Lazy Man's Farm

The photos above show an example of the results that encouraged me to write this story. We planted the same seeds, the same day, and later observed the incredible difference that a little trash can make. When I say "trash," I am referring to organic material, which includes raw materials like branches, whole leaves or vegetables and even tree trunks. Once in a while it might even include compost. But not often because we are lazy and compost requires work.

One day, my right hand man, Marcelino, planted 10 plantains. One grew spectacularly and the others produced nothing. The gigantic plantain resulted from the help of some bagaso trash on top of the soil. Bagaso is wrung out sugar cane. An agricultural engineer, who saw the gigantic plantain, told me indignantly that "Bagaso is not fertilizer."

I explained that I understood completely "but that I have very stupid plants. Please explain it to my plants."

If you also have stupid plants perhaps this story will help them grow too, and with minimum work from you.

In another area of pure rock a visitor exclaimed "This seems impossible," when he saw the incredible production from the Magic Circle. Normally he would be right, impossible --- but lazy techniques produce.

Maybe this man would also say "It's impossible" when looking at a forest. Nature simply grows. Without fertilizer or plowing. Without burning or irrigation. Without chemicals. "It's impossible."

So do we do the "impossible"? No, we just copy nature and organize a bit more in our favor.

For a few minutes put aside your ideas about organic growing. Let's examine a different way. We do NOT make compost piles or bocachi or play with California red worm poop. I do not like to chop, mix, move mountains of garbage from here to there or turn them over and over again.

Most gardeners and farmers, especially in the tropics, clean their soil of debris to look nice. Then they dispose of it often by burning. This sets the perfect stage for the erosion effects of wind and rain. Each year millions of tons of good soil goes to the ocean bottom, lost forever. After storms, the river in front of my house seems to be pure mud. With soil cover it would be cleaner. Many scientists are predicting that in around 40 years, all of the productive soil in the world will be at the bottom of the oceans. We're really messing up, folks.

Good news: By copying nature and with a few other techniques, we can improve our soil and harvests. In the woods, nature produces incredible quantities of all kinds of stuff without chemicals or serious plagues.

When leaves and such fall to the ground, they decompose and make compost. In the tropics, however, plants immediately grow up from this compost so tropical soil seldom is more than one inch thick. All the richness is in the air. This makes for enormous problems in the tropics when people burn their plant matter.

(In the north, with winters, the compost mixes and year by year forms deep rich soil.)

In December 2006 I bought 25 acres next to the Zarati river in Panama. I can say with great pride that we had the strongest, toughest and meanest weeds in the world. When we started, eight workers with machetes never won a battle in the war against the weeds. They cut grass 12 feet high in one day and the next day it was 14 feet high. It was a !"%@*.

In the war to control weeds, we started out using poisons and machetes. Now we use shade from plants that are also crops. We won not just a battle. We won the war. The weeds are short and soft.

The shade comes from plants such as bananas, pigeon pea and squash. Several of the plants also fix nitrogen into the soil from the air. Pigeon pea puts out a poison that really knocks out competitive plants. These are grown in conjunction with the plants that do not give dense shade like fruit trees. By having, for example, sweet potato under the trees, they control the weeds, improve the soil by fixing nitrogen and carbon, guard from erosion of wind or rain, protect from the damaging sun rays and the leaves are a great spinach. Oh, you can eat the potato also. Ain't sweet potatoes neat?

When I refer to lazy farming I often am referring to permaculture techniques. Permaculturists always want to use everything in more than one way.

Looking back, in the process of developing the base of the farm, I made many errors. If I could start my farm all over again, I would first have a tractor come in and form the land in beds and canals perpendicular to the slope of the land. I will explain more about that later. Secondly, I would grow pigeon pea (guandu) over the entire terrain. It is great to eat, is an excellent firewood, controls weeds and improves the soil. Four for one is always a good deal. Such deals are the heart of lazy farming.

