Darwin Organic Farm
Designing a diverse medicinal garden for an organic farm
For this project Đom Đóm worked alongside Darwin Organic Farm in Vĩnh Phúc to create a plan for an educational medicinal garden for school students to visit and use as a source of medicinal plants for school projects such as essential oil extraction and herbal product creation.
The idea was to create a model of a working garden which used only organic inputs, whilst still providing a harvest of medicinal plants for educational purposes.
We also made a plan for how to grow medicinal plants under the canopy of a newly planted teak plantation, which followed a succession plan over multiple years. This teak plantation was on steep and hard to access land, and so required a different approach to the easy-to-maintain model medicinal garden.
To reduce the need for organic inputs, we created two plans for each garden. The medicinal garden would require liquid fermented biofertilizers as nutrient sources, whilst the teak plantation would be run according to syntropic agroforestry methods.
About the project
The project required clear and detailed planting plans as well as a master plan of the site to allow for smooth implementation of the plan for the farm workers. For the model medicinal garden, we created mandala shaped beds with a range of medicinal trees, shrubs and ground cover to create a diverse ecosystem which followed the patterns of a natural forest.
For the teak plantation, we devised a more complicated succession plan due to the changing conditions created by the fast-growing teak trees which would begin to shade out other plants after 2-3 years. The teak trees had been newly planted, and so our plan involved the planting of sun-loving species in the first 2-3 years such as lemon grass and moringa, followed by two rounds of thinning out the teak trees and the planting of shade tolerant medicinal species such as galangal and medicinal mushrooms.
The teak trees were intercropped with biomass species and nitrogen-fixing legumes to be regularly pruned according to the methods of syntropic agroforestry methods. For the model medicinal garden, we build an area where liquid fermented biofertilizers could be made and applied to the garden beds.
