Today everything looked bleak and desolate. I asked Gerry why people lived out here. My eyes were continually searching the horizon for something to see, some kind of feature. I saw a tree. Just a small tree withstanding the wind. Otherwise the landmarks are man made. Long lines of power poles that link the small towns. The railway line that goes to Beijing. The piles of rubble around small-scale mines. The road building equipment along the stretch of construction that will be the Millennium Road connecting Ulaanbaatar with China. In places there are no Mongolian herders, and I could only see a few herds of camels in the distance. The bleakness was amplified by the clenching of my gut (though I can't blame Mongolian food, Chris and I both got sick after eating something not too good at the SDA "potluck" we had at our apartment the day before I left). My outlook was as bleak as the grey sky...then we reached the gardens.
In what felt like the middle of nowhere (actually Erdene Soum, close to the Mongolian/Chinese border) we arrived at four large gardens. One of them is an ADRA project. Inside a roughly made fence the wind buffeted the plants constantly, but they were growing, most carrying fruit ready to harvest. The people showed us potatoes, watermelon, tomato, cucumber, carrots, onions and garlic. Around the perimeter of the garden small bushes had been planted that would eventually provide a hedge of berry bushes called "seabuckthorn" - look it up, it could be considered the next miracle berry. They have almost completed a small greenhouse, designed so that it both forms a windbreak but is also aerodynamic so the winds won't blow it down (the first design did blow down!). All this is possible due to a restored well next to the greenhouse. We have no data on the water that may be underground here, but there is sufficient to support this garden. The community cooperative operating it have already sold almost 2 tonnes of watermelons.
Inside a small makeshift building that might have been a train carriage in an earlier life, three people had formed a pickling production line. Using recycled glass jars, sterelised by steam over the wood stove (I have no idea where the wood comes from, but they were using it very carefully), the three were chopping cucumber, carrot and green onions and putting them into jars covered with pickle juice (sugar and vinegar I assume). They have already sold several boxes of their produce and were taking more home. The objective of this garden is to give families a source of vegetables in their diet. The pickling training has been a big hit as the families were wondering about all the effort it takes to grow vegetables that would rot over winter, but now they see how they can eat the vegetables until next summer.
After a tour of the garden we were seated in a ger and served a lavish lunch of vegetable dumplings, fried vegetable tempura (Mongolian style), and a variety of chutney and jams (watermelon jam is a first for me). To top it all off the skies opened up and it rained for the next three hours. Am I in the Gobi Desert?