I hope that you can start to see how the design process can be a fun game. When I first arrived here, I knew nothing about agriculture, farms, or tropical plants. Now I know a little and I am enjoying the the heck out of the trip.

It is critical to use the organic material that you generate to maintain the health of your soil. Equally important is to grow plants to specifically feed your soil. I also believe that there are times when it is smart to give some chemical boost.

Soil is very complicated. Rich soil has 25,000 varieties of bacteria inside each spoonful and millions of actual living things. Those folks that refuse to think past the basic nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium triad turn the soil to concrete.

A soil doctor examined more than 100,000 samples of soil from all over the world. Every sample that she examined had all of the minerals that plants need, but many samples had the minerals in forms that the plants could not use. Plants find the minerals in usable forms when the soil is alive with bacterias and such.

The bacteria life form, like us, is based on carbon. Carbon forms the structure of plants. Soil with more than five percent carbon is black, loose, and behaves like a sponge which can absorb large quantities of water and air, and it contains many beneficial life forms like bacterias and fungus. In organically rich soil, the plants can absorb the minerals that are in the soil.

A priest in Germany, circa 1500 AD, conducted an experiment where he grew a tree inside a pot. After 5 years, the tree gained 150 pounds and the soil only lost five ounces. Imagine. Where did the tree's weight come from if not from the soil? Surprise folks, the majority of the material, in particular water, carbon, and nitrogen, comes from the air. Only small quantities of the total materials of the plants come from soil. When we take care of soil, soil takes care of us.

Read that last paragraph again. It helped me to understand the guts of the life cycle.

In contrast, when we add high nitrogen fertilizer, we end up with soil that is no better than concrete for growing. This is because with each pound of nitrogen that plants use, the plant will use anywhere from 5 to 50 pounds of carbon. That carbon which they cannot get from the air they take from the soil. Hence concrete if we don't use our organic matter.

Also, plants fed big quantities of nitrogen are soft and sweet and attract more pests. Therefore, the more chemical fertilizer that we use the more poisons that we also need to use. Plants that grow in rich soil with lots of organic material are resistant to pests.

When we eliminate the organic materials, we create soil that has little carbon and little life. Here comes another desert.

Avoid erosion. Erosion deposits the rich soil at the bottom of the sea. It is lost forever. Preventing erosion is simple, keep the soil covered. For areas with a slope, possibilities include vetiver, lemon grass, balo, pineapple, bananas, rocks, canals, and wood walls

Adventurous folks are now resuscitating some of the dead soils of the world. They collect, borrow, steal and grow lots of organic material and dump it on the dirt. And the desert is reclaimed. Now you can go back to sleep.

Nature, using microorganisms, converts the organic materials on top of the soil to compost and restores healthy life to the soil. The micro organisms make nutrients available to the plants. Nature works with the material on top of the soil. We do not need to turn it under either.

Like us, plants need to receive many types of nutrients. Major nutrients and minor nutrients. Plants and people work the same.

Many people that we know just eat meats, starches and grease. They avoid fruits and vegetables like taxes and ex-wives. Hello to the health problems. Many people in Panama have night blindness before the age of six due to vitamin A deficiency. Many babies have birth defects because their mother did not eat well when pregnant. Lots and lots of otherwise great looking young folks here are missing all their front teeth. Eating decently is cheaper and better than doctors and maybe even better than witch doctors, if not as much fun.

The life of plants is the same. When the soil is tired and the plants only receive nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in the form of chemical fertilizers, they live but they are are susceptible to disease. Then we use more fertilizers and more poisons.

Note that chemical fertilizers never include carbon, so the soil tires quickly. The big chemical/fertilizer/oil companies celebrate. The spiral is downward and the deserts grow.

In comparison, using organic fertilizers cost almost nothing and improves the soil with not only major and minor nutrients but also with carbon to improve the structure. And that, my friend, is cool.

