Gardening is a very important piece of Sera survival. However, don’t picture climbing roses on trellises with foxgloves and delphinium, amidst smooth paths.

You’re probably thinking, “Oh come on, Katie. I’m a little more intelligent than THAT. I KNOW that delphinium don’t grow in the tropics!”

But wait. Don’t even picture tropical flowers like orchids and neat mil flores shrubs growing in nice rows.

No no.

Here is a Sera “garden”:

A “garden” will appear to the foreigner’s eye to be just a large patch of the jungle. But each garden is actually owned and worked by an individual, or in some cases (like in gardens near a village), group-owned. (And of course, when I say a garden might be owned and worked by an individual, remember that this is still a group culture, so it’s not a task done in isolation … such a far cry from American culture – so strongly individualistic – that it’s kinda hard to imagine.) The people enjoy working together (and singing, talking and laughing while they do it), and they also travel together to take the produce to the nearest market.

Their gardens are often located far from where they live, and they travel there by boat or canoe (a trip of perhaps two or three days). Many have both a garden home and a village home, so they then live in the garden for several weeks and tend it before returning to the village.

Garden work requires both men and women. Men assist in clearing the land (a CONSTANT job -everything grows astoundingly fast over there, what with the rain and sun and all – both desirable plants AND undesirable), making fences, guarding the crop, breaking the soil by pick or digging stick (“u’ia”). Women and children do much of the weeding (see photo below). Either may be sent to the garden to harvest enough food for the next few meals.

Women go together to adjacent gardens with their children. Their husbands may join them at other times during the day, but are often hunting or fishing. All come home in the evening in small groups, stopping to bathe at designated bathing places for men or women. After they get home, they eat a meal of tubers, bananas, or sago before bed. The meal schedule is based on availability, and hunger is often tolerated all day.

Gardens yield bananas, tubers (like taro, sweet potatoes, and cosby [cassava]), kangkung (a spinach-like leafy green), maize, peanuts, breadfruit, nutmeg, sago, pineapples, coconuts.

Bananas require very little work in planting, cultivating, or harvesting (meaning the trees grow like weeds, and then when there’s a good-sized stalk of 100-some-odd bananas, you hack it off with your machete and take it home). Many varieties of the fruit are roasted or boiled before they sweeten. Probably more than a third of the caloric intake in some homes consists of bananas. And you wouldn’t believe how many varieties of bananas there are … huge ones over a foot long, tiny ones as short as your finger, fat ones 4 inches in diameter, longer skinnier ones. One of my scariest experiences the first summer I visited the tropics (in 2000), was being offered a wild banana, only to find that it … had … seeds. I’d never really noticed a banana’s seeds before, being as microscopic as they are in Chiquita’s preferred variety. But this banana had SEEDS. Hard black balls the size of small BB pellets, and literally packing out the entire center section of the banana. Frightening. I had nightmares about that banana. I think it’s something about seeing a thing you expect to be friendly and familiar be suddenly distorted … into a nightmare. (Okay, so it wasn’t that bad. But you get my drift.)

Tubers and sago (both starches) are considered staples to the Sera. Tubers (taro, sweet potatoes, cosby) grow in the ground like potatoes. They’re roots. A harvest of tubers takes 3 or 4 months to mature. Sago, on the other hand, is scraped out of the trunk of a tree (a sago palm), then rinsed (in the hollowed-out trunk, then called a sago trough) before it is cooked and eaten. The starch from one tree may last a month for more than 8 people. Both starches are prepared by roasting over coals or boiling. A sago trough was actually used in the Scripture dedication ceremony a few years ago (see photo). They made a typical sago trough (a trunk hollowed out and set up to angle slightly downward) and slid the Scriptures down the trough in the same manner that sago is washed and collected. This was to show the people, in parable-like form, that this Scripture – God’s word – is important. Important as sago.

Here’s a picture of a nutmeg fruit we came upon while hiking in Sera-land in 2004:

The fruit itself (the white part) is quite sour. The red sheath you see is what is grated and dried to make the spice “mace.” The grey-colored seed beneath the sheath, when grated, becomes the spice we call “nutmeg.”

Coconuts are a miracle food. Seriously, if you were ever stranded on an island and somehow managed to come upon a coconut … you would be a very rich man. For one thing, it is its own seed, and it plants itself. If a coconut lands on the ground, given enough time it will sprout and grow a whole new tree. Smart. For another thing, that seed floats. Pretty nifty for propagation if you live in a huge archipelago. Thirdly, they’re really durable. Fourthly, (this is so cool) they have all the macro-nutrients the human body needs to survive: fat, protein and carbohydrate. Fifthly (this is also really cool), they have enough water in them to rehydrate and refresh you (the juice also has sugars in it so it tastes yummy). Sixth, depending on the age of your coconut, the juice is carbonated (not a bonus for me, but I hear tell from soda-loving friends that this is a nice feature of the coconut). Seventh, the meat can be easily dried (a la American-grocery-store shredded coconut), so it can also last you a long time if you don’t want to eat it right away. Eighth, if you have a knife you can easily carve a spoon as you open the coconut, and use it to eat the meat (not to mention the juice is in its own cup, the meat in its own bowl). I mean, really: what more could you want in a food?

P.S. As you will notice from this photo of Joe enjoying fresh coconut juice, real coconuts on a tree will be green, or yellow, or sometimes kind of red, but PEOPLE: they are NEVER BROWN AND HAIRY ON THE TREE. Most cartoons taught me otherwise, growing up. Sigh.

In closing, let me tell you a short story related to gardening. Daniel loved to help his mom in their garden when he was little. One day on our recent trip to the Philippines, he got a shot of a village boy that reminded him of himself.

Cutie. Just picture white skin and white-blonde hair, and you’ll get it about right. … And I guess Daniel’s mom wouldn’t let him run around naked, so change that part too. But the part about him being a cute little kid with a machete in his hand, helping Mommy plant, is about right. Oh and, you can’t quite tell, but that machete? It’s about as long as he is.