Garden work with Mum and Dad

When Mum and Dad were visiting me, we took them to the garden in the bush and they did a bit of weeding. Here are some photos that Dad took (thus he is not in any of them!).

Mum with some of her weeds:

Ready to go back to the village – I have the backpack of garden produce:

Walking along the road on the way back:

Arrived back in the village and I am forcing a smile while thinking, “Hurry up and take the photo so that I can take this backpack off!”

Garden at Kovanis with Emily

When Emily was visiting me, we went to another village called Kovanis, and we went and had a look around a garden there. Here are some of the photos we took there.

The two of us in the garden:

The plants in the foreground are peanuts:

These are tobacco plants:

A watermelon growing:

Instant food – pick a watermelon from the garden and eat it:

Cocoa beans – this is where your chocolate comes from!

Some freshly picked aibika being put onto some leaves for taking back to the village:

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.

Tomato plants

I brought some tomato seeds back from Australia with me when I returned to PNG in November, so since then I've been growing tomatoes in my little vegie garden. It is fun watching them grow and develop, and rewarding to eat the fruit when it is ripe!

Here is a nursery of baby tomato plants:

Fledgling plant getting stronger:

Tomato plants getting bigger planted out in the garden:

A big tomato plant. I staked them out and some of them are taller than me! I didn't realise that tomato plants grew that tall!


Look at this lovely bunch of three tomatoes! I'm still waiting for them to ripen up and am looking forward to eating them!

Garden and backpack

A while ago, I went to the garden with one of our aunties and carried this large backpack of sweet potato, cassava and other vegetables. It was quite heavy, but not unmanageable. Some people weren’t too happy about how big it was and I don’t think they’ll let me carry a backpack that big again, although I would be okay with it.

“My” vegie garden

I sort of have my own little vegie garden next to our village, which I am really enjoying. Most gardens are about a half hour walk away from the village, but this is just right where we are, so I am able to go to it at any time and do a bit of weeding or clear away more grass, or plant more vegies.

Here is a photo of the whole garden. (The tall plants with long, pointy leaves to the right are pandanus and aren’t a part of ‘my’ garden).

These are my tomato plants in the centre of this photo, and the ones Joyce planted are on the right, at the top right are the beans.

These are the leafy greens known as ‘aibika’ in Tok Pisin. Similar idea to spinach.

There’s a banana tree in the centre of this photo, which was already there when we started the garden, but surrounding the banana tree, you can see more of our beans.

I’m hoping to plant some eggplant, basil and more tomatoes here in the future. I’ll do my best to keep you posted on the progress.

Weeding: Before and after

I took these two photos at the same spot before and after weeding in the sweet potato garden. If you click on the photos to see them bigger, you might be able to compare them and see the differences.

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.

Village – Garden house (post by Bill & Liz)

Every villager has a piece of land they use as a garden to grow produce and cash crops. Our village was next to the beach, but the gardens are located in the small hills further inland where the soil is more productive. They grow cash crops such as cocoa and food crops for their own consumption and for sale at market. Foods that they grow for eating are bananas (sweet ones and cooking bananas), kaukau (sweet potato), taro, Chinese taro, sago and green leafy vegetables.

Close to their garden site, they build a smaller dwelling to use while they are working in the garden. Here are some photos of the garden house.