Yam planting season...

Yams are the staple crop on Tongariki. We eat kumala, manioc, breadfruit, taro, banana, and rice, but our main food is breadfruit. It's lucky for me -- yams are delicious. Boiled yams with coconut milk is one of my favorite meals.

Yam planting takes up a good portion of the yearly work calendar.

Roughly around May, you start to burn the gardens. Everyone takes their knives and cuts down grasses, trees, and any plants left over and spreads them all around the garden. The sun dries them up a bit, and then you're ready to burn. The most efficient way I've seen of doing it is cutting down big trees and using them as fire logs. You build the fire up at the top of the garden and then use rakes to pull it down slowly.

Once you've cleared and burned all the gardens, it's time to plant. This photo was taken in July, during a yam planting work party I went to with my counterpart and other family members from Lakilia and Tavia villages. First, some women cut the yams open and scrape out the insides to eat later. Then, you dig a deep hole (roughly to your bicep), plant the yam with the top facing up, and build a large mound of dirt around it. (The mound is to discourage mice, pigs, and other animals from digging up the yams.) You put a piece of wild cane in by the yam to encourage its leaves to grow up the right way.

Later, around September through November, you start staking the yams. You take lots of wild cane and build little houses for the yam stalks to grow around. My village cuts holes in the yams and builds these beautiful tinker-toy like contraptions; two of the villages on the other side just bend the wild cane. Either way, you have to regularly go back and turn the stems around the wild cane. If you don't do this, the sun burns the leaves and they can get moldy, too (I think.)

Then, over Christmas, you spel. No yams. Over Christmas, you eat all of the fancy foods you want to eat during the rest of the year--bread, pork, beef, cake, lollies--but no yams. That has to wait until February, when the New Yam kastom happens, and you can start eating them again.

Delicious!