When I was in the Peace Corps in Panama, they taught us to do Bocachi (a weird compost), green salads, and compost using California red wiggler worms. We also dug gardens using the French double dig method. Those techniques take too much time and energy for me. Those techniques are for small garden and for seed beds. They are inefficient for large scale. So I will ignore them.

We improve the soil by using organic materials (trash) on top of the soil. We grow it near where we will use it. We do not haul material from here to there. Nor do we cut it up or make pretty piles. We sure do not follow complicated recipes or turn those pretty piles. I do, however, heartily recommend French double digging to my friends that enter international rose competition. It also is great if you have slaves, lots of slaves.

Why are the farmers not already using trash? Actually 23 percent of the farmers in the states have stopped plowing now along with over 60 percent of the farmers in Brazil and some other south American countries. This is in contradiction to the wishes of big oil so you know that the techniques of Zero Tillage work. But there is resistance. The resistance also comes from tradition and that they simply do not know better ways.

Obviously each plant or animal that decomposes is potential fertilizer. But in Panama tradition dictates that you burn the plants to keep your area clean. The slash and burn lifestyle worked fine when there was lots of land and few people but is a disaster now. We need to educate and to change the culture. Not burning or burying organic trash is the first step in improving our soil. There are unlimited numbers of ways to use trash and grow your plants bigger. The most effective is to use the trash on top of the soil.

To improve the soil more, grow plants that fix nitrogen into the soil. In general, the plants that have pods, like beans, are plants that take nitrogen from the air and put it in the soil in a form that the plants can use. The most common plants used in Panama for this purpose are beans, balo/bala, leucaena, pigeon pea, mucuna, and canavalia.

For example, on the Lazy Man's Farm, in two acres, we grow more than 1,500 balo, along with lots of other nitrogen fixing plants. When we want to fertilize a plant, we cut some branches and drop them around the plant. Lazy! Cheap! and serves marvelously. For example, when a banana has branches of balo or bagaso on its soil, it will be 2 to 4 times bigger than the neighbors that received no trash. It produces bananas months earlier than the others.

Many farmers do not grow near their houses because their soil is poor. The soil is poor because each day they eliminate their trash. A better way is to deposit it inside of your Magic Circle or put it around some convenient tree or plant. Then sit back and harvest the results.

Nine months after I planted the majority of my fruit trees, they hadn't grown at all. For an experiment, I took the leaves off of some balo branches and filled a 5 gallon tank almost to the top with leaves and the rest full of water. I left it for 5 days then filtered out the leaves and doubled the quantity of water. Next I sprayed some fruit trees. (It smells horrible, so it is best to cover your nose and mouth.) And...

Foliar feeding is not meant to take the place of regular fertilizer, but it is a good way to complement the minor minerals. Balo works as fertilizer, and also fights bacteria, fungus, viruses, and plant pests.

The majority of you have fertilizer that you never use. Your trash! What happens to the kitchen rubbish? The water left after cleaning rice? The newspapers? Whatever organic trash you have will work.

It is educational to observe where the plants grow well. During tours, when I am yakking about organic material on top of soil, Marcelino hears teachers saying, "So that is why my squash is growing well." They remembered that they have some happy squash growing where they threw their trash.

During an interview, one journalist told me "I have an huge taro along side of my trash. Now I understand why it is bigger than the others."

A common Panamanian thought is "This plant is big because it has a good seed." When we think that, we stop the thought process. Let's spend more time observing and analyzing. Note the light, the water, the drainage, if it is on a slope or a plain, the type of soil and organic materials around it.

We have two huge taros growing beside the trunk of a decomposing citrus tree. Everybody knows that citrus trees are not fertilizer and should be dug up and burned. But, once again, it seems that all of my plants are stupid. They simply do not understand that decomposing citrus trees are not fertilizer and are three times bigger than their neighbors. If we were not Lazy, we would clean the area, burn the trunk and would have tiny taro. As you may know, there is nothing worse than a tiny taro.

