The beginnings of a homegarden: construction of a nursery

Entry written by Logan Sander

After a few weeks of getting oriented and familiarized with our Sri Lankan village life, we began work on our homegarden plant nursery. For us, the nursery will be one of our primary work sites, a place where we can grow, multiply and nurture along the plants that will come to make up our homegarden, tea fields and any other forestry or agricultural project we undertake. Under the guidance of Professors Ashton, Gunitelleke, Singhakumara and our caretaker Somaratne, we selected a site for the nursery near the field station on a flat alluvial terrace next to the stream. In this location we have ready access to water and any construction materials we might need. In many ways the proper functioning of a nursery is as much a social consideration as an ecological one – we expect to visit the nursery several times a day to check on and water plants. It’s important that the nursery be conveniently located, otherwise it’s all too easy for the spontaneous nature of our day-to-day lives here to lead to neglecting the plants. Forgetting to water germinating seeds on a single rainless day could result in their demise (admittedly, rainless days seem rare here in the “rainforest”).             After a rough delineation of the site, we set about clearing the area. Somaratne led the way, showing us how to use the local machete-equivalents (pehiyas and katas) to cut away small trees and ferns. We chopped and raked roots with the idella, a large hoe-like tool used locally for everything from mixing cement to maintaining rice paddies. While crashing around in the bushes we found a small mine, which pretty much consists of a vertical hole in the ground, about 2 meters square. This province (Sabaragumara) is renowned for the gems buried beneath the shallow soils. Several streets in the provincial capital of Ratnapura (“City of Gems” in Sanskrit) are filled with small-scale gem miners and merchants. We also came across a few polybags scattered amongst the leaf litter – apparently ours isn’t the first nursery to be located here! In terms of light management, we cut a few large branches of adjacent trees

Logan axing a tree to provide more light to the seedlings

that blocked light to the ground where our plants will be located. Our closest neighbor, Tillekaratne, and his climbing skills came in handy for this. Within seconds of deciding what to cut he had sprung up the tree, cut the limb, and slid down the trunk like it was a fireman’s pole. At ground level, we retained most of the seedlings of the late-successional trees (mostly Dipterocarps – a subject for a later posting). These seedlings won’t interfere much with light reaching our nursery beds, but will become the future forest when the nursery is eventually abandoned (hopefully after many years of good use!). Ultimately, we ended up with a 15m x 20m clearing that permits at least half of the sunlight to reach our plants. If we need to, it will be easy to expand the nursery into the secondary forest. 

Tillekaratne climbing a tree to cut branches

 

Next, to build the nursery beds, we needed some wooden boards. The plants in our nursery will be grown in polybags – 4-6” diameter, 8-10” long tubes of black plastic sealed at one end with a few drainage holes poked into the bottom. As a result, our nursery beds simply provide a structure to hold the polybags upright and make it a little easier to organize our inventory. We decided on a rough size (8-10’ long, 4’ wide – for ease of watering/weeding) and set off into our forest to cut two large kitul palms to make into wooden boards (more on this in the next post: “’Shopping’ for lumber”). After moving the finished boards to the nursery we quickly built the beds: two short boards, two long boards, and 10-20 handcrafted wooden stakes to hold them in place. Within a few hours, and after some minor work modifying a nearby hose, we had 10 nursery beds complete with a central water spigot!           

Constructing the nursery has been a highlight of our time here so far. This modest project represents one of the more tangible pieces of work at this stage in our experience, a welcome change from the endless ups and downs of learning Sinhala and adapting to a new culture. Each day was filled with lessons and laughter from our local teachers, the rise and fall of the sun, evening rain showers, the hooting of our neighborhood monkey troop, and the intermittent excitement of a snake, a gaggle of foraging birds, or the sighting of a wild orchid. We purchased very few materials, instead relying on the resourcefulness of our local friends and the vast storehouse of natural materials from the land. Most of the work was done with commonplace tools and was of simple, common sense design. Any anxiety we felt was self-imposed: the stresses of industrial society seemed distant and far away - no blaring horns or diesel exhaust in Pitikele! Evenings were spent practicing our language skills (or lack of skill) with our friends and reading under the spacious veranda.          

Beginning planter bed construction

Pounding stakes for bed construction

   

Gathering soil adjacent to secondary forest

 

soil site with a screen for sorting out rocks

While we are satisfied with the start we have made, our work is only beginning. Thinking ahead, I can imagine several larger efforts and hundreds of smaller tasks to accomplish before we have a functioning, educational homegarden.   

Hauling soil to the nursery

To give an idea of how long all of this took, here’s an approximate time summary (usually with at least 3-4 people working): 
-Clearing the site: 1 day
 -Cutting Kitul palms and processing them into boards: 1.5 days  
-Building the nursery beds, bringing water to the site: 0.5 days 
-Gathering, processing, mixing and hauling soil and sand: 2 days 

After mixing the rich organic soil with river sand, we planted seedlings

Blair and Tillekratane after a long day of work