[?]y’ll Grow Everything

Experiment In Self Help [?]y’ll Grow Everything [?]m Pineapples To [?]paws And Parsnips

By a Staff Writer

Mr. Barry Philp owns and man the Mocambo Hotel, at Nadi irt, Fiji, through which pass mnds of airways travellers. A ?rtion of them, by arrange with the air transport corn 's, is fed at the Mocambo.

CIR collective appetite, in srms of root crops and salads, ggs and bacon, pawpaws and pples, is simply enormous, herto, supplies have come ands of miles by ship, or reds of lorry miles by road. ;h a planner like Barry Philp, text step was inevitable. He it 500 acres near Queens Park, oga Coast, not far from Dka. There he found a neat, valley, permanent water, some g hillsides. Early in 1958, he Ir. and Mrs. G. L. Wallace in n the place, erected a lot of ngs, provided all sorts of rs and cultivators. i, twice a week, a lorry leaves Kula with at least 1,000 s weight of farm and garden ce, for the insatiable kitchens 5 Mocambo Hotel, the floor of the valley there series of vegetable gardens, iccommodation for thousands r ls and a growing line of pigs, is an irrigation system, throw ater all over this wide area.

Rf of 20 Indians and Fijians production moving, iding in one place, I saw, ig luxuriantly in that hot valley, silver beet, carrots,

celery, pumpkins, lettuce, Spanish onions, English and Chinese cab bage, tomatoes, parsnips, French beans, kolrabbi, pawpaw, yams, mint, pineapples, rockmelons, cucumbers, endives, tapioca—even some heroic English potatoes.

Fascinated The planning of this enterprise, and the results, have fascinated Barry Philp. He spends more time here with Mr. Wallace than at the hotel.

A pleasant hobby—and, on the face of it, profitable.

He and Mr. Wallace have done something interesting in irrigation.

They are siphoning water over a hill and, using gravitation only, are bringing it into the valley sprayers under good pressure.

Up beyond the first hill, they found a gulch, with a narrow neck.

They put a dam in the neck and soon accumulated 6,000,000 gallons.

To get it into the gardens, far below, they had to lift it over a 26 ft ridge.

Local experts said it could not be done. But they tried the siphon

system; and, once they had found a" couple of small leaks in the pipe line, it worked perfectly. Now the dam is being enlarged to hold 60 million gallons.

The Lesson

With all this water, and scientific contour cultivation of the sur rounding hills—now proceeding— Barry Philp’s fruit and vegetable farm at Tubu Kula is going to pay off.

The lesson is: Fiji can produce almost anything in tropical and sub tropical foodstuffs—but you must have solid finance to carry out a large-scale plan involving powered farm implements and controlled irrigation.

Mr. H. P. Williams, a road re search expert from the UK Depart ment of Scientific and Industrial Research, recently spent 10 days in Fiji, inspecting the Colony’s roads.

Part of Mr. Barry Philp's cultivated valley.

Mr. Philp is on the right, with the mana ger, Mr. Wallace, in the centre.

This photo shows how the water is syphoned from the dam (at right) over a 26 ft. ridqe, into the cultivated valley, which is out of the picture, down on the left.