At first it seemed that the Green Revolution was going to bring an end to world hunger with its hybrid seeds and chemicals. But now it appears that this revolution worked to make the multinationals richer and to make the impoverished soils and peoples poorer.

When President Baby Bush entered Baghdad, one of his first actions was to burn the national seed bank in Iraq. Really! We lost genetic codes forever. Shamelessly, Baby Bush also made a law that made it illegal for Iraqis to save their own seeds. Oh yeah, that's right, the oil companies own the chemical companies that own the seed companies. The petroleum bosses, like the Bushes, get richer and the poor in Iraq starve.

"Thanks" to the failures of the Green Revolution, around 10 years ago 17,000 farmers per year in India were committing suicide because their soils would no longer produce sufficient yields. The majority of the farmers chose to drink their chemical pesticides. I don't know how many suicides there are now.

The good news is that there is hope. In the same India and in many other parts of the world, many farmers are rediscovering green fertilizers and natural repellents like the neem tree. They are beginning to understand the grand variety of ways that we can use these plants. One program in Panama grew thousands of neem trees. But forgot to explain how to use them. We now have a huge quantity of unused neem trees.

There is an opportunity where some group could help many people with a tad of educational intervention. People can learn that they already have the greatest natural bug repellent. Bugs can never adapt. It also fouls up their reproduction cycles. If neem grows above a rice pond, the mosquito can not reproduce. And neem is safe.

Neem is also a good fertilizer and makes attractive shade during summer as it keeps its leaves.

In order to work less and harvest more... use your back less and your head more.

Doctor Bunch worked for many years in Honduras constantly telling everyone to put organic material on their soil. For years no one listened.

Doctor Bunch says, "Our odyssey started in 1982, the day that Conrado Zavala, a Honduran farmer, timidly showed us his experiment. Even with his skepticism about our recommendations, he had accumulated an enormous quantity of vegetable matter in various lines of the corn. He left the last lines as they were, without trash in order to have a control group. In that same place there, before our eyes, we had corn nine feet tall and the last line of corn was less than four feet tall.

(That was the day that Dr. Bunch really understood.) Gradually, he explains, the work in dozens of countries has convinced us that the grand majority of soils can become very fertile. How? By using our first principle:

Be like Conrad Zavala and do your own experiment. It can be as small or as big as you want. They don't take much time but all of our experiments teach us something.

Yuca without organic matter around it

Yuca with organic material around it

The Lazy Man's Revelation

In the Lazy Man's Farm something similar happened. Marcelino did an experiment of his own. In one area where we had trimmed a lot of trees, Marcelino planted some cassava in an area that he had cleaned and some in an area that remained full of trash.

How UGLY! The neighbors said that the gringo was crazy. Then they saw the harvests. Now they are gringos too! While we were harvesting cassavas that averaged more than 30 pounds, our neighbors were harvesting cassavas of three to four pounds. One came in at 63 pounds, just because we did not clean the trash before we planted.

One neighbor, thinking that the great results were due to better seeds, wanted to buy some of my seeds. I told him "No problem sir, $5 per seed." He almost died of fright. "But you have the same seeds in your hands sir." The secret is in the trash.

Now most of my neighbors follow our example and harvest more because Marcelino listened to a story and tried his own experiment.

But one neighbor listened to the same stories about Bunch and Marcelino and chose not to believe. She asked me what I used, not believing my answer, she then asked Marcelino and then asked his wife. Being sure that the gringo had a secret magic powder that he would not tell her about, she burned her land to clean it. So it goes.

Trying your own experiment will only take a half hour of your time. Let me know the results. I want to hear your story.

