Love me some agriculture

My main reason for joining Peace Corps was to learn about (and help farmers in the process) agriculture in a developing country. The thing about Peace Corps that is so amazing (and a little scary) is that you never know what is going to happen next. Even from the beginning, my placement in Nepal, being that I had no choice of which country I would serve, feels a little like fate. Likewise, my host family placement feels like fate. Although we have our ups and downs (it’s hard being 31 are living with a family again), we get along really well. I feel really lucky! I knew my family was going to be good when on my first day, my Didi asked me if I wanted to help pick suntala (mandarin). Since then, we’ve worked together on several projects that I’d like to share in this blog. Just to preface, this is a long one. Hopefully the things we learn together, can be passed on to others in the community next year. There isn’t a set ‘script’ on how to be a PCV (a.k.a. weird/unusually enthusiastic-American-who-tries-to-suggest-outside-of-the-box-techniques), so if anything this experience is teaching me how to live more intuitively.

After Suntala are harvested into crates, they are staged for a jeep that
will ship to Pokhara or Kathmandu

I didn’t jump right into agriculture projects when I first got here, but slowly I’ve been learning a lot about agriculture from a Nepali subsistence farming point of view. And I love it! I arrived just in time for suntala harvest. Although, I was kind of sad because I was really starting to enjoy eating around 10 mandarin a day. Harvesting was a good way for me to meet other people in my community, even if I couldn’t really communicate all that well. Most families help each other with large ag jobs like planting, mass weeding, composting, and harvesting. The really fun part of agriculture here in Nepal is that OSHA isn’t breathing down your neck about ‘PPE’ (personal protective equipment) or other safety rules. So we were all climbing trees with large baskets harvesting and having a good ole time. However, this ‘Nepali system’, as my Didi says, creates other issues.

A ladder used for harvesting. Not the safest ladder I've seen.

One of the problems I’ve seen…or not seen is a good ladder. From my American perspective, ladders are pretty essential pieces of equipment in an orchard.  Another thing I noticed is that there is no quality control. A lot of suntala are damaged in the harvesting process because they fall and hit the ground becoming bruised and cracked, and are thrown in the pile and shipped with all the good suntala. I’m guessing they are picked out once they arrive at the market, but I’m not sure. My thulo ama would run around and collect as many bruised/ cracked ones as possible and make orange flavored raksi (rice whiskey). She also was going to make face wash out of the peels, but I still see the bags of dried peels in storage.

Drying suntala to make face wash.

Village ladies taking a water break.

A hassiya and ninlo, essential Nepali tools.

 After suntala harvest, we pruned as many trees as possible (per my suggestion), which wasn’t many because we don’t have the proper tools to do a good job. I brought hand pruners from the States, but I’m still searching for some good loppers for larger branches. I don’t think any tools are of good quality here, with the exception of the hassiya. I recently bought one for myself; I look like a real Nepali farmer now! Ok..Sorta…. Anywho, while I was pruning, a group of 8 ladies and 5 men were tilling the soil around the suntala and mixing in compost. This was so much fun because my language was getting better, and I wasn’t terrified of making mistakes anymore. I actually felt like I made friends during this period. I ended up abandoning my pruning job to work with the ladies so I could gaph garne (gossip or chit chat) with them. The last step of suntala season is applying ‘border pest’ – they actually call it that in English. A mix of copper sulfate and lime are mixed and painted on the bottom portion of the trunk as an organic pest control method.

Once suntala season was over we moved on to takari utpaadan (vegetable production). We first made a few garden beds (carrots, radish, cilantro, and peas) and then a nursery bed to start tomato, cucumber, and bitter gourd seedlings early. This was a fun little project I did with my affno mancheharu (relatives). Ritten is about 9 years old and really curious about me. His English is really good too, so he was asking me all kinds of questions. Like if I’ve ever met President Obama (I get that a lot from kids/teens). He was a little disappointed when I said no, but I was even more disappointed when he said he didn’t know/listen to Katy Perry. A few kids in the village are big Katy Perry fans.

Mi Dai and Mila Ba making the structure for our nursery bed.

