By Chandni Navalkha We have finished our inventory of plants! We now will begin to gather plants that we will need to replace, to figure out which sites in the home garden didn’t work well and how to ameliorate them, and to choose what plants we want to add in zones 1, 2, and 3. … Continue reading Learning about Pitekele, a “village outside the forest”
One-Month Update, Part I
By Luke Menard Since our arrival in Pitakele a month ago, life at the research station has been a flurry of activity — we’ve expanded our Sinhalese vocabulary, made some serious progress in the home garden, strategized and planned out the completion of our individual research tasks and projects, visited with several of our neighbors, … Continue reading One-Month Update, Part I
Weeds and Water – wal pele saha wadura
By Jo Hanle This place is so wet and mild that the bananas seem to unfurl new leaves every week and wings of emergent foliage float over the tree line above our research station, forming a canopy so rough, the forest clearly isn’t water-limited (Fig. 1a). The last fellows left four months before we arrived … Continue reading Weeds and Water – wal pele saha wadura
First Impressions and Day 1 in Pitakele
By Luke Menard After several months of eager anticipation, a frantic afternoon of packing (for me, at least), and about 70 combined hours of international travel originating from various northeastern U.S. cities, this year’s SLPFC fellows arrived in Colombo ready to begin their hard work and Sri Lankan adventures. Jo and I disembarked on the … Continue reading First Impressions and Day 1 in Pitakele
A tumultuous departure
By Laura Luttrell As our time in Sri Lanka drew to a close, we were busily working to complete all the tasks we had begun, which included: planting out the remaining plants that we included in our homegarden designs (785 total documented plants, plus hundreds more seeds sown)labeling each plant with a metal tag number … Continue reading A tumultuous departure
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