The first thing you learn when working at Peter Morehead's Wind Valley Garden on Yangmingshan is the difference between grey water and black water.
Grey water is created by dishwashing, showers, clothes washing and so on, and it needs to be filtered through specific types of vegetation to break down its high nitrogen content.
Far more dangerous is black water, or raw sewage, which is full of dangerous, disease-causing bacteria. "This stuff'll kill you," he says.
On a tour of his garden, Morehead points to the PVC pipe that leads from the toilet in his trailer home to spill into the canal just outside. Because of the potential health hazards brought by raw sewage contaminating the water that in part irrigates his gardens, Morehead only rarely allows his wife or the volunteers on his farm to use the flush toilet.
Instead of a flush toilet, the Morehead household, and the occasional helpers from around the world who are pointed to his farm by the World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) organization based in London, use a bucket placed under a comfy-looking homemade commode. What's left behind is covered in rice husks and, surprisingly, it doesn't stink at all. It's called a toilet composting system and eventually the feces and urine become fertilizer for trees.
The demonstration of the black water pipe serves to teach volunteers at his farm that, here at least, you are never far from what you are producing and what you will soon be consuming, so be careful what you put into the ecosystem. In this light, the composting toilet system seems like a pretty good idea.
Back to the earth
Wind Valley Garden sits on the lush mid-slopes of Yangmingshan in Pingdeng Li, where, in the 1970s, farmers got rich selling orchids to fanatical Japanese collectors who would pay millions for plants that wouldn't even flower. Sitting with legs crossed on his cluttered porch in a dirty, torn T-shirt, sweatpants and rubber boots, Morehead says with a mix of pity and derision, "Now, most of the farmers sit around doing nothing all day and their kids work in the city." He's looking to go in the opposite direction from the farmers' kids, from a suit-and-tie desk job to coaxing vegetables from the earth and keeping an eye on his six hens. His break with the urban world is not yet complete, however. He reluctantly works a part-time translation job to make ends meet. His Taiwanese wife also works an office job.
A resident of Taiwan for 10 years, Morehead started the farm two years ago to indulge a long-time interest in organic farming and to open the garden to people with similar interests. He rents the home and plot from a farmer who listed his land as a "citizens' farm" (
Though it's too small for subsistence farming -- he and his wife still buy staples like rice, tofu and wheat -- the plot provides all the vegetables for their strictly vegetarian diet with some left over to give to the neighbors. Depending on the season, he grows carrots, garlic, cabbage, lettuce, celery, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers, tea, mint, guavas, bananas and papayas.
Given the modest scale of the farm, subsistence farming has been scrapped all together as a goal at Wind Valley. More important, Morehead says, is the purpose of educating people about the organic movement, which was why he joined WWOOF, a kind of cultural exchange and educational forum for people interested in organic farming.
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