Beauty in Growing Your Own

Rows of Marigold dancing in the sunbeams; a field of pastel Moss-Rose stretching out to meet the bright yellow Cosmos encircling a muddy man-made pond; Bougainvillea of varying colors blooming in the bright sun; ten thousand square feet of land planted with flowers is certainly not a common farming practice in the Maldives. 

If you ask Hassan Shahid why he planted flowers instead of crops, he would tell you he wanted to do something beautiful and beneficial. Flowers are beautiful, that much is commonly understood. It is the beneficial part that eludes most people. Most farmers give little thought to the benefits flowers bring to their crops. 

As a child growing up in Addu Atoll Meedhoo — an agricultural island — Shahid remembers what farming was like on the island when he was younger. Farmers did not use pesticides or imported compost; people relied on natural procedures like creating and using homemade compost. There was no need to manually pollinate the flowers. The bees and insects played their part to ensure the flowers’ bloom. Yield cultivation followed an organic process.

“You do not see so many bees or butterflies now,” said Shahid. To pollinate the pumpkin or the passionfruit, Shahid gets up at the crack of dawn. He has to differentiate male flowers from female ones to pollinate them. The pumpkins, passionfruit, and watermelons we eat may not exist if not for this process.

I want to bring back the bees and butterflies. There are many benefits for the farmlands in reverting to natural and biological farming methods — benefits for our health, for the soil, and for the whole ecosystem

Shahid

“We ate a lot of taro when we were young,” he reminisced. “Taro was our staple food, not rice. Rice is our staple now, although rice is not a local crop; taro is.” Shahid would help his grandfather plant the tubers and later harvest them. In the past, taro was plentiful. Planted in wetlands and swampy soil, the taro harvested in the past yielded bigger corms (the edible root) than they do now. Today, taro cultivators across the country face daunting challenges, as taro fields face severe taro leaf blight. Other crops are also plagued with a similar plight. Plant diseases are more common now, and pesticide use to combat these diseases have grown exponentially.

Harvested taros were distributed to family members and neighbors, and even sent out as gifts outside the local island. Farmers would collect and store some for personal use as well. Harvested taros were also collected as community crops and stored in the Kaaduge’ (the community food store) for emergencies.

The same principle guided breadfruit cultivation. Homes that did not have a breadfruit tree were not forsaken — they would receive a portion from neighbors and family members that had breadfruit trees. This is a beautiful and beneficial tradition that waned away with the advent of the industrial first-world and its mechanical ethos we have slowly imported into our culture.

Sadly, Shahid’s beautiful flower-laden farmland has withered away too. The COVID-19 pandemic left in its wake a floral necropolis; the mismanaged curfew — with its slow and untimely execution — left him unable to attend to the farm. The flowers died. There are only remnants left: a row of pink and red roses lingering in the aftermath.

“People were anxious about potential food shortages during the COVID-19 lockdowns,” Shahid recounted. “Anyone who had space in the back or front yard of their homes started growing crops. They planted pumpkins, bananas, eggplants, chilis, and passionfruit. When they planted crops at home, I noticed they refrained from using pesticides. They planted a diverse variety too, and that by itself is a means of biological control: when you grow a single crop, there is a higher possibility of faster and more extensive damage to all the plants if a disease occurs. It is always better to diversify crop cultivation, whether you are growing them on farmland or at home.”

Shahid ardently supports growing one’s own food. “There is beauty in plucking fruits, vegetables, and greens fresh from the garden onto your dinner table,” he recommended. He advocates for self-growth’s benefits too: “a household that grows their own food will not have to spend hard-earned income buying off the shelf.” He quoted prices in Maldivian Rufiyaa per kilogram at current market rates: MVR 50 for tomatoes, MVR 100 for green chilis, MVR 70 for capsicums, MVR 100 for passionfruit, MVR 35 for cucumbers, MVR 25 for pumpkins, MVR 35 for bananas.

“A family of seven can easily save MVR 1000-1500 from their monthly expenses if they grew their own crops. Plus, you would know how you grew it.” 

Growing our own food at home is an excellent idea. Unfortunately, years of unchecked destructive urbanization has forfeited the right to home gardening for those living in the capital, Male’. After concrete and traffic overtook every inch of soil, there is no space for life to flourish. 

There is still hope for social infrastructures built around home-grown food — a more sustainable lifestyle — in other islands beyond the capital, however, where exploitative urbanization’s tendrils have not taken root yet.

Despite the beauty and benefits of home-grown food, the panic-induced home gardening practices have waned away. As for Shahid, his flower farm might have died, but he continues to grow his own food in his home garden among the surviving flowers.