Walkabout to a garden

All the villagers gardens are way past the village up in the jungle (and I mean UP)!  (They were super nice and let us put ours right next to where our house will be.)  People work as subsistence farmers here, for the most part, so they go to the garden for most of the day, 5-6 days a week.  We haven't gone out with people much, but have had little introductions to the gardens by people whose gardens are closer to the village than others.  Some people walk HOURS to get to theirs.  Joed, a chief's wife, has one that is the closest to the village, being only a 20-30 minute walk away so we asked if we could take Val to see it.

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Whenever we ask people the specific way to plant things here, sometimes they have technical answers, but usually people just stare at us like we're crazy and say "you stick it in the ground."  And that is SERIOUSLY all you usually have to do.  To get new hibiscus plants to grow you literally only have to chop off a branch of an existing plant, cut it into pieces, and stick each piece in the ground.  How cool is that.  They complain in North Ambrym about how tough their ground is, and especially women who marry in from other islands complain about how you have to dig up the ground to plant.  But they showed us here to use a hoe (or in their case, a machete), and just barely dig up the top inch or two of the (very soft) soil and then stick our seeds/plants in the ground.  Yep, they grew!  Apparently on other islands all you have to do is chuck seeds all around on the dirt and they grow.  Nice.