Here are a few other ideas of how you can use organic fertilizer on top of the soil:

Use leaves and branches of trees to fertilize plantain/banana plants, bushes and trees. Our experiments show balo is great.
When trees fall, don't clean up, just plant next to the trunks.
Plantain or banana trunks are our favorite because they store water in their leaves, and are good weed control covers.
Use what you have access to. Bagazo, grass, weeds, rice water, branches...
If you prune your fruit trees, you get bigger fruit, easier to harvest and organic trash. What great fertilizer can you harvest from your live fences? Throw rice water on the plants close to your house.
Animal manures.
Don't burn. Do not burn anything! Ever!
Keep the soil covered. Organic covers prevent erosion from rain and wind. They maintain humidity in the soil. They decompose and make neutral fertilizers that minimize acid problems.
Use zero tillage. The bacteria inside of soil that has been plowed has access to more oxygen for their breathing, so they eat more carbon from the soil and make the soil harsh. Plowed soil is one of the major causes of erosion. In Argentina, the farmers now do not plow 60 percent of their soil. In EEUU they do not plow around 23 percent of their soil. The leader in the world is Paraguay that does not plow 65 percent of their soil. Each year fewer farmers plow. It is good news because when soil is in the bottom of the sea, we can't get it back.
Maintain biodiversity. The forest, with its biodiversity never has grand invasions of bugs. Everything is balanced. Different plants have different enemies. With diversity it is more difficult for a bug to get from one favored plant to another. In contrast, monoculture invites bugs to feast.
Feed plants through the material on top of the soil. If you use supplements, put them on top of your trash, they will find their way down.

Permaculture

My favorite definition of permaculture is "I am going to live more than 100 years, cure all the problems in the world, and have lots of parties with great food with other creators doing the majority of the work."

The word permaculture is a combination of the words permanent and agriculture. It is the thoughtful form of sustainable farming. Permaculturists observe more, analyze and organize in order to be most efficient. We organize the various organisms so that they are always helping one another.

There are no new techniques in permacutlure. But there are philosophies and ways to analyze that make systems better --- not just agricultural systems.

Philosophies of permaculture

Work with nature, not against it. Think of how we can mix plants and animals.
The problem is the solution; Example: two problems --- we had an ugly septic tank outside the patio and too many rocks. The solution: we used the rocks to build a spiral of herbs and plants for cooking. Now we have an attractive view of the spiral herb garden, which produces food near the kitchen. A solution replaces two problems.
Do the minimum to insure the maximum effect. If your house is below your water source, no pump is needed. No problem when the electricity is out.
The harvest of this system is, in theory, without limit.

We ask ourselves over and over, "How we can improve, eliminate, minimize, maximize, shorten, combine? How else can we use?" Staring out, with or without a beer in the hand, can be productive. Maybe you want to put in some chickens to eliminate your garbage and to produce meat and eggs. They also can clean up weeds and bugs, completely.

All things affect their own ambiance. For instance your house makes its' own micro-climate. Probably the north is the coolest temperature and the south is hotter. So place your patio with the micro climate in mind. When you plant around the house put the shade lover in a shady place and so on.

Techniques of permaculture

Use plants and animals for more than one reason

Normally people use chickens for their eggs and meat. However, some lazy people have chickens inside portable corrals. The chickens eat weeds, the weed seeds, bugs, and they fertilize. And they scratch to eliminate our digging. So, then the lazy folks move the corral and plant. And then they go to the hammock.

Panamanians normally put balo sticks in the ground to grow living fences. But it is also my favorite fertilizer both on the ground around the plants and sprayed on the leaves. It controls many bad bugs including leaf miners and the larva that destroys plantains. This year we have no larva destroying the pigeon pea. We believe that the 1500 balo that we planted are giving off a repellent odor. It kills rats and is great shade for coffee and cacao. Anti-fungus. Anti-virus. Anti-bacteria. What more can you want?

If you are planting balo for fertilizer, not a fence, a stick two or three feet high will work fine.

Have more than one way to get each thing you want.

For fertilizer we grow balo, leucaena, guandu, mucuna, carnavalia. Besides that, we also use the trash from the kitchen and from our other plants for fertilizer. How do we use them? Cut a bit if it seems important and just throw at the base of what we are fertilizing. The important part is that then we have a beer. The day's work is done.

