“You‘re going to the garden?” I was asked by Misis Gholopume.  I nodded a yes by raising my nose up to the trees as I made for Sogopex.

I was going past a kandis of women and girls who giggled that I was going gardening when the sun was up and hot.  We usually made our gardens early in the morning and in the evenings when it was cool. 

During the middle of the day we congregated at the kandis place and would break our backs playing cards.

But I was a young man in a hurry.  I had with me a collection of plant starters to take to the garden.  They included several tapioca sticks, one ripe banana sucker, four kru sako seeds, a taro konkon plant in a bag and various bean seeds in my pocket.  These needed to be planted and I could not afford time at the kandis.

My mother passed away when I was young and, although she never gave me any skills at making a garden, I knew the type of garden she had made.  I knew she kept the garden going for the whole year.  There was never a patch in the garden where there was not something growing.

Around the tree trunk was where she planted pumpkin vines and crawling bean.  Against the fence were various climbers including kidney beans. Around the pile of rocks she planted ghotane or pitpit. And on the small ridge, she planted tree tomatoes.

The marretta patch has passionfruit with strict instructions for us not to harvest the vines.  The fruit had to ripen and fall off and then we had to collect it.  If we pulled on the vines, we would kill the plant she had said. 

There were little clumps of bush where she would hide the bananas to ripen.  She would direct us to a spot to get the bananas which would be ripe and yummy.

There was never a food shortage in our house and, even during times of hunger, there was always kaukau or taro as a starch staple plus the ghomona banana that my father grew plenty of.

When ma harvested kaukau she did it judiciously - getting one, burying another - so that the one plot would last a long time.

I know my father also had his own taro – both types - and a yam garden and another tuber he always said was for the time of great hunger.  The leaves were like the sogoneha vines and I called it sogoneha. 

Pa had brought the plant from Nambayufa when he went to the village to complete some bridal obligations. I still remember the great hunger of 1972 and it was this tuber that kept us for a long while and he maintained a big row of it.

We were never short of beans, the fence was covered in them – several types.  Mother trained the plants from a spot near the head of a depression in the ground where she reckoned the water table was.

Using bamboo pieces, she trained the bean stalks along the fence line and that was a supply of beans all year round. I would watch her prune them to renew them to bear new beans pods.

The women and girls giggled because I was a young man out of school who had come back from some exotic place to be a villager. They laughed at my misfortune of being a villager. 

It was some 10 years after my mother had passed on and I was trying to make a garden. Oh, in the village you don’t go looking for seeds to start a garden.  You either have them or they are given to you in goodwill. 

I had no goodwill shown to me and my garden stock was empty as my father could hardy maintain a garden after the demise of his wife.  So I would walk through the village gardens and grab a been seed here, a tapioca stick there, a weak banana sucker in some bush that no one wanted….

“It’s good that you have a tapioca stick,” someone said. “Plant it at the top and bottom ends of the row because, if you plant a lot of it or mix it in the garden, it will cover the kaukau leaves and then the kaukau won’t stretch its roots and won’t bear tubers.”

My lesson in making a garden was coming from the experts in the village.  The rudimentary agriculture lessons taught to me at school were on how to grow pachoi and Chinese cabbage for the school mess.  Real agriculture happened in the village.

Firstly, when you dig the land, you must really turn the soil.  Turn the soil?  In school I was told the top soil was where all the nutrients were. That is true for Chinese cabbage but kaukau and tapioca send their fruiting roots deep.  And, if the soil is turned properly, the nutrients are found at the end of the spade mark. So dig and turn the soil properly.

I did not take their advice.  I made gardens like mother made hers.  I inter- and multi-cropped.  I planted all manner of things.  I planted beans, pumpkin and all manner of fruit.  Soon it became a haven for my children.  They loved the fruit.

Farmers today plant to make fast money.  They have become commercial farmers but with a twist.  Individual farmers don’t have the land mass to make big viable commercial farms. 

This is creating a problem in rural areas where they now plant one crop a year on the one plot of land that they have.  It is not viable; the income from that one harvest will not cover expenditure.  So for part of the year, the family goes hungry.

While, traditionally, a garden is multi-cropped and harvesting is designed to last a season, farmers now plant one type of crop each season and they are making do for the rest of the year. 

They make a kaukau garden and harvest it all in one go.  They never let the garden run on to bear more kaukau.  It is harvested and the runners pulled up for the next crop.  When the time for planting on this harvested plot comes there is no rain.  So the land is then left bear for the next rainy season. 

What the farmers fail to realise is that commercial farming is not viable as the proceeds obtained from one kaukau harvest are not adequate to provide for the family for a year.  It needs a rethink and multi-cropping is not rocket science.

With the current El Nino in Goroka, I fear a lot of families are going to be victims of this type of farming.  They have been into commercial farming and have abandoned the practises of old and will suffer for it.

The old ways bear lessons we can learn from.