Fig Shoots for Supper

This year's dry season is turning out to be quite long and hot. Under such conditions, we're applying a lot of water to our home vegetable garden. Although a fresh supply of vegetables is great, I hate to think about the water bill.

Having access to water for gardening is really a luxury. During the dry season, many communities in our region barely have enough water for basic household consumption. So vegetable gardening often takes a pause until the rains return in May.

Fortunately, various trees and shrubs, both indigenous and naturalized, offer seasonal or year round access to edible leaves. For instance, moringa trees produce considerable amounts of nutritious shoots during the rainy season.

By the middle of the dry season, the semi-deciduous red shoot fig (Ficus virens) may drop a lot of its mature leaves. But around February, the trees produce a flush of tender, edible leaf shoots. At a time when there are few fresh, homegrown vegetables to enjoy, this indigenous strangler fig offers an abundance of greens (which are actually red). Many people in tropical and sub-tropical Asia stir fry the leaves or add them to curries. The leaves are also blanched and eaten along with chili pepper sauce.

On a late February afternoon, a few years ago, I happened to be in the hilltribe village of Huai Pong where I encountered this young lady who was harvesting a batch of fig leaf shoots for supper. An hour later, at the home where I was staying, I found the same on the menu.

By the way, ECHO promotes the cultivation and use of many types of perennial vegetables around the world. Obviously, certain perennial vegetables can fill a niche for home gardeners with limited access to water.

Dry Season Floral Show

In monsoonal Asia, the late dry season is a time of dessicated discomfort. But one thing to be thankful for is the current natural floral show being offered by various types of trees. During late April, one of the most showy species are the Golden Shower Tree (Cassia fistula), with masses and more masses of yellow flowers. Another is the Royal Poinciana or Flamboyant (Delonix regia) which is aflame in orange blossoms. The Golden Shower Tree is native to our area and happens to be Thailand's national tree. Many have been planted along the streets of Chiang Mai. Although the Royal Poinciana is native to Madagascar, it has spread throughout the tropics. They're found all over Chiang Mai. The full bloom Flamboyants in this photo are located on Payap University (Kaew Nawarat campus), across the street from the ECHO Asia Regional Office.

PVC Fish Cage

During a recent visit to Suan Aden Children's Home on the outskirts of Chiang Mai, I came across this PVC fish cage floating in a large pond located on the property. In Southeast Asia, fish cages are commonly constructed in rivers, lakes, ponds and seas in order to confine fish for accessible management and harvesting. Common fish cage materials include bamboo and mesh as well as barrels if flotation is necessary.
Ton Kankaewmoon, who manages the children's home, was inspired to construct this PVC fish cage after seeing a similar one at a local tilapia fingerling supplier. Ton reports that he used 2 inch and 2.5 inch PVC pipe to construct the 3 m x 3 m frame but he reckons that 3 inch pipe would work just fine.

Ton estimates that the frame, once assembled, weighs no more than 20 kg (44 lb.). It's so light that one person can easily construct the cage as well as place it in the water. The glued PVC pipe frame floats just fine making additional flotation materials unnecessary. Ton also used stainless wire to secure the mesh to the frame.

The entire cost was 2000 baht (about $63 US); 1,100 baht for the pipe and glue plus another 900 baht for the mesh.

Ton reports that a cage this size can hold 1,000 to 1,500 tilapia, catfish or other local freshwater fish.

Our First "Official" Batch of Seeds

Recently the ECHO Asia Regional Office sent out it's first "official" batch of seeds. Shown with the shipment are Ruth Tshin, ECHO Asia's Volunteer Seed Bank Consultant, and Lue Chompoothong, Seed Bank Technician. In all, over a dozen kilos of various green manure cover crop seeds, including rice bean (Vigna umbellata), black bean (Vigna unguiculata), jack bean (Canavalia ensiformis) and lablab bean (Lablab purpureus) as well as indigo (Indigofera suffruticosa), a nitrogen fixing tree, were shipped to Laos. Apart from indigo, seeds of the green manure cover crops were purchased from local farmers and packaged at the ECHO Asia Regional Office Seed Bank.

