Pekarangan
Pekarangan is a type of tropical home garden developed in Indonesia, mainly in Java. In addition to plants, pekarangans may contain animals and structures such as pens and bird cages. The gardens provide food, income, and ornamental plants, while also supporting social interaction, food sharing, cultural ceremonies, and religious practices. Some pekarangans are made, maintained, and spatially arranged according to local values. The first mention of pekarangan is found in a Javanese chronicle that was written in 860 AD. In 2010, around of Indonesian land were used for gardens of this sort.
The sustainability and social roles of pekarangans have been threatened by commercialization of its crops, mass urbanization, and land fragmentation. These factors led to a loss of plant diversity within the gardens, which consequently reduce the gardens' sustainability. The reduced sustainability of the gardens play a part in causing problems such as pest outbreaks and a rise in household debts.
Throughout the history of Java, pekarangans have been of little interest to its rulers that have ruled the island due to their minimal susceptibility to agricultural tax-in-kind. In the 2010s, they have gained the attention of the Indonesian government through P2KP, a program focused on urban and peri-urban areas that aims to optimize production with a sustainable approach.
Definition
In Indonesian, pekarangan can be translated as "land that surrounds a house", "a house's yard", or "plotted land for house construction". However, the term is widely used in scientific literature, specifically in agroforestry and environmental topics, to mean "home gardens". The word pekarangan may be derived from karang, which means "perennial crops".Scholars offer various definitions of the term "pekarangan". According to Sajogyo, it is a plot adjacent to a house, cultivated on a part-time basis. Totok Mardikanto and Sri Sutami define it as a plot surrounding a house; most of its kind are fenced, and usually planted with dense plants with various annual and perennial plants for daily and commercial use. Euis Novitasari considers "pekarangan" to be a form of land use: a system of small-scale additional food production by members and a family, that is also an ecosystem with a densely layered canopy. Further, she describes it as having a clear boundary and containing elements such as the owner's house, a kitchen, a pen, and fences. Simatupang and Suryana argue that it is hard to define "pekarangan" clearly, since its role can vary as a form of farmland to a homestead plot. Rahu et al. interpret "pekarangan" as, specifically, a Javanese home garden.
Elements
Plants
A pekarangan generally consists of annual and perennial plants combined; they can be harvested daily or seasonally. Some perennials offer harvests all year round, including melinjo for its edible leaves, and others such as coconut, jackfruit, banana, and salak for their fruits. Other perennials' fruiting periods are limited: for example, the semarang guava fruits from April to June, mangoes fruit during July and August, and durians from June to September. Perennials are more common than annuals in pekarangans throughout regions where rice fields account for more than 40 percent of land area; elsewhere the situation is reversed, and annuals are more common, though if labor is in short supply, perennials are again favored. Trees are one of the most common components of home gardens, contributing to the image of Indonesian countryside with houses less visible than the "dense, forest mimics" of pekarangans.In Sundanese pekarangans, ornamental plants tend to be placed in front of the house, while crops such as cloves, oranges, and mangoes are frequently planted in the front yard for the homeowners to see. Starchy crops, medicinal plants, and cash crops are more frequent in the front and back plots, and less in the side plots. Coffee plants might be used as a hedge in the side and back yards; ornamental plants might have a similar function in front yards. Vegetables are habitually grown in front and side areas to be exposed to light, as tall trees are rare in those areas. Trees with large canopies might be planted in front yards, providing shade for children. Coconuts, fruit trees, and tall trees whose woods are used for construction are planted in back gardens to avoid damage to the house when any of them falls due to a storm. Most plants propagate without intentional human intervention—this natural process is called janteun ku anjeun in Sundanese—due to seed scattering by birds, mammals, or humans after they eat. Because of this, no clear spatial arrangement is found in Sundanese back gardens.
Plants in Javanese and Sundanese pekarangans—especially annual plants grown in the dry season —are habitually grown near water sources such as fish ponds, open sewage ditches, and wells. Plants that need high levels of nutrients, such as banana, mango, jackfruit, and other fruit plants, are planted close to garbage dumps. Meanwhile, crops frequently harvested for cooking, such as chili peppers, lengkuas, lemongrass, and tomatoes, are planted near the kitchen.
Pekarangans in Borneo contain fewer exotic species than pekarangans in other regions of Indonesia. Many of their plants are native to Borneo. Among the plants in Bornean pekarangans that are considered economically and ecologically crucial are durians, jackfruits, langsat, and rambutan.
