Vegetables in the Uma

Since few gardeners possessed terraces, most planted vegetables in their old dry fields. Since cabbage plants, unlike creeping sweet-potato vines, provided the soil little protection, erosion on sloping plots could be greatly accelerated; to counteract this, farmers began constructing narrow contour ridges. Another problem was soil fertility. Cabbage, unlike the sweet potato, languished on the exhausted soils typical of most dry fields. Farmers responded by applying ash or, if they could afford it, chemical fertilizer. Because some of the added nutrients remained in the field after the vegetable harvest, subsequent sweet-potato plantings proved quite productive. Since most Buguias residents continued in the early postwar period to grow for subsistence, many began to alternate their plantings between cabbages and sweet potatoes.

The extent of preexisting dry fields in Buguias soon proved inadequate to support both market and subsistence cultivation. By the early 1950s, gardeners began to clear new fields in pastures, using the puwal technique, and in shrub or forest land, using the swidden method. But clearing new land for permanent vegetable plots required arduous work. After burning, farmers now had to remove roots before they could create a furrow-and-ridge pattern. In the late 1950s, when carrots emerged as Buguias's main crop, this job became more difficult still, since even a small obstacle could mar the appearance of the carrot root.