Former ECHO Staffer Learns About Life ‘On the Other Side’

Dr. Grace Ju Miller, Seed Bank Director at ECHO from 2002 to 2006, is finding out what it’s like to be on the receiving end of ECHO’s agricultural ministry.

She and her husband, Garth, are mid-way through their two year teaching assignment at an orphanage in Morocco. Set in the mid-Atlas mountains, at the same elevation as Denver, the American-run school offers a curriculum in French, Arabic and English.

Grace teaches high-school biology, introducing her students to many of the ideas used at ECHO. She especially emphasizes sustainable agriculture and the appropriate use of resources, plus the importance of composting and recycling.

Asked whether she uses ECHO as a resource, she laughs. ‘After all those years of writing plant information sheets and technical articles, now I see what it’s like to be on the other side.’ Grace regularly receives ECHO’s technical bulletin, ECHO Development Notes, plus seeds from the seed bank. She also requested a Chapin drip irrigation system, which she uses in the orphanage garden plots to grow tomatoes, hot peppers, bok choi and moringa as an annual.

Follow the Miller family on their blog www.4morocco.blogspot.com.

Gregariously Flowering Bamboo a Rarity at ECHO

In the bamboo world, gregarious flowering is a rare phenomenon. Over a period of time, sometimes as little as two years, the bamboo plant flowers and produces large volumes of viable seeds. In the process, the bamboo plant becomes exhausted, and most die from the strain, leaving only the seed to carry on the genetic lineage.

What is especially fascinating about this phenomenon is that during a gregarious flowering cycle, a single variation or cultivar of a species will flower all over the world at the same time. In 1994, thousands of acres of a Thai cultivar of Dendrocalamus asper – pai tong keo – flowered in Southeast Asia. Plants of the same cultivar planted in Australia flowered simultaneously. This is a good reminder of the dangers of monocropping any type of plant.

At ECHO, we recently had the chance to witness our own gregarious flowering of the Bambusa tulda, or Punting Pole Bamboo. Most gregarious bamboos have a flowering cycle of between 30 and 120 years, so it was a rare and exciting spectacle to see. Interestingly, none of the seed was viable.

What are those pots for?

People were curious about rows of pots on the surface of raised beds. They were placed that way as part of a seed planting technique used quite frequently at ECHO. A seed is planted in the ground, and a pot (top photo) is placed over that spot. Once all the seeds and pots are in place, the beds are covered with mulch. The pots keep the mulch from covering the seeds. In this case, the pots were removed after moringa seed had germinated (bottom photo).