The Garden: Things are growing

Here's a mostly picture update of the garden veggies. 

Things are growing well, much more green

TOMATOES

The 30 of so tomato plants are doing really well and have started to flower and give fruit. No harvest yet as I'm waiting for them to go red...

Flowering Tomato plants. You can see that I've failed to cut the
"suckers" in time, so the plants are quite bushy.

Tomatoes Lined up in a row

Some fruit showing, hope to have some red juicy tomatoes by next week
especially because their price has doubled in the market :(

What does Danny do everyday?

When someone goes abroad to do something like this, it often leaves people wondering, “well what are they doing anyways?”  So it hasn't all been about creating a fantastic garden (and to be honest I can’t take much credit for that!) but in my day to day I have also been involved in some neat projects with my organization- so I thought I’d take a moment and let you in on the details about some of them.

A brief description of my non-profit organization:

LEAD SEA (Leadership for Environment and Development, Southern and Eastern Africa), is one branch of LEAD. The head office is in London (LEAD International) and there are 12 branches (known as member programs) of LEAD around the world. LEAD’s mandate is to develop a new generation of global sustainability leaders, and this occurs through their Fellowship Training Programme.  The 12 member programs help to deliver training to new LEAD associates and support a network of LEAD fellows.

LEAD SEA is the member program that covers southern and eastern African countries. It strives to develop the leadership potential of people and communities to collaborate and deliver sustainable solutions. They are involved with the LEAD fellows trainings and they also manage and engage in specific local programs.

One key project that LEAD SEA is managing (which I am most involved with) is the Lake Chilwa Basin Climate Change Adaptation Program (LCBCCAP):

  In collaboration with the Forestry Research Institute of Malawi (FRIM) and Worldfish Center, LEAD SEA is implementing a five-year (2010-2014) programme, to secure the livelihoods of 1.5 million people in the Lake Chilwa Basin and enhance resilience of their natural resource base. This is being achieved through development and implementation of basin-wide climate change adaptations in support of the Malawi National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPA) to enhance the capacity of communities to adopt sustainable livelihood and natural resource management practices.

Phew, that is quite the mouthful.  Basically in its simplest form we train and build capacity of people so they can better adapt to climate change.  Through the LCBCCAP we are also engaged in a sustainable livelihoods project for communities that live around Thuma Forest Reserve. 

My title here is ‘Assistant Project Manager’ so my role is to assist in planning and implementing the activities of the LCBCCAP and of the LEAD Fellowship Training Programme. 

LCBCCAP Office in Zomba

Inside the office- My desk is on the left

Currently one of the major tasks I am working on is:

·      Thuma Ecotourism Feasibility Study: This is part of the Thuma Livelihoods project and in December I was tasked with the job of undergoing an ecotourism study for the forest reserve. The purpose of this study is to see how viable ecotourism is in Thuma Forest Reserve and if it can become an alternative livelihood and income generating activity for villages in and around the reserve. It has been really interesting researching about what ecotourism really means, how ecotourism has been done here in Malawi, and devising a methodology for this study. It has become quite the research project filled with interviews, focus groups, household surveys, demand surveys and site observations. Two weeks ago I was in the field for a week and another trip is planned for April.  

Josh has also been involved in the Thuma Livelihoods project, specifically in assessing sites for piggeries and bio-gas projects.  During the field visit they kept calling him the biogas expert from Canada and he would receive a round of applause after explaining things, so that was quite funny.

Map of Thuma- the colored pins represent incidences of poaching or charcoal burning

Driving into Thuma Forest Reserve to the basecamp- beware.. Elephants!

View of the reserve from the basecamp- so peaceful and beautiful

The kids at the village of Mvululu where
we were pre-testing the household survey

 Some of the other major things I have been involved with:

·      Payment for Ecosystems Workshop: A workshop was held in November 2011 for key stakeholders (NGOs and key government officials) about the concept of payment for ecosystems, and how PES could be used in Malawi. I was involved in planning and co-facilitating the workshop.

PES participants- can you spot me?? lol

Participatory mapping exercise

  

·      ICT Supported Education Workshop: This was a 3 day workshop held in December 2011, facilitated by 3 Norwegians, which brought together about 40 education practitioners from all over Malawi to learn how to integrate e-learning into their courses and learn practical ICT tools such as digital storeytelling to help teach about climate change. The task of organizing this workshop was passed over to me when the original organizer took leave.  I see this as one of my major achievements here as the workshop turned out to be a huge success and required a ton of organizational skills on my end. I’m sure you can only imagine what it takes to organize something like this in a culture that is not your own!

Facilitator Birgitte Wegerland talking about digital storeytelling

Participants creating a map of Lake Chilwa for their digital story

  

·      Climate Change Toolkit: This climate change toolkit has been over a year in the making (the previous intern worked on this as well). So this toolkit, as well as being an information tool for Malalwi it also needed practical tools. Therefore I took on this challenge, found community based tools that could be incorporated, and am now just editing with comments from the director and hopefully this document can be published soon!

So those are just some of the major tasks I have been involved with.  LEAD SEA does a ton and always has so many things on the go- I have been very fortunate to be able to learn so much and be exposed to so many different things!

If you have any questions or want to know more about what I’m involved in, let me know!

Malawi's pretty darn beautiful!

