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!

The Garden Fence

So our garden was all dug up, divided into plots and ready for planting thanks to the hired help and some primitive tools.

Having the mind of an engineer, I, of course, had to create a sketch of the garden and a table of plant characteristics so that I could accurately plan the upcoming planting from the comfort of our living room chair. As you can see below, the little garden I had planned was now a whopping 24 plots (each a "garden" in themselves). 

Garden Layout

This was back in December before going to Mozambique for 3 weeks, so I thought I'd just plant a couple of things. I started with a plot of coriander, one of parsley, two of carrots, and two of cauliflower. After a couple of days, proud of my first planting, I went out to see how things were growing (still dirt at this point) and to my dismay I found rabbit, dog and chicken tracks all over creating holes and messing up the beautifully formed plots. Sheesh! 

I should have known better, chickens are everywhere looking for insects, the neighbour has rabbits and wild dogs are common....time to build a fence!!! 

Chicken wire was super expensive being an imported product, so I decided to go with some local bamboo, the locals estimated I needed 50 pieces, but I "knew better" and said 30 since I didn't want to decimate a bamboo forest or spend more than I needed. Sounds pretty easy right, go down to Home Depot or Revy and load up, right? Not exactly...the only way to get bamboo was to first apply for a permit with the city of Zomba, pay the require fee, gather your tools and work men, find a city official to escort you, hike up the side of Zomba plateau, find the bamboo in the forest and cut them down one by one. Oh, and of course you have to transport it back to the garden...either one by one on foot, or hire a truck and driver, who may or may not have diesel on that day due to the fuel shortages.... ok...here we go

First step, buy a saw and a panga knife, which is essentially a machete knife that almost everyone here owns. Like Danny mentioned in previous posts, knives are common and are everywhere. They look pretty evil and essentially are since every day I read in the paper of a robbery or murder or dispute involving these things. Some may consider my chopping down of bamboo an evil as well. I don't necessarily disagree but I need a fence darnit!

Malawian Panga knife

So after weeks of walking to the city hall trying to meet with city officials, getting the run around, meeting one person who said I had to meet with another person who said I had to meet with another person who said..., finally paying the fees (50 Kwacha a piece), gathering my hired help and the tools, only to have the city official to be at a funeral that day, coming back the following days, only to have the city escort be off on another job, to FINALLY having everything fall into place and we hiked the side of Zomba plateau and found some bamboo and went to work. 

Bamboo!

30 pieces of bamboo each at 10m long finally laid in a pile waiting to be picked up. But of course the truck I hired from our housekeeper hadn't returned from another job, but luckily he called a friend that came with his. This is how things go here, you can't plan too much, you just have to have patience and go with it and it's all about who you know that can bail you out at the last minute.

So, the bamboo fence was made after studying how the surrounding neighbours did theirs. As you can see in the pics below, the fence is a little short....looks like I did indeed need 50 pieces....but I was not going to go through all that again. It'll keep the chickens and rabbits out at least and hopefully deter the wild dogs.

Bamboo fence, Malawian style

thanks to Google for the help with the knot tying techniques

 Notice the dry grass on the garden beds, this is what the locals do after planting to prevent the heavy monsoon rains to wash away the seeds until the seedlings come up. Unfortunately it also leave a nasty mess behind not to mention weed seeds. Well, we'll see how things have grown. This is how it looked the day before we left for Mozambique with the guy, Medson, from the market tending to it while we were gone. How do you think it looked when we returned?

Garden fence 

We've arrived in Zomba!

Hi everyone! Danielle here:

Just wanted to write quickly and let you know that we are here in Zomba safe and sound! We arrived here Wednesday Oct 25th and are in good hands here with my team at LEAD (which stands for Leadership for Environment and Development). They have given us a house to live in (which includes a caretaker and security!) and Josh has slid easily into the role of "bug killer". We are trying to adjust to the idea of having 'help'. This is something we are really not used to. Steven, our caretaker comes every morning at 8am and washes the floors etc. And our security is actually the family who lives in the house opposite us. They don't have electricity, and they cook on a wood fire that they make every night outside. It's hard for us to look out our kitchen window everyday and see them there, and not feel just so ridiculously privileged..because we are..

We have learnt a bit of Chichewa (the local dialect) and we have these super funny daily exchanges of "hi, how are you? good? and you? good, and you? good? and you? good. Thank you, thank you." and we all just end up laughing because that is all we can say. So we are super eager to learn more so we can communicate with them.