Ritten and Kanchi Didi

The finished nursery bed. Tomatoes in front and cucumber in back.

Village ladies loading up compost.

After about a month, it was time to plant the seedlings. I had been away for a couple weeks for a PC training, so when I got home I was happy to have something to do right away. My Didi and I set up a simple drip irrigation kit that iDE Nepal (a NGO in Nepal) gave to each PCV during the training. This was a fun project because we asked a man who hasn’t had much work in the village to build a table for the 55 liter tank. We put the drip kit under a plastic greenhouse my family already had. I guess there was drip there before, but they stopped using it (not sure why). We planted the cucumber and bitter gourd under the house because they take a long time to grow and will need protection when the monsoon rains come. We planted 90 tomato plants in the ‘tala baari’, literally meaning down garden, but it means the garden down the hill. After a few weeks of establishing, we sprayed them with the same copper sulfate and lime solution to help prevent bacterial and fungal diseases, a very common issue in Nepal (and elsewhere). This is an organic method, however, I’ve heard it can be detrimental to the soil (I need to read up on this), and it’s advised not to use this method year after year. During the training mentioned above, I learned that lantana leaves, a common plant here in Nepal (it’s grown and sold as an annual bedding plant in the US), can be dried and ground up into a powder and sprinkled onto tomato and potato leaves to prevent the same diseases. The problem is that lantana isn’t easily found in my village. It grows prolifically in Pokhara, so I took the liberty of snagging a bunch of leaves one day. I also dug out a plant and gave a Didi 100 rupees for soil and a plastic bag. However, my thrifty plant has not faired the transplant shock very well and will most likely die soon.

The last project is oyster mushrooms. This has been the most educational for me because I’ve never grown mushrooms before. They are super healthy, providing protein for those that don’t eat meat or can’t afford to buy meat. It also is pretty economically feasible for villagers to start. Mero milne sathi (my best friend…Shout out to Melissa!!) here came over to my house and helped me out with a training I gave to 10 women in my village. The training went really well because my Didi did most of the recruiting and she helped me a lot with language. I’ll just say it was good practice, and I should always have my Didi around. Village language is way different than the Nepali I learned and is taught in books. Answering questions ‘off-script’ is really difficult still. Out of the 10 women three seemed really interested in growing their own mushrooms, and after following up with the women, one out of the three is actually growing a few bags now. She wants to practice a few times before she starts to sell in the local market. The bags we made that day did not turn out, and we had to throw them away. The biggest challenge I faced with this project/training was time, cleanliness, and temperature. There were so many people and hands, it was hard to keep track of what was clean and what wasn’t. I used raksi (Nepali alcohol) to wipe everything down, but some hands may have been dirty. Time was an issue too because these women don’t have all day to attend trainings, so my Didi and I wanted the training to last a few hours. We succeeded in that, but we may have killed the spores by laying them on freshly steamed rice grass (we were supposed to wait 10-15 min). A third factor could have been that the room (needed to be dark) we stored the bags of mushrooms in was too cool. The incubation temperature should be around 20-25°C. My Didi decided she wanted to try again. I’m glad she did because I was ready to throw the towel in. So the other day (about a month after the first batch) we made two more bags. We are hoping with just the two of us handling the materials and the increase in temperature, these will produce lots of yummy mushrooms. Fingers crossed!!

Group photo of our mushroom training. 

  Now that the gardens are growing, I’ve been wanting to experiment with bio fertilizers (another technique we learned during training) a little. Bio fertilizers use natural ingredients found in the surrounding environment, and can substitute synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The only one I’ve ‘made’ is mixing water with water buffalo urine. My families’ barn has a cement floor with a ditch that deposits the urine into a bin. It’s used for our bio gas stove and as fertilizer.  So far, it’s working great. I want to do some comparison garden beds with bio fertilizers and compost. The bio fertilizer is actually easier than making a compost pile, just have to get past the smell. However, my hypothesis is that compost probably is the best when considering the longevity of soil quality. Anywho, ma bholi parsi garchhu, hola. Basically, I’ll do that later, maybe.

Water buffalo barn. 

Urine catchment drain.

Urine catchment