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Chirchik's AgroCenter Promoting Biointensive
by Carol Vesecky
Our team to Uzbekistan included Albie Miles, a teacher of Biointensive
and apiculture based at UC Santa Cruz and myself, Carol Vesecky, director of Biointensive for Russia. The program
included a return visit to Chirchik, Uzbekistan, sponsored by Winrock's
USAID-funded
Farmer-to-Farmer Program.
Darina Drapkin and Patrick Williams, co-director of the Santa Cruz
Homeless Garden, offered workshops in Chirchik last spring. Darina and Patrick donated
funds to help purchase a dacha (house and garden) that is now being used as a Biointensive
demonstration garden by our host Irina Kim.
Albie and I spent the week with Irina offering follow-up lectures to her
48 students in the Mini-Farmer Class and Ecoclub at the Combined Studies Center, a senior
high school where students receive instruction qualifying them for many different
occupations as well as for university entrance. Last summer, Irina took the Ecoclub's
"activists" on the road and together they taught workshops in the Nuratau Nature
Reserve and the Brichmulla Forestry Farm. This summer, they've already carried out several
more such teaching trips, and are committed to reversing desertification in Uzbekistan by
promoting Biointensive throughout the country.
We were both greatly impressed with the degree to which the students had assimilated
Biointensive concepts since last year's workshop. They also clearly understood their
potential for solving the desertification problem in Uzbekistan, largely caused by the
cotton monoculture and wasteful ditch irrigation. In addition to reviewing the basic
topics of Biointensive "how-to's" and their implications for helping protect the
environment, Albie described his 1996 research project on nutritional self-sufficiency.
For 7 months, he ate only those foods he personally grew in his garden. I led an
introductory exercise in garden planning and provided students with crop planning
worksheets, calculators, and copies of the first (1993) edition of the Russian translation
of How to Grow More Vegetables.
On two afternoons, Albie conducted demonstration workshops on Biointensive composting,
double-digging, and transplanting techniques for the dacha gardeners in the Chirchik area.
He used the D-handled fork and spade we had brought along to present to each group, hoping
that a way will be found for them to be manufactured locally. These sessions were held at
the dacha gardens of Irina Kim and local journalist Victor Starshikov, both of whom had
been gardening Biointensively for a year. Newly prepared double-dug beds in their gardens
demonstrated the potential of Biointensive to conserve water: no open irrigation ditches
in sight! Many of these experienced gardeners expressed interest in following up by trying
Biointensive in their own gardens. To encourage them, we will provide several additional
copies of How to Grow More Vegetables.
For more than 20 years, Carol Vesecky has grown food for her family
using Biointensive mini-farming methods as taught by the non-profit Ecology Action.
In 1993, after coordinating translation, typesetting, and publication in Moscow of the
Russian translation of How to Grow More Vegetables by John Jeavons, she formed the
organization Biointensive for Russia
to share the Biointensive method with the people of the former Soviet Union. This is the
second year that she has volunteered for the Farmer-to-Farmer Program.
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