Our hands and feet covered in dirt, we were sitting at the side of the garden areas, on the top of the hill overlooking the plateau. Jenny and I had worked there most of the day. The sun had long since passed its zenith, but it was still burning on our heads. Until that point, we had been removing weeds around pineapple plants and planting countless maize kernels and manioc stalks, so-called ‘hands’ of manioc. Now keen to find some shade, we hid underneath the finger-like leaves of the manioc plants. From our vantage point on the hill, we had a good view over the huge garden sites, cultivated by several families of the village of Dixon Reef. This was a stately area, around the size of a football pitch. However, the boundaries were difficult to discern, as the cultivation area of one family merged directly into that of another, so that the garden areas stretched across the entire plateau and over the next green slope. Looking around, I was able to identify a wide variety of crops – banana, taro, and tomato – as well as some smaller pits with yam vines ranking up. Also, at this time, maize plants formed an impressive arrangement, planted sequentially over a number of weeks to ensure an uninterrupted period of cultivation. Maize was one of the main food crops at that time, since it is a successful crop in extremely hot conditions, and there had been an unusually long dry period between 2015 and 2017, known as El Niño. Villagers in Dixon Reef, on Vanuatu’s island of Malekula, had been working through this prolonged drought and the problems it had caused, especially for yam, the most important food and ceremonial crop.