2006Jeroen is back in Mongolia; and sends his reports. 28 juli 2006 - Back in MongoliaThe parts for the Hanomag could be send with a Swiss transport to Mongolia, so in the end I went by train. Once in Mongolia I found the Hanomag in good shape in my Mongol friends garden and it started at the first try. Chuluun, the farmer who was going to plant the rapeseed which we got from the city of Venlo, already planted 300 hectare of Chinese rapeseed. It was suffering because of drought; it didn’t rain at all in this area in June. One village further on I found a farmer with some smaller parcels in the hills with more chance for rain. He didn’t have money to buy seeds; we agreed to plant my seeds on his land and to share the costs and the benefits. The small parcels aren’t big enough to create the big jin-jang sign as planned and it is also hard to find enough sunflower seeds. It should be possible to create a field like this in the valley, but only with an irrigation system. This year we just make a boring square field of rapeseed of about 7 hectare. We planted 24th of June and in July there was quit some rain. It grows reasonable good. Now we hope for enough rain, enough sun and a late autumn.
21 oktober 2006 - Back from the GobiThe summer is over, it was a cold summer for Mongol standards with quite some rain; unluckily most of it fell in just one month. After a slow start the raps grew surprisingly fast and in the beginning of August the field looked pretty well; the plants were big with light green leaves and some of them had a strong steel with flowers, a small wonder while we had seeds of winter raps, which normally grows from late summer until early summer the next year. But in august it didn’t rain and the plants suffered in strong sun and hot soil. They looked burned with hanging dark green leaves and death leaves on the bottom; the ones that had no flowers before didn’t develop them. Either these plants didn’t manage to flower because of the heat or else they just didn’t change into summer seeds. They looked quit a bit better in September: they will try to stay over winter as half-grown plants, but normally they won’t survive the extreme freezing temperatures of the Mongolian winter. In the beginning of September there was a cold period with quite some frost; the seeds by then were still small and got frostbitten; they stopped growing and didn’t get a chance to fully grow. This happened to all of the raps in Mongolia; Chuluun had no harvest from his 300 hectare and another farm with a huge irrigation system lost half of the harvest. The weather turned cold for autumn in the second week of October. For the plants that didn’t manage to flower it will be an unlikely miracle to survive the winter. So probably there will not be any harvest of this small experiment, but we learned a lot. In August I left the Selenge and I went to the Gobi with some French friends (worldtravelleradventures.org). I came back with the beginning of a family: Bayar, a little streetdog from the village of Bayandalai (which means “a lot of sea”; not any more, some time ago…now it’s desert) travels with me as a gipsy dog, guarding my truck in different places. I found her trapped in the top of a pink plastic garbage bin; she was 4 or 5 months old and very hungry. She’s nice company.
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2006
