Garden harvest

I like cooking with eggplants, but there’s hardly ever any eggplants for sale at the market near the village, so one of the things I planted in my vegie patch was eggplants. I have several eggplant plants growing quite happily in the garden. See some in the photo below:

I think they’re the kind of eggplant that’s called ‘Lebanese eggplant.’ They’re the long skinny ones anyway, not the big, fat dark purple ones that seem to be more common in Australia.

Here is one hanging on the plant:

These are the first two eggplants that my garden produced. I was very happy about them.

Another day, there was 5 eggplants ready to be picked, which I took a photo of (below) and another time after I had been away for two weeks, I picked 9 eggplants.

I also picked some aibika with those five eggplants, but it was only a small harvest of aibika because of the damage from the tree a couple of weeks earlier.

And here’s the aibika by itself. For those of you who are wondering what aibika is, here it is. This is aibika!

Garden disaster

As you know, I have a little vegie garden in the village. Well one morning after a windy night, we woke up to a small disaster in my vegie garden – a dead tree had fallen over and landed on top of my aibika plants, causing a lot of destruction. Here are some photos of the mess:

We spent some time cutting up the branches into firewood and clearing up the mess in garden. Here is a before and after photo taken of the same spot in the garden:

This is one of the bundles of firewood that we got from the tree.

I enjoyed cutting up the firewood and wasn’t too upset about the tree falling on the garden, but the sad truth is that almost all of my aibika plants were destroyed and we’ve had to restart the aibika plot with new plants and have a bit of a wait until we can pick and eat our own aibika again.

Making a new floor (hauling sand)

While Emily was visiting me, the village was busy preparing to host a workshop, and needed to make a floor for the shelter where the workshop was going to occur. Grass isn’t’ sufficient flooring, but sand is, so we got involved with the community in carrying bags of sand from the beach to the shelter.

First we needed to fill the bags with sand, so here’s me at the beach, scooping sand with a coconut shell into a 10kg rice bag:

Others used hoes and filled other types of bags:

Next I lifted the bag up onto my shoulders…

…and took it over to the shelter.

Then I turned the bag over and dumped the sand over the grass:

It took a lot of trips by lots of people to get the whole floor covered. Here’s Emily getting involved:

Finally, the week of the workshop came, and here are the participants under the shelter, enjoying the new floor and listening hard to the teaching:

Husking coconuts

One day when Emily was visiting me, we went to the bush and I helped one of my aunties to husk a lot of coconuts.

Here’s me carrying a couple of coconuts to husk:

Hard at work husking coconuts:

Resting a little:

Here are all the coconuts back in the village. I husked 14 of the 16 coconuts.

Finally, another photo of me husking a coconut in the village while Mum and Dad were visiting: