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 :(

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 

The Garden: The Prep...

I'm finally going to blog about my garden in Zomba, Malawi. It's been my (Josh's) main pastime over the last months, so I'll blog about it in a few parts.

So, having no job, no prospects of work and alot of time on my hands, I thought, "Hey, let's start a garden!" Almost every inch of Malawian soil is used for maize, cassava or veggies and so our empty lot felt like wasted arable land. So after gathering a variety of garden tools from the local market with help of Medson, my fruit seller friend, I was ready to set out and start hoeing!

Empty grass field which was to be a garden

The farming tools here are very primitive, a steel blade on a wooden stick. But it works for Malawians, and almost everyone owns one. Even large farm estates, use cheap labourers with these hoes. Even along the street or in town, you find these labourers with their hoe over their shoulder looking for work. Nope...I didn't need any help! I was going to do this myself, I have lots of time and I could use the workout. Little by little, bit by bit, hoe swing by hoe swing in the Malawian heat...whew 

Little by little, one hoe swing at a time

I started smallish, not really sure how big I wanted to make this garden, hoeing, hoeing, hoeing....taking out one weed at a time out of the coarse, dry, hard earth. What I would give for a rota-tiller (what my dad used in our garden growing up). Man, I now have more respect for the Malawian labourers, this is hard work!

Very glad to stop and pose for the camera!

 Most rural and poor Malawians would work this land in their bare-feet, in fact, it is common to see people walking about their day in bare feet given the expense of shoes. And although I now walk in the garden with bare-feet (shoes get way to muddy), I was glad to be using shoes as I hoed given the spiders, biting ants and venemous snakes that enjoy their home in the tall grasses. Our security guards killed this green mamba (highly poisonous) right next to where I was hoeing. They had killed a black mamba the day before. Thanks security!

A dead green mamba

Well after a couple of hours of hoeing, dirty and sweaty, people began to come and watch me work. A tall white (mzungu) dude hoeing is something people rarely see. By this time I was exhausted but tried to put on a good show, Canadians can work the land too, you know. Either seeing my pathetic attempts to swing the hoe or by wanting to earn some money working, a couple of guys grabbed their hoes and started swinging. I was glad for the help! 

Trying to keep up with the locals as a neighbour watches on...

Day two arrived and I went back out there to start hoeing on my own again. This time the neighbourhood kids came, about five of them with a wheelbarrow and their father's hoes, and helped clear the brush and hoe as well. Our nighttime security guard chipped in with his panga knife (machete knife) to clear debris and vines off the surrounding trees and walls.

Enjoying some Sobo between working

Neighbourhood kid

So, within a few days of starting, with the help of the whole neighbourhood it seemed, my garden started to take shape with plots of soil ready for seeding, a heck of alot bigger (23 or so plots) than I expected, but hey, how much work could it be....

Basic imprint of the garden

So why have a garden anyways????

Vegetables are very inexpensive in Malawi, so why start a garden here (also given I have no prior gardening knowledge besides the chores my parents gave me as a kid to weed and shovel). Well...here are some reasons I can think of:

- No job, lots of time. Why not?

- Everyone here in Malawi uses every bit of land they have to grow maize, pumpkins, cassava and other veggies for their livelihood and for food. Our lot being empty seemed kinda a waste, was being eyed by the neighbours, and frankly, I wanted to experience what typical Malawians experience.

- At first, I partnered with a local seller in the market, thinking it could be an additional source of revenue for him, saying if he helped me with it, we'd split the harvest (I later learned that these "great" ideas had to have come from him...as I will explain in another blog)

- Fresh veggies. Yes!

- Something wholesome about gardening, reminds me of my grandmother's garden, of a slower pace of life, of appreciating where your food comes from.

Stay tuned for the next phase...