My gawd yes the rainy season really wipes out all that mulching work. Even on our barely sloping property, if there’s a rain that over saturated the soil, we lose so much of it. My plan for this has been like yours but also to one day plant a lot more thick grasses to try and catch the sediment before it leaves the property. I did realise my neighbour puts his corn and veggie crops right in the area where most of our sediment leaves the property, so at least it’s not completely wasted 😂
The Archidendron we have here is jiringa, locally known as jering. The big seeds are edible young or mature, raw or cooked or sprouted. They all taste different. It used to be more commonly eaten but now less popular and priced than petai (Parkia).
One of the staples around the Malay region before rice was sagu, a forest palm. Not sure if you have it up north there. I have not heard of anyone planting it here, or even seen it!
Good points about slash and burn. I read that the orang asli here would only slash and burn an area that is fertile enough, one of the indicators being the trees are too big to hug. They would plant hill rice after, which apparently needs very high fertility. And they only plant one round after the burn.
Yeah, we have several species of Sago palms (called Saa-koo in Thai), and I keep an eye on them as famine food! Massive plants! I read somewhere that even the fishtail palm yields a bit of Sago starch, but it is of inferior quality and thus not often used. Processing is quite a lot of work, which is probably why people around here haven't used it as a staple. The Penan of Borneo use Sago as their main staple, they usually boil it in water to make a kind of porridge.
I recently did a podcast interview in which I talk about slash-and-burn and shifting cultivators in Southeast Asia, which will come out in the next two weeks. In concert with the two-part interview I will post a three-part series of essays about shifting cultivators, and the second part goes into detail concerning slash-and-burn in practice as well. Stay tuned!
Always love sticky beaking other peoples places (without the horror of getting on a plane). You are doing amazing work.
My gawd yes the rainy season really wipes out all that mulching work. Even on our barely sloping property, if there’s a rain that over saturated the soil, we lose so much of it. My plan for this has been like yours but also to one day plant a lot more thick grasses to try and catch the sediment before it leaves the property. I did realise my neighbour puts his corn and veggie crops right in the area where most of our sediment leaves the property, so at least it’s not completely wasted 😂
Great update, looking good!
The Archidendron we have here is jiringa, locally known as jering. The big seeds are edible young or mature, raw or cooked or sprouted. They all taste different. It used to be more commonly eaten but now less popular and priced than petai (Parkia).
One of the staples around the Malay region before rice was sagu, a forest palm. Not sure if you have it up north there. I have not heard of anyone planting it here, or even seen it!
Good points about slash and burn. I read that the orang asli here would only slash and burn an area that is fertile enough, one of the indicators being the trees are too big to hug. They would plant hill rice after, which apparently needs very high fertility. And they only plant one round after the burn.
Yeah, we have several species of Sago palms (called Saa-koo in Thai), and I keep an eye on them as famine food! Massive plants! I read somewhere that even the fishtail palm yields a bit of Sago starch, but it is of inferior quality and thus not often used. Processing is quite a lot of work, which is probably why people around here haven't used it as a staple. The Penan of Borneo use Sago as their main staple, they usually boil it in water to make a kind of porridge.
I recently did a podcast interview in which I talk about slash-and-burn and shifting cultivators in Southeast Asia, which will come out in the next two weeks. In concert with the two-part interview I will post a three-part series of essays about shifting cultivators, and the second part goes into detail concerning slash-and-burn in practice as well. Stay tuned!