The ECHO Asia Seed Bank is currently evaluating dozens of crops of regional importance with plans to make several of these proven varieties available by the end of 2010. So as soon as our on-line seed catalog is finished and the first dozen varieties are ready for distribution, we will notify our regional partners about their availability.

Of course, we invite interested persons to continue to use the services of the main ECHO Seed Bank based in Fort Myers, Florida (http://www.echonet.org/content/SeedBank) which offers seeds of hundreds of crop varieties from around the world.

Planeteers Strike Again!

The Planeteers, Chiang Mai International School's environmental club, returned to the ECHO Asia office on Friday, March 26 to help upgrade the container and perennial vegetable garden. Braving hot afternoon temperatures, the 10 young people and their adviser, Mr. ElJay Erickson, replanted approximately a dozen containers in which several species of shade-loving edible plants such as basil, pandanus leaf, fiddlehead fern, sawtooth coriander (Eryngium foetidum), taro (edible stems) and leaf pepper, as well as a few medicinal herbs are being grown on the front porch of the office.

Along the wall of the office, another group of students, under of the supervision of Mr. Chanchai, dug and mulched a raised bed in which perennial vegetables such as sweet leaf (Sauropus androgynus), cha-om (Acacia pennata) and leaf pepper (Piper sarmentosum) are growing in partial shade.

The demonstration looks 100% better thanks to the Planeteers. Thanks again for the hard work guys!

Rapid Multiplication of Bananas

In northern Thailand there's lots of demand for banana stalks these days. In many parts of Asia banana stalk is a traditional feed for pigs. After slicing up the stalks, farmers usually boil them to increase digestibility. Fed alone, such plant material isn't very nutritious. So stalks are usually mixed with other more nutritious feeds such as rice bran, corn, papaya fruit, kitchen scraps and wild vegetables. Otherwise, they mainly serve to fill hungry animals.

In recent years, growing numbers of farmers have been adopting a proven practice of fermenting banana stalk with molasses and a little salt. Reducing the need for fuel to cook the stalks, the fermentation process boosts the presence of digestible bacteria in the silage, making stalks considerably more nutritious. And mixed with smaller amounts of nutritious local feed or supplemented with a little commercial pig feed, fermented banana stalks offer a cheap, nutritious component for small-scale pig production. This, in turn, helps to boost small farm income.

But with every innovation comes another challenge. With demand for banana stems growing, in some areas, stalk scarcity is becoming an issue. So can the production of these plant materials be boosted somehow?

Years ago, ECHO Development Notes ran a story on rapid multiplication of bananas (RMB). Basically, banana stems are mangled a bit to prompt the main corm (underground stem/root system) to produce more daughter corms and, ultimately, transplantable suckers. And a few years later, EDN reported on another rapid banana multiplication approach whereby banana corms are dug up, trimmed and scored just so to injure meristems before being placed in plant beds to stimulate the production of a lot more plantlets. So the idea is, one way or another, to stimulate the production of a lot more plantlets (suckers) which can be transplanted to establish more clumps of usable banana stalks.

Unable to find any references to RMB in our part of the world, I turned to Abram Bicksler. With a freshly minted PhD. in Sustainable Agriculture from the University of Illinois, Abram currently serves as an instructor with the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute in Chiang Mai; a key ECHO Asia partner. Abram (shown here) is helping to design a trial by which various RMB approaches can be tested to see if any might actually boost the production of banana propagation material in a way that can be readily adopted by farmers.

Having recently run a "trial" RMB at the Upland Holistic Development Project Center, Abram is encouraged by initial results. He is now planning to implement a comprehensive field trial to evaluate promising methodologies which have emerged during the preliminary trial. Hopefully, this collaboration between ECHO, Abram (ISDSI) and UHDP will yield some very useful RMB techniques for regional pig farmers to employ.

Garden in the Sky

Rooftop gardening creates a good bit of buzz. But real working examples are somewhat difficult to find. The March 14 (2010) edition of the Bangkok Post carried a very informative article about successful rooftop gardening efforts at the eight-story Lak Si District office in Bangkok. The article, with photos, details how the garden has reached productivity following years of trial and error. District office personnel are reportedly using 400 square meters to produce about 70 different crops in rotation over the course of a year. Check out the article via the following link http://www.bangkokpost.com/life/family/34431/garden-in-the-sky (or click on the title above).