My staff find me vastly entertaining in a general way, but my bizarre gardening techniques astonish them.
A well-kept Balinese compound is bare dirt, swept remorselessly several times a day until every atom of topsoil has been removed. When I moved into my new house three years ago, it took us several weeks just toclear away the debris from the construction, exposing a vast expanse of virgin soil. I rubbed my hands in anticipation of a lush organic garden. Wayan began to sweep.
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No sweeping,” I implored, replacing the broom in the kitchen.
“
But Ibu, it needs to be clean.”
“
We will plant grass,” I announced.
They absorbed this radical concept with mistrust. No matter how many times I explained that I intended to plant over every inch of bare dirt on the garden, they couldn’t believe that I meant it. “It will be cooler,” I explained. “The house will be cleaner because the dust won’t blow in. The dogs won’t bring in mud during the rainy season. And it will keep the earth from blowing away during the dry season.”
Wayan shook her head. “It’s not usual, Ibu.”
It has taken almost three years to grass in the whole compound, one strand at a time. Wayan and Nyoman were very suspicious of this activity. At first they would actually pull the new grass up again, or cut it back to the ground during the hot season. But finally I achieved my goal of a cool, grassy garden. My staff conceded that our garden was several degrees cooler than the street, and the house was indeed easier to keep clean. Then they told me that they were slowly introducing the concept into their own compound, lifting the broken old concrete a few centimetres at a time and replacing it with grass so that Nyoman’s mother wouldn’t notice.
Next came the Battle of the Mulch. Nyoman subscribed to a scraped-earth policy in the flower beds and around the shrubs and trees. When I explained the principles of mulching, complete with nifty coloured drawings, I could see that his Balinese sense of order was outraged. Mulch does look untidy, true, but it also cools the roots of the plants, distributes nutrients as it decays and keeps the earth beneath it moist for weeks after the last rain.
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It is not usual, Ibu.”
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In other countries, it is usual,” I assured them.
They looked at each other and refrained from rolling their eyes as I built little bamboo fences around the trees and heaped grass cuttings inside. I watered the flower beds well and piled on a foot of ylang ylang grass. Nyoman observed all this with an expression of deep disapproval. When I asked him to mulch, he would scatter a handful of grass clippings around to humour me, but I could see he thought I was a little bit one o’clock.
Then came a long, dry spell. In some parts of the garden plants wilted, leaves drooped. In others, the same plants bloomed and flourished. When I pulled away the mulch from these, he couldn’t help but be impressed by the rich, moist humus underneath. Now he mulches deeply where I ask him to and hauls home truckloads of dry straw and rice husks to humour me, but I know he won’t be taking this technique back to the banjar. It’s just too messy looking.
My gardening eccentricities escalated alarmingly after I took a tropical organic gardening course from Diane Hart a few months ago. This master gardener comes to Bali from Australia once or twice a year to deliver intensive courses covering garden design, soil chemistry, composting, natural pest control, companion planting and yes -- mulching. I came home with all kinds of peculiar new ideas.
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We will no longer dig in the earth to plant vegetables,” I announced. Nyoman winced and Wayan sat down abruptly. They carefully avoided looking at each other.
“
Ibu, we have to dig,” explained Nyoman patiently.
We went into the garden and I demonstrated Diane’s no-dig‚ garden. First I placed about 10 sheets of the Bali Advertiser in a sunny spot right on top of the grass and weeds, and watered it well. Then went a layer of nicely rotted cow manure, also well watered, then a few handfuls of rice husks and some compost. I finished it all off with a thick layer of rice straw and gave it all a good soaking.
“
There”, I said. My staff stared at the pile without expression.
We made a bamboo tripod and planted some bean seeds and sayur hijau. I never did figure out how to explain that digging destroys the structure of the soil and buries the rich culture of micro-organisms that populate the top two centimeters. They wouldn’t have believed it anyway. But seeing is believing. Within a month they had to admit the vegetables were growing faster than usual. By the time we were eating the harvest, they had become used to the strange appearance of our vegetable garden. When the plants died back, we put another layer of mulch and compost on top and planted in that. “Organic,” Wayan explains kindly to visitors.
Diane returns to Bali this month, and I’m already booked into her class for pruning and grafting. I can’t wait to see Nyoman’s face when I graft an orange branch onto a lemon tree. It will be good for his sense of humus.
E-mail: bali_cat7@yahoo.com