Organize by zones

Ask how often is something visited?

The house is zone 1. nearest the house is called zone 2 and the one that is the furthest from house is called zone 5. Zone 5 is wildlife that we never visit.

For example, we visit the wood trees 2 times per year, so we will grow them in zone 4, far from the house.

However, I love lemons. I can use one every day. So I grow lemon trees next to my house in zone 2. I don't have to walk 100 meters down the hill to harvest my lemons. Plant those things that you use frequently near your kitchen.

Put that herb garden near the house and make it really attractive. Grow celery in the shade, a quantity of parsley, and cilantro, and your other favorites.

When we analyze, we are more efficient than when we just stick something wherever.

Use the different levels and times of your plants

A great old example from the Indians of the Americas is called "The Three Sisters." The three sisters are corn, beans, and squash.

The corn supports the bean vine. The beans gives nitrogen to all three plants. The squash protect the soil from erosion and control weeds.

With this system, the Indians did not need to buy fertilizer or make poles to help the beans climb or constantly weed the soil --- and it worked for hundreds of years

To use different levels you might think about the following:

Level 1 something tall like coconut trees
Level 2 might be avocado, mango...
Level 3 can be citrus trees, coffee, mango...
Level 4 can be cassava, taro, pigeon pea...
Level 5 can be vine ground covers like squash, sweet potato, cilantro...

One example in using different times for harvesting; some people grow mucuna after they start with corn. They harvest the corn and leave the mucuna to continue growing to cut down later.

Another is when people grow and cut down mucuna and then grow corn. With this system, they yield more corn in one harvest than with regular corn harvests. When we only grow corn, corn, and corn, the soil is more deficient every year. When we grow mucuna and corn, the soil becomes healthier every year.

Plants that work together

With your banana stalk, grow yam that will climb the stalk.

Grow canavalia with bananas/plantains to fertilize the stalk.

When a tree falls, grow something next to the trunk to use like mulch.

If it seems like it might work, try your idea.

Form your land in beds and canals because:

Plants in beds grow better and are easier to tend.
Canals store water inside of the soil.
You will have different micro climates that you can use in different times of the year.

Magic circle

The magic circle is a favorite permaculture technique. We planted 40 circles in two acres and will make more.

Permaculture tells us that the problem is the solution. Each family has the problem of trash from their kitchen. The magic circle is a solution that produces lots of food in a small area. Marcelino makes them in less than an hour.

Make a hole about three feet in diameter and from 18 to 36 inches deep, put the soil from the hole in a ring around the hole. In the ring plant 12 banana plants. In between those, grow 12 sweet potato plants. As time goes on throw your trash (remainder of herbs, leaves, water from cooking vegetables or fruits, newspapers, etc.) into the hole. Planting intensively using different levels copies nature, controls weeds and allows plants to aid each other.

After a while, the roots will find the decomposing material and they will party. The worms will improve the soil. Your kitchen trash problem just disappeared.

Or you can grow six banana trees with six taro and 12 sweet potato plants. Around that grow six pigeon pea. Or, whatever you want.

It is a good idea to have one magic circle close to your house, where you can throw all of your organic trash. Maybe you want to run a canal from your sink or shower into the hole for water and to use the soap and stuff for fertilizer also.

So we have an effortless compost maker/user and food producer. There is no space or light for weeds to grow.

The best ideas are the often the simplest.

Seeds

When we start delicate seeds, we grow them in a seedbed in order to avoid problems. The seedbed is above the soil and below the shade. We use sterilized soil.

Our favorite sterilization system is to place soil two inches thick on top of a plastic sheet. This we cover with a transparent plastic sheet. After three hours in the sun the soil is sterilized. We normally leave it for six hours for security.

When we want to dry seeds, we use solar dryers. Posts hold it up and the supporting bottom is made of sticks covered with cardboard. The top is an arc made of vines covered with clear plastic. Cheap and easy and the seeds dry quickly. The best part is when it rains, we don't need to worry, because the seeds are covered and protected from the rain.