Animals
Some owners of pekarangans keep livestock and poultry, in a household pen. Animals are often allowed to roam around the gardens, village areas, and traditional markets to find food on their own. They are penned at night and are usually given additional feed. Other common domestic animals kept in pekarangans are fishes in ponds and songbirds, which are kept in cages on bamboo poles. The economic status of pekarangan owners plays a role in livestock ownership; lower-class owners tend to own several chickens whereas middle-class owners might have a goat or a sheep, and wealthier owners may own several cows or water buffaloes. Livestock manure acts as an organic fertilizer for the gardens via composting, and sometimes a nutritional source for pond fishes.Productive fish ponds are common in Sundanese traditional pekarangans. The fishes are fed with kitchen waste supplemented by human and animal waste, coming from toilets and horse stables above these types of ponds. However, pens for other animals are not built above the ponds, and their waste is composted instead.
The gardens may have a high diversity of soil fauna. According to Widyastuti, the soil fauna diversity in the gardens is suggested to be higher than that of teak forests. The diversity might be caused by the vegetation, which protects soil fauna from direct sunshine, especially in the dry season. Otto Soemarwoto and Gordon Conway wrote that the gardens are also believed to be "a good habitat" for reptiles and amphibians.
Researchers found opposing findings on the conservation of wild birds in pekarangans. A high diversity of birds, including legally protected species, within the gardens were recorded in a West Java research while another study in Jambi suggests individual pekarangans are not effective as a means to conserve bird communities. This is because of the edge effects of their irregular shapes, their frequent disturbance, and their proximity to roads and houses. The pekarangans used for the Jambi study had unusually low levels of plant diversity, which may account for the results. Despite this, the gardens apparently still attract birds due to their food resources.
Ecology
Plant diversity in pekarangans arises from complex interactions between several factors that are not fully understood. These include environmental stability, the tropical climate that is favorable to plant growth, and their close proximity to the owners' domestic activities. Other natural factors are size, temperature decrease due to elevation, precipitation, and climatic events like El Niño. Anthropological factors include individual preferences and market proximity.The diversity of plants aids individual plants to adapt to a changing environment, helping them survive in the long term. The biodiversity in the multi-layered system also helps to optimize solar energy and carbon harvesting, cool the domestic climate, protect the soil from erosion, and accommodate habitats for wild plants and animals. The genetic diversity also gives protection from the effects of pests and diseases. As an example, the abundance of insectivorous birds in the gardens helps control pests, helping the garden remain productive.
While on per individual basis pekarangans store only small amounts of carbon due to their size, on per area basis they hold an amount of carbon that is similar to primary or secondary forests, and greatly surpassing Imperata grasslands and fallow lands.
Natural factors
Plant diversity in pekarangans tends to increase as their size increases. Diversity of crop species, however, might reach a plateau in very large gardens. Larger pekarangans have a lower density of crop species because of more constant cultivation patterns. A pekarangan smaller than is insufficient for plant diversity and crop production. Some plant types, such as trees higher than 10 meters, spice plants, and industrial crops are almost completely absent in gardens of or less. Home gardens in Java tend to be smaller; the majority of them are smaller than, as suggested by a report from 2004. Meanwhile, similar gardens in other Indonesian islands tend to be larger. Their average size is estimated to be ; a few reach the size of.Pekarangans at high altitudes tend to have a smaller size, increased density of plants, and a smaller range of plant diversity. As altitude increases, temperature decreases, limiting plant diversity. Coconuts and fruit trees tend to develop better in lower-altitude pekarangans while vegetables tend to grow better at higher altitudes.
Pekarangans with better access to water—either by climate or by proximity to water resources—are able to facilitate annual crop cultivation. Those in West Java, when observed, perform better in accommodating plant diversity when the wet season occurs than in the dry season. The climatic conditions of Java enable the consistent growth of annual plants in its pekarangans, even in parts of East Java where the climate is drier.
Canopy in those gardens functions as a protection from intense raindrops. Most of their plants' heights are less than a meter, slowing down raindrops when they hit the soil. Leaf litter also helps protecting the soil against erosion. The role of plant canopies in consistently producing organic litter is believed to be more important in reducing erosion than its direct speed-reducing effects on raindrops. Nevertheless, gardens are less effective than natural forests in erosion reduction.