROWING VEGETABLES FOR SEED IN CHEMPAKA KUNING PART ONE

Greetings everyone

I last wrote this blog in May and since then a lot has happened.  In June I went on a trip to Sri Lanka to talk to people at the  Foundation of Goodness – an NGO that focuses on enrichment activities for school students and women in the centres they have set up in mainly rural areas.  I visited some of their rural centres with Sangita (Rajan’s wife) to see if I could be of any help with their food growing program.  It was a delight to travel around the less visited parts of Sri Lanka and a privilege to meet some of the people that run these centres. I will write about it soon.

I am writing this in Buddha Garden having just returned from Malaysia last week where I have been for the last two months working in Ashok’s Chempaka Kuning farm.  This has been a time of great change for the farm as Ashok has revised his initial vision and is now going to set up and run the farm according to syntropic agriculture principles (more on that also in future weeks).  With this new focus has also come  a different vision for the vegetable garden.  Originally it was planned  that this – the only flat area of the farm -  would produce vegetables for sale. But the initial vegetable growing and selling has not been easy. 

This is the vegetable garden of Chempaka Kuning consisting of 20 vegetable beds (along with moringa, banana and sugar cane) on the only flat area on the farm.

Vegetables were being grown (beans, chillie and cucumber) but this was done using hybrid rather than open pollinated seed.  Hybrid seed is developed to be grown in good soil and using fertilizer and pesticide.  Since this was the first time plants were planted in the beds the soil was not in a condition  good enough for hybrids.  And as Chempaka Kuning has been planned as an organic farm it does not use fertilizers and pesticides.  Despite this some vegetables did grow but then there was a further problem when we tried to sell any produce.

Several local shops were willing to take the Chempaka Kuning vegetables but the price – based on market prices of conventionally grown produce – was very low.  Generally growing organic vegetables needs more labour and is therefore more costly to grow than crops grown conventionally.  Most farmers selling organic produce therefore aim to get the so called ‘organic premium’  – a higher price – for their produce.  This requires, of course, that there is an ‘organic market’  consisting of people who understand the value of the produce and are able and willing to pay the higher price.  In a place the size of Kuala Kangsa there probably is such a market but it is not very visible and it would take time to develop.  Or maybe we would have to focus on more nearby urban places (like Ipoh) where the organic market is larger and better developed.  This of course would take time and energy to do. 

Another aspect of the situation was the time it was taking to pick, pack and then go out and sell the produce.  What we received for our vegetables was very little money and it was clear that our present customers did not access the organic market.  Developing the market and obtaining enough money to cover costs was obviously going to take some time and a lot of effort. 

Thinking about it Ashok then decided that it would be better if the vegetables were grown just for people staying and working on the farm.  He also has ideas for setting up a place where various items that are grown on the farm can be processed into something which is more valuable and can be sold over the long term – things like moringa powder and possibly dried fruit.  Clearly, however, this is something for the future, probably after the syntropic agriculture has been implemented all over the farm and the farm is hosting volunteers.  So what should happen to the vegetable garden in the meantime?

After some discussion it was decided that the vegetable garden would be reimagined as a Seed Garden where vegetables would be grown for seed for the farm Seed Bank.  This would mean that the soil in the vegetable garden would continue to improve and that over the year or so it will take to create the farm community we would also produce a lot of seed for the Chempaka Kuning  Seed Bank.  Seed that would be adapted to the conditions on the farm which would include being resistant to some, maybe even all, of the pests. 

There are 20 vegetable beds and as my return to India was looming I wanted to get at least 10 of the beds prepared and planted with a range of vegetables so there would be something growing here when I returned.  Plants would include vegetables that we would propagate with seed as well as those propagated by cuttings/bulbs/rhyzomes.  Hybrid seeds that grow into plants do not produce a daughter generation of hybrid seeds, but seeds that are one or other of the two varieties that make up the original hybrid.  For that reason we took out the hybrid plants and then planted our first open pollinated seeds.  These had come from a variety of places both inside and outside Malaysia and included some from Buddha Garden.  A range of vegetable seedings have been planted which will be grown only for seed. This means that all the energy of the plant will be used for seed making as none of the vegetables on the plant will be harvested as vegetables for sale.  Cuttings of various plants like lemon grass and different sorts of sweet potato as well as different varieties of ginger have also been planted and these will grow into large plants that can provide cuttings for future planting. 

This is a bed of bassella spinach which we hve planted to grow seed.

The aim is over time to create a large seedbank so that when we do start growing vegetables for our own consumption we will have enough seed, bulbs and rhyzomes that have been grown in Chempaka Kuning which are adapted to the farm conditions and will therefore grow well.

In the next blog I will tell you what happened to some of the Buddha Garden seeds that we planted.