Plants as ecological embankment

Posted on | July 13, 2011 | Comments Off

Secret of good bamboo construction is availability of good bamboo. Not all bamboo is as strong as steel. There are many variables like age, culm diameter, wall thickness and moisture content. As modern bamboo construction in Nepal and most of South Asia, is in its embryonic stage, there aren’t many commercial suppliers who can provide quality grade bamboo. Today the commercial use of bamboo is for scaffoldings for which the concern for age, maturity is often overlooked by contractors. The contractors harvest anything they see, thus promoting a very unsustainable harvesting regime. For a long time we had planned to start our plantation but we never had the financial resources to do so. We could only limit ourselves to establishing a nursery where we have collected over 20 indigenous and exotic species of bamboo. We have two hectares of land where we started our nursery based on permaculture principle. Its obvious we love bamboo, but we also realize over obsession of one plant could lead to development of monoculture as its happening in China. Thus we have collected hundreds of plants that have different nutritional, medicinal and utilitarian value in our model farm. Read more…

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Village Of the Future

We are working with a community in Chitwan where we are planting hundreds of bamboo along a river bed. In order to avoid monoculture, we are also planting high value crops like lemongrass, ginger, lentil, chamomile etc. Our plan is to add value to these plants, for example by building schools with local resources, or extracting lemongrass oil so that we can create a unique village that demonstrates the world the best local use of natural resources. For more info http://www.abari.org/votf

Treatment

Treatment is the most fundamental part of bamboo construction. We spent first two years of Abari just developing pressure treatment system that is effective, portable and economical- in other words that is suitable in a developing country like ours. It is not fully perfected, but it is good enough to treat 100 bamboo a day. We have even exported our technology to India, Fiji and USA! If you are looking to buy our machine or treatment service do let us know. If you want to collaborate with us to make our treatment plant better we'd be more than happy to share.

Plants as ecological embankment

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