permaculture advocate in Zimbabwe - too little/too much rain

Rufaro Makamure wrote:The female flowers on my pumpkin plant turned yellow before even flowering. I am putting a shade as its very hot these days and it could be the reason why. Both the female flowers had no bite or prick on them, also the white mould is not as much as it was, so it's encouraging.

That's very common in the hot dry season. If they continue to drop the fruit when your shade is over it,  then just eat the leaves :-)

They grow for many months, so if you keep it alive until rainy season it will produce.

For my pumpkins, the first female flowers often fall off. Sometimes I can see a reason (lots of rain, they rot, or more often wind/storms) but sometimes not.
I agree with Nathanael- once they start going, I might get 6 fruit off the same plant (and I don't bother pinching/pruning or anything else, just cutting off the leaves that show mildew).

John C Daley wrote:Rufaro, I saw your note about lots of rain a while ago and no water for the maize.
Can you capture any of that rainwater to use later?

We have 2 * 5000l tanks that capture rain from the roof, a pit for harvesting water and we designed the raised bed area to fetch as much runoff as is possible. I do admit rain water collection is something I need to learn more about as we progress, maybe by visiting different places with good systems and also doing a lot of searching on the internet to see how we can best take advantage of when there is rain.

It's just started raining and its so much wind and a lot of rain with hails stones. The switch from the high heat is insane.

I thought writing personal stories would show that little, seemingly irrelevant actions, are actually the things that shape us. I also thought it would help those that are making some decisions see how valuable their efforts are in the present time. I was wrong on this one. I still believe in this, but the effect of doing this is far from what I expected.

I seem to be hitting brick walls a lot these days.

Last week's plan was to push the selling of peanut butter as much as we could. We had to stop, before even starting, because although Apo had managed to get peanuts, he didn't have enough bottles to package the peanut butter in, for us. The ones we want are the original $3 bottles which are a lot bigger than the ones that are being sold in the streets these days. Since Apo promised to keep the size of our bottles big, he is willing to go an extra mile for us and look for the size we want, even if it means an extra cost to him. He brought them and we received our peanut butter. We now get to see if we can grow our market.

I have included in the pictures, the different bottles that are used in the market. The one with the red cap is the small one which is in the market for $3, the one with the yellow cap is the big one and is the original $3 size.