Plants

Bananas/plantains don't like strong winds or to be hunger or thirsty, or to live alone. Many of my friends' banana plants are sad because they don't have what they like. Banana plants like rich black soil. For every plant we plant a balo to have lots of organic material for fertilizer. Maintain the trash near the trunks because the banana plants don't have big roots. Cut off the flower to get the bananas a little bigger. Don't clean! The banana plants also like the company of other banana plants to help break the wind, and maintain humidity.

You can give the leaves to cows and horses to eat. Grow some where you drain the water from your sinks, or shower or laundry tub such as in the magic circle. We use the trunks for mulch around other plants because they store a lot of water and protect the soil. Below the banana plant is a good place to grow cassava, taro, pigeon pea and cilantro.

Cassava/tapioca. People say that cassava doesn't like fertilizer. That is because they blasted with too much high nitrogen fertilizers. However, yuca loves soil rich in organic materials. A good amount of trash on top of the soil produces enormous tubers.

Passion fruit likes rich soil, a lot of water with good drainage. We plant them under trees that are not fragile and so we don't have to build supports. We harvest them from the soil when they fall. Just like in the jungle. Planting on fences is also good.

Moringa is a tree that they say can cure tropical world hunger. We can eat the leaves, flowers, vines, beans and roots. It has enormous quantities of protein, iron and various vitamins. For example, four times the vitamin C that oranges have, and seven times the vitamin A carrots have. Dry the leaves and just throw them in the pot with whatever and have your days' worth of health. All natural medicines in India include moringa leaves. We are starting a seed bank of them. My favorite feature is that if a nursing mother's boobs dry up, after three days drinking moringa tea she has milk --- and bigger boobs. Life is good.

Mucuna is famous for its capacity to improve soil and kill weeds. When grown before corn, one harvest of corn yields more than two harvests without mucuna.

The neem tree is one of the gods in India. It is used to improve the soil and for the best natural bug repellent. If you grow it above your rice pond, mosquitoes can't reproduce. Other advantages are that the bugs can never adapt and the neem is not dangerous for humans. Ask your neighbors if they have seeds for you. MIDA sometimes sells plants.

Squash: small leaves are excellent used like spinach. The flowers are fine salad decorations and are often fried in Asia. We multiply our harvests when we eat more parts of the plant.

Sweet potato is a marvelous plant with few problems. It is best to use pieces of vines to plant so as not to transfer diseases but you can also start with the potatoes --- they want rich soil and very loose soil too. So sand or raised beds. Once they start growing throw soil on top of the vines in various places to form more tubers.

Taro tolerates a lot of shade, so it is good to grow it below various plants. Loose soil is very important and organic material on top of soil will keep the soil wet and loose. The same rules apply for all plants that are harvested for their tuber.

Tomatoes: you can grow indeterminate varieties from cuttings.

Vetiver is used in Panama to make a sedative and calming tea. The deep roots are miners of minerals from below. Due to this and the grand quantity of organic material produced, vetiver is a superb mulch. It is the best plant to prevent erosion in the tropics and sub tropics. Planted on hillsides it makes the best, easiest and cheapest system of terraces imaginable. Being a sister plant to citronella, it is also a fine bug repellent. It is the most important plant that a person can grow on a hillside in the tropics and semi tropics.

To work less and harvest more... use your head more and your back less.

P. S. And another resource is:

Five years ago, I was enjoying a beer with a Peace Corp buddy Jeramy. While curing the world's problems, we observed five shrubs in front of the patio outside of his door. The shrub directly in front of the door was equal to the size of the other four combined.

He told me, "I don't know why it is bigger than the others. They were planted the same day"

"I know why."

"How?" he asked, figuring that I was full of it.

"Because every night when you get up, that's the one that you pee on."

HAPPY PLANTING