"My name is Thomas Wilfred, I need giant pumpkin seeds"

"My name is Thomas Wilfred, I need giant pumpkin seeds". The man was well-dressed, enthusiastic and out-of-breath. He had caught Alex and I just as we were leaving our house to visit a neighboring village for the day. "Bae yu kam insaed", I responded, inviting him into our house.

I think I've found my counterpart! He lives in the district immediately north of ours, we're told it would be about an hour's walk to his village if you wokabaot kwiktaem (walkabout quicktime). Thomas is an agriculture field assistant for northern Pentecost (or some similar title).

Ni-vans are great gardeners, I've blogged about how great they are on numerous occasions I suspect. The great majority of their food comes directly from their land, the only foods imported in bulk are rice, flour and canned meat. As I write, Alex and I have local oranges, avocados, mandarins, sugarcane, taro and yams in our house.

There are some gardening shortcomings in Northern Pentecost too:
1. There is plenty of land. No one would attempt to "build soil" or have a garden in less than ideal soil. They would just plant their garden somewhere else. There is almost no composting, crop rotations, green manures or such things.
2. Everyone gardens; to find available fertile land, gardens are often an hour's or more walk uphill from the person's home.
3. As there is plenty of land, there's no need to plant densely or efficiently.
4. The total number of different fruits and vegetables grown here is low, probably less than 20. If some potato famine-type disease killed all our taro, we would need someone to send us food for awhile.
5. Nutrition needs are not getting met. As root vegetables are the simplest to grow, diets are often heavy on the carbs and light on protein and 'green vegetables'.
6. Taro and Kava can be sold in Port Vila pretty simply. You essentially just have to put it on the ship and go to the bank a week later and the money is there waiting for you. The price they get for this taro and kava is not much, but because it's viewed by many folks as their only income option, huge amounts of fertile land are dedicated to these monoculture fields that generate little money. There are literally valleys full of kava and mountainsides covered with taro.
7. You can put a seed (or a stick or a tuber) in the ground and it will grow. There has never been any motivation to complicate agriculture techniques and systems.
8. All of these issues become more dire as population increases, and population is increasing rapidly.
9. Everyone has enough food, every single person. People have little motivation to change what's working. If it's not broke, why fix it?

To combat these issues and potential issues, agriculture field assistant Thomas Wilfred has created a small, intensively-managed polyculture garden directly beside his house. His garden (so we are told, we haven't seen it yet) includes annuals and perennials, shrubs, vines, flowers, herbs and a few trees. There are plants for food, but also plants that attract predatory insects, plants that open the soil with their root systems (like radishes) and mineral-mining plants. He uses composting, green manures and lots of legumes. He makes his own insecticide by fermenting chilies and grows many plants that most Ni-vans are not familiar with.

Thomas Wilfred's goal is a model garden that can be used to help guide Northern Pentecost as the population grows, land becomes less available and Ni-vans have to reluctantly change their gardening ways. Problem is...he's having a hard time convincing folks a more labor-intensive garden technique is a good idea. And this is where the giant pumpkin seeds come back into this story...a giant pumpkin might just give the intensive gardening the validity it needs. Thomas Wilfred thinks that if he can grow pumpkins the size of small children, more interest will be given to his garden and his gardening techniques.

So please, please, please send us giant pumpkin seeds. My ability to bribe Thomas Wilfred to be my counterpart depends on it. We need all different varieties, especially ones suited to the sub-tropics and tropics.

Lucas Obringer and Alex Amorin
Peace Corps Office
PMB 9097
Port Vila
Vanuatu