It's been a good week for us here in Malawi. We spent the week in the field working on a sustainable livelihoods project with my organization LEAD. I am working on an eco-tourism feasibility study and Josh is helping out with setting up piggerys and biogas projects in three villages!
This picture was taken today as we were on our way back to Zomba from Lilongwe and I was reminded just how beautiful Malawi is!   So I thought I would share it with you :)

Outside Ncheu- In the distance is Lake Malawi

Garden Progress Since January

So I left you all on a lurch last blog without showing you what the garden looked like when we returned from Mozambique after 3 weeks....well, to be honest, I don't have a picture of that garden because it was so disgraceful!!! I just couldn't take a pic of it.

The friend from the market that agreed to help with the garden (to split the end harvest) and who I paid to care for the garden over Christmas wasn't so much interested in doing any garden keeping as he was "managing". Apparently he showed up a couple of times (drunk I'm told) telling other labourers around to work in the garden and that I would pay them upon my arrival. Haven't no agreement with me, no one else did any work, and so the garden went back to its original state of weeds and long grasses. Our "friendship" suffered for a couple of months but we are working things out little by little.

Lessons learned are: to hire gardeners for gardens and let the market vendors do what they does best, sell in the market; have clear written agreements; sometimes "yes" in another culture doesn't really mean "yes" as I may know it; maybe don't start a garden before going on a 3 week holiday :).

So after returning and spending a week remaking the beds, weeding, salvaging the seedlings that emerged and doing alot of planting.... the garden finally looked as it did below on my birthday, Jan 13. You can see the 2 beds in the far right corner is green with weeds, that is pretty much what all the beds looked like before.

Starting anew, January 13, planted.

Planted at this stage is lettuce, spinach, corn, cucumbers, watermelon, strawberries, carrots, rhubarb, parsley, coriander, peppers, radish, cauliflower, broccoli, tomatoes. A couple of weeks later the corn was coming up well along with cauliflower and cucumber seedlings. The coriander was already flowering (finicky herb) so I planted some more for a constant harvest.

Signs of growth, Feb 6th

Watering is a twice daily every day chore (unless it rains!). Since I could not find a hose in Zomba, I started out the first weeks filling up two 10 L watering cans at our home, about 30 m from the garden and lugged them back and forth and back and forth. At 2 cans per bed with 25 or so beds, lugging 50 pounds of water 30m and back 25 times is a GREAT workout. Who needs a gym?? It reminded me of the Disney movie Fantasia where Mickey Mouse is carrying buckets of water and magically gets his broomstick to carry them for him until it all goes out of control....I wish I had a magical broomstick....or at least a hose..

Watering the garden one can at a time. Cans are made in the local market by metal workers!

A hose!

So finally in Blantyre one weekend I bought a hose, so now I could at least reduce the lugging back and forth but I still use the cans since I can weed while they fill and it saves on time (sitting there with the hose for 1.5 hours is not that productive). What about a good sprinkler system, you say? Our water pressure is pathetic so it wouldn't work and besides the only sprinklers available are crazy expensive. Irrigation has not come yet to most of Malawi. Most everyone depends on rain fed agriculture...and the rain presented more issues as I will describe further down.

By mid-February I was excited to pick our first strawberry! Not quite enough for jam, but nice to see some results!

First strawberry picked with a rough looking haircut.

Radishes are ready!

 Around the same time the radishes were also becoming ready to harvest (after less than 4 weeks). Now, I enjoy a radish or two in a salad but I planted way more than I can eat (Danny doesn't like them at all). I chatted with my vegetable vendor in the market, he needed radishes and so we agreed that he would buy them from me. It was time to harvest!

Washing the harvested radishes with Mary, our daytime security.

Ready to go to market!

 So I ended up selling 80 radishes for 800 kwacha credit at his vegetable stand. A good deal for both of us I suppose. A bunch of 3 to 4 radishes goes for about 50 kwacha (25 cents) in the market so I got some free veggies and he made some profit: win-win...plus I didn't have to eat 80 radishes...(they aren't as flavourful as mangoes you know).

Other consistent harvests are the herbs, coriander and parsley which adds nicely to our cooking.

Feb 25th, still looking brown but lots coming up

 It is currently rainy season which means hot days with the chance of thunderstorm in the afternoon. Most weeks however it doesn't rain for days and then the cats and dogs fall. Towards the end of February, the rains were so heavy on a couple of days that half the garden flooded. The pics show it after it lighten up a bit but imagine the beds from the tree in the garden on the right side to the wall, completely underwater! Ugh, there washes away new plantings and seedlings, leaving a mess of debris and weeds.... I thought of all the Malawian farmers who rely on their gardens for their livelihood, with me it's a hobby and a lost bed isn't the end of the world. More respect for them!

Heavy rains flooding the garden.

Rain rain go away....

 And so with a new respect for the elements, the next days I dug a ditch around the garden to divert flowing water away as well as some internal canals to keep the water flow in check. The garden expanded as, along the ridge of the ditch, I planted more lettuce and cucumbers as well as seeds from a pumpkin I bought in the market ...they are coming in nicely nowadays.

Water control

And so with the weeding, watering and water control, the garden is growing nicely. The corn now has tassels (cobs to come), dozens of cucumbers are growing and little tomatoes are showing. Next blog I'll show some up close pics of the plants. Thanks for reading!

March 1st, hope the corn is done before we go!