Permaculture by the Indian Ocean

 

In December last year, I visited a new-to-me project that is situated in Kilifi county, Kenya. Kilifi is the next county up from Mombasa, and as one who loves to swim in the sea whenever she has the opportunity, I was delighted to have the excuse to go to the Indian Ocean in order to visit this project!

My visit in December coincided with unprecedented flooding in the area, and so getting to the project was much more complicated and time-consuming than planned, resulting in only a relatively brief visit. But still it was very good and I was keen to get back and see progress.

This past week I have been able to achieve that, and what wonderful progress I’ve seen! Let me share some of this with you.

The project is run under the name of the Asilomar foundation – a small non-profit enterprise set up by Norbert Chumu when he returned to Kenya a couple of years ago after serving the church in UK for several years. He and his wife had land in a small village in Kilifi county. The village bordered the ocean, and most of the inhabitants had grown up with livelihoods based around fishing. But recently that livelihood has all but gone, due to big fishing companies taking all the stock and leaving nothing for the little guys. Norbert was very aware that the community was struggling to move forwards. They had no knowledge of farming, and no scientific understanding of climate change and its impact on agriculture, even if they were aware that the weather was increasingly unreliable.

So, when Norbert and Mercy returned home the plan was to set up a demonstration permaculture project. In so doing, they would provide a space for local people to come to learn more about how to do small-scale gardening and crop cultivation in a context that matched their own, rather than trying to learn from practitioners who were living in a different environment. Unbeknownst to Norbert, 5 miles down the road there was another permaculture practitioner – Lennox – who has turned out to be a wonderful source of knowledge, and together Lennox and Norbert are proving to be quite the team!

For those of you who don’t know what permaculture is, by the way, it’s a system of food production and land management that seeks to mimic arrangements seen in flourishing natural ecosystems. So the combinations of crops, the avoidance of over-intensification, the ways in which different crops support each other etc. It ties in with some types of cottage gardening and allotment growing that we see in the UK.

Back in December, things had just got going for Norbert, and his first demo garden was getting underway. This time round, it was great to see so much progress. They are using a 3-row repating pattern of growing, so the first row is trees, the second is veg and the third is grass, then back to trees. The trees include fruit – guava, banana, papaya, moringo etc; and timber trees, and there are quick growing leafy veg growing underneath – cowpeas, spinach etc. The veg include onions, tomatoes (both staple ingredients) and carrots, and in future there will be beans and possibly maize as well. And the grass is grown to provide mulch for the soil and so prevent loss of water.

The harvests come at an alarming rate – on average Norbert reckons he can have a continuous crop of tomatoes and onions throughout the year, and similar for the greens. Not like our one crop of tomatoes per year: I was very envious!!

The water comes from a well which, due to close proximity to the sea is a bit saline, and affects the taste of the crops. So Norbert is going to dilute it with rainwater which he is capturing off the house and storing in a large underground tank. He then plans to use a solar pump to pump the water to a tank high enough to give the pressure needed for watering.

Some of the crops are grown in sacks and tyres, as it is recognised that not all of the locals have access to land, and even if they do it isn’t always viable land for growing crops. So Norbert is also demonstrating how they can grow crops, and not feel excluded by virtue of their living conditions.

It was so inspirational to see what Norbert is getting up to. The progress made is phenomenal, especially considering that he is also running a permaculture project in a local school – but more about that in a subsequent blog. My visit was a great reminder of just what can be achieved when we work in harmony with mother nature, rather than trying to go our own way.