Trip to the vegie garden

Going to the garden is a daily part of life for the local women, and it’s not just as easy as a half minute walk to the vegie patch your back yard like we do in Australia! For us, it’s a five minute walk along the road to the path that goes into the bush, and then it’s a further 25 minutes till we get to the garden.

We have only been to the garden twice, but hopefully we will go more often in the future.

Here’s Joyce and me walking along the road to get to the garden path:

We used the hoe to make many mounds of dirt to plant new sweet potato shoots into:

Here are some newly planted sweet potato shoots:

We also dug up some sweet potato and insisted on carrying them back to the village on my back, so here’s a photo of me carrying the sweet potato. The Bougainville tradition is to make a pack that you can carry like a backpack, over two shoulder, while in much of mainland PNG, they use ‘bilums’ (string bags) that they hang from their head down their back.