So Zomba is pretty small but is actually quite green and lush. It sits right below the Zomba Plateau so when you look up all you see is green. We have been told to go hike the Plateau so one of these weekends we will have to do so. My boss gave me Thursday and Friday off so Josh and I spent the past 4 days adjusting to life here and setting small goals for ourselves, like today we will go to 'Tasty Bites' (one of 2 restaurants in Zomba), today we will go to Shoprite (their grocery store) etc. We haven't yet gone to the market where apparently there is tons of fresh fruit and veggies, so this is next on our list. So we are doing well- culture shock hasn't been too bad, but it has been super hot here.. but at least at the moment it's a dry heat. Luckily we were given a fan, but the power goes out for about 3 hours every night and sometimes in the morning as well. We now understand that the power will go out around 6pm everynight, so dinner has to be made before that.. one night we got caught offguard and ended up making peanut butter and jam sandwhiches by candlelight.. haha.. I do love that we have hot water though (for those who were in the Philippines with me I think of our time there often as similarly we shower with a bucket.. but we didn't have hot water!) so we are very fortunate.

I have been learning so much about Malawi, and all their local papers are in English, so it's a great way to become familiar with what's going on. There are a lot of issues here, one of the major ones is that they have a fuel shortage and people line up for 7 hours sometimes just so they can get gas. It's incredible. Yesterday we saw the line of cars extend from the gas station almost all the way back to our house (maybe about a 100 car line up). So everyone is frustrated with this. Because of this lack of fuel people can't go to Blantyre (the nearest major city) to get goods and often places will run out of stock very quickly. This also hurts the farmers and businesses who want to export because moving these goods around becomes very expensive as well.. so it's a mess. Just over the summer some of the major foreign aid donors pulled out of Malawi (one reason being the lack of good governance by the president) so this is hurting the country big time.. But besides all of this, the people remain upbeat and positive. I am beginning to understand that complaining isn't something people do here..

So Josh and I are just taking it all in.. enjoying all the new sights, tastes and sounds.. not feeling too overwhelmed yet.. but i am happy to have started work today so that I can start contributing to some of the really neat things this organization is doing here.

Traveling to Malawi

After weeks of preparation and a lot of waiting, our trip to Malawi is finally beginning!!

After a nice but short visit at Damien and Sara's place (Danny's brother) in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (and after picking up last minute essentials such as maple syrup and peanut butter!) on October 25th, Danny and I hopped into our rental car well before dawn and drove to JFK airport. The next bed we would sleep in would be in Zomba, Malawi...the likes of which we could not even fathom at this point.

To reach our final destination we had to drive 2 hours to JFK, drop off the rental car, check in, fly 16 or so hours to Johannesburg, wait a couple of hours, then hop a 2 hour flight to Chileka International Airport in Blantyre (Malawi's commercial hub), hopefully meet a driver who was to be sent by LEAD (Danny's work organization) and then drive 1.5 hours to Zomba, all the time not knowing what was ahead of us in terms of accommodation etc.

Checking in at JFK, the South African Airlines personnel looked at our final destination airport code (BLZ) and had to ask the person next to her whether that was in South Africa or not.....we must be going way off the beaten track if the airline didn't know even know where we were going! So 16 hours on a plane is terrifying for some people, but 16 hours with nothing to do but watch movies, read and be catered to with excellent airline food (tsk) is actually quite gratifying. Before we knew it we were descending into Malawi, with its red earth and scattered huts visible from above.

Hopping off the plane, the hot and dry temperature of 35C hit us like a wave (we were definitely not in Canada anymore leaving that cold rain behind us). After a long wait in customs we got our luggage (which was unloaded by tractor) and our driver was there waiting for us. Hooray! Leaving the airport about 5 men took over our cart to "help" us load our bags into the truck despite our constant "No, thank you's" (We should have tried it in Chichewa..... "Iyayi!") for money of course.

Driving to Zomba was a quiet ride. Firstly, we were exhausted (too much movie watching and no sleeping) and secondly, we were taking in the sights of where we now were. Africa! It was intense to go from the multi-freeway system, bridges and excellent infrastructure of driving to New York (despite my former thoughts that the odd US highway was patchy and poorly maintained) to the disorder of people, animals, bikes, & vehicles and the dismal condition of the main highway. This did not phase our driver as he reached speeds of 130km/h in a rickety truck, on a bumpy two lane road, passing cars into opposing traffic, honking at people (carrying their goods on their heads) to get out of the way, as cars whizzed by who were seemingly too close for comfort. Oh, and the seatbelts weren't working. "This is it," I thought. "Well, we had a good run, it's a shame we couldn't see more of Africa." We obviously arrived safe, but the difference between what is "normal" in Canada and "normal" is apparent. Welcome to Africa!

We've arrived safe and had a very warm welcome from LEAD. Upon arrival we were invited to a lovely meal at one of Danny's co-worker's although my ability to converse was limited having been awake for the last 30 hours! LEAD provided us our own house within walking distance to Danny's work and the main Zomba town centre. They even stocked our cupboards and fridge with food so we wouldn't starve our first days here (chicken, eggs, rice, sugar, flour, water, just, fish, beef, oil, soaps etc).

It will be quite the adjustment here but we're excited to be here...and we are excited to share more of our experiences with you all. We'd love to here your feedback, comments and so forth!