Vegetable Garden of ‘Gimbal Farmers’

Yoel and Weweh

What is the people’s response when seeing young people, students and farmers having no farming background dare to build a vegetable garden? Yoel Yoga Dwianto, commonly called ‘Beler’ and Alva Kurniawan familiarly called ‘Weweh’ are able to do it! Both come from Lampung and currently study in “Marturia” Christian  Institute of Yogyakarta. They have a simple but powerful principle: "If we are able to plant vegetables, why we must wait others to do it?" This spirit encourage them to open a small vegetable garden.

Both got such inspiration after joining an organic training  in Stube-HEMAT Yogyakarta entitled “Organic Agriculture and Food Diversity”. Yoel and Weweh determined to realize their dream to have  'a vegetable garden'. This vegetable garden is their way to establish independency of food, especially vegetables, to reduce food-cost and to have healthy living, as they cultivate it with non chemical fertilizers.

In the beginning, they planted chili in a yard in front of Yoel’s boarding room. When they dug the ground, suddenly came a woman, fondly called Mak Yah. Mak Yah was curious about what they did and asked the reasons why. Then Yoel and Weweh told their 'dream'.

Luckily,  Mak Yah offered them a small part of her farming land to be cultivated as their vegetable garden. Yoel and Weweh enthusiastically agreed and the next day, they began to prepare the land for planting vegetables. Activities did by Joel and Weweh evoked many responses. Some were smiling, some others were amazed and some people were dubious. It occured because the two of them are young people, students of theology, not farmers, and have unique appearance with dreadlocks hairstyle. However, don’t judge a book just from its cover, their spirit and commitment are very strong to start a vegetable garden. Even a neighbor farmer was surprised to see the result, “Their harvest are better than mine! I am a farmer while they are students and not study farming, how come?”

Chili, long beans, chayote, spinach, kale, squash, pare and tomatoes are planted using intercropping planting system. Further, they seek seeds for their crops by doing barter among friends having the same vision of food self-sufficiency. After two months they harvest kale, spinach, beans, and ‘pare’. Half of the harvest is consumed by them and the rest is given to Mak Yah, who opens food kiosk.

  

Currently Yoel and Weweh are preparing a fish pond as one step forward to realize integrated farming. Yoel opens an opportunity to anyone who is interested to support fish fingerlings.They both realize that this vegetable garden is one small step done by young man to establish independency of food. He advised for other young people, “Don’t be shy to do something that brings goodness!”

Happy gardening Yoel and Weweh, keep your spirit!! (TRU)