Hello ECHO Community,
In 2023 a banana circle was planted in each of the eight areas of the ECHO NARIC Global Farm. A banana circle is a permaculture technique where bananas are planted around a pit that is then filled with compostable materials like food scraps, manure, and mulch. This benefits the bananas because the pit will collect water and the compost pile will help to hold water and provide nutrients as it decomposes. It’s a low maintenance way to care for high maintenance bananas which are heavy feeders and need a lot of water.
In the Urban Garden context, banana circles are a good way to make use of kitchen scraps and gray water from sinks or washing machines and turn it into highly nutritious and delicious food.
Here is a photo update from the Urban Garden:
- Have you tried this idea, what has been your experience?
3 Likes
At the bottom of our sloped area that was not planted in sugar cane, we installed a row of 10 banana circles with a pit dimension of 1M deep and 2m diameter. In excavating the pit and building the ring, we added in layers of coco peat, bamboo leaf compost and cow manure, as our soil is a compacted clay with no organic (according to the soils report).
We filled in with pineapple starts, lemon grass, ginger, turmeric and cow peas. The last 4 rings are rather sparse since we just finished them but decided to mulch heavily instead of sowing seeds or transplanting as the dry season is upon us and we do not have irrigation.
Some of the banana pups were planted a month ago and already doubled in size.
The pits were filled with a base os splintered aged timber bamboo culms, fresh culms, charred pieces and layers of cane fodder, ash, banana stems and leaves, and weeds from the cane rows.
Everything that was planted looks healthy and happy and we are braced for drought!
This was during installation a month ago.
2 Likes
@Rick_Clausen That looks great! We’d love to hear updates on how it goes, especially if the drought does hit.
I would be happy to provide updates for the community.
Right now we take monthly progress videos but did not know how to upload them. Any help on how to attach video would be great, otherwise we will take overview photos monthly.
1 Like
@Stacy_Swartz Do you know how to upload videos on echocommunity?
Hi Rick,
Yes, if you’d like to send ECHO’s publishing team a technical video - we will review it and can make it available on ECHOcommunity for others to learn from! Please send it to publishing@echocommunity.org and we’ll review it. If they are smaller updates that you’d like to share more sporadically over time, I advise putting them on a YouTube channel for yourself and linking to that channel here! Please let me or @Steve know if you have questions.
