A key idea of Reconnect is to manage to grow our own food in a sustainable way (no pesticides, no chemicals, using our food waste to grow more food, etc.)

Until now, and considering the rocky/sandy nature of the island, I was quite unsure if we could actually grow enough food here.

After my friend Stephanie Garvin, from Togean Conservation Foundation, visited the island, she gave me an quick accelerated course on permaculture, and how we could grow things here.

Since then, I kept all the saw dust produced from our wood workshop, and 100% of our food waste goes to a homemade compost bin, which produced wonderful soil.

My skills with gardening are equivalent to my skills with driving a boat: I don’t know much, but I figure out.

And this morning, I woke up to 2 great news:

1) The baby trees I brought from mainland (papaya, mango, dragon fruit) are now in our garden, and live. They produced new leaves and seemed to be well alive.

2) A lot of the seeds we threw in the compost bin with our food scrap actually grew from there by themselves.

Right now, here are the plants we have in our garden: mango, papaya, dragon fruit, watermelon, cucumber, pumpkin, lavender, lemongrass and aloe vera.

It’s the very beginning, the (utopian?) goal being to supply close to 100% of our food from our own garden in the future.

This made my mood to the roof today 🙂