permaculture advocate in Zimbabwe - too little/too much rain

David Livingston wrote:Might it not be better to work out how much water you have and then calculate how much you can plant .
Is there any milage in growing different stuff to everyone else . :-)
Cow peas etc

David  

My answer to the above if everything was up to me, on the kind of crop chosen, a different plant more adaptable to the climatic conditions which can be marketed easily, would make efforts profitable and less strenuous. The place I am working on is my mother's and after that suggestion on whether it would be possible to not grow maize, I passed on the question to my mother, again looking at what is generally spent in growing the maize vs the outputs (which we have been going through repeatedly these past months). The losses are apparent even when we put the maize produced at the highest price it has ever had in the past, we have never harvested maize that returns the value of the inputs.Real life example of the 2 acre place we have been growing maize in the past years follows:

ploughing-$100

Total fertiliser-$222

labor-$100

seed -$30

making the total $432, and the highest we could remember that one 50kg bag of maize fetched is $24 and the most we got from the field is 12 bags, meaning if we would sell this maize it would fetch us $288
We are trying to consider the input vs output not only in agriculture, because there is indeed a gap in whether the choices we are making are best for us or not. In terms of what generally is planted, I can only suggest what to grow, but the final word is my mother's. When we discussed the issue on looking at growing other crops at least she did not shoot it down, she actually commented on a field she saw which had entirely sugar beans. The best bet I have is when it is not the rainy season, since the field is only planted during the rainy season, I could grow a different crop in the field, proving that we can in actual fact produce a profitable yield and that strange as it might seem it might be less costly to buy mealie-meal, after selling whatever crop we would have planted.
In terms of the water available, we have a borehole currently that pumps water into two 5000L tanks and when it rains the tanks collect water from the roofs. The borehole has never run dry on us, so I had concluded we have enough water basing on this, more advise on this is welcome.

Are there any trees you could start ? Apricots citrus for example such trees need not be pricy you can grow apricot from seed plus they will provide shade etc and if they loose leaves enrich the soil eventually these  may become a cash crop as well . Once they start cropping and people get used to this welcome addition to their diet they will want more and with their help eventually you might be able to move away from maize which I know is the staple in Zimb.
Have you read the lost crops of Africa there may be some ideas there :-)
What did folks use before maize which has it's origins in the new world ? Maybe my name sake would have known :-)
Getting your mum to change her mind might have to be a gradual thing :-)

Time really flies. It is hard to believe that the bean plant is ready to be harvested. We are planning on harvesting the beans this weekend and I am really excited.

Have you tried growing the beans with the maze like the native americans do?  They use a three sisters system where squash plants cover the ground between the corn stalks and the bean vines are held up by the corn stalks.

Today I am celebrating the past year which marked a complete turn around in my life and I am going to share some of the important moments.  

being part of a soil building generation

Hope of healthy food accessibility to everyone: discovering, areas we can improve and harvesting what we would have sown has brought hope to me and the belief that we truly can alleviate poverty if we really try and if we are patient  

increased quality time with family: In all my life I just found out my mother can play checkers last year. It is surprising that just a slight change in a family environment has an impact on productivity and growth. So much has been achieved and not necessarily because of increased income, but because of extra effort and time we are putting to try and accept each other as different individuals.

having times to just live in the moment

The maize has started drying up and I am so eager to know what our harvest is going to be like this year. We have decided to let the maize stay longer in the field so that we have as much of it properly drying, before we start harvesting it. The one miraculous area is the sandy part. The really tiny yellow maize turned into green and grew a little taller and has small cobs with good grains, which I found fascinating. This farming season is very much similar to the 2015-2016 period. The maize looked so healthy and during the silking  stage the water stopped raining which led to the maize drying up and the yield was dismally low. I am happy to say we did improve this season and, baby steps going in one specific direction, in this instance towards becoming resilient and sustainable (from how I see it), is so much better. From 2015-2016 we realized the value of water to back up rainwater, which made the availability of a borehole a priority. This farming season we need to look into improving distribution of water, because it seems the uncertainty of the weather pattern is becoming the normal thing now.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

I just finished an online course "from soil to sky" which was offered by Citizen science. There is a man who was talking about their space, which they grow olives on, and he used a phrase which made so much sense and pretty much sums up my main objective, "Growing soil". If, among the goals of producing farm products, one of the goals is to develop and improve soil, I can only imagine what the world will be like in 50 years to come.
We finally planted covo in our orchard area, which has been an activity that had been on the to do list for a long time. The idea is to feed the area, while at the same time profiting from the exercise, so the best way we thought of is to put a vegetable that is on demand, as we wait to add more fruit trees. The other covo plants, did not survive the last bit of the rainy season which had a lot of rain and the vegetable beds were water logged. Below are images of the orchard area when we were starting to put vegetable beds and then weeks after the covo plants had been planted. The other attachments are of beds I put nut skins in, almost 2 months plus ago and the soil is a little different now, between the bed which was mulched with skin (which has decomposed) and the adjacent one which wasn't mulched.  

Hi Rufaro. It's so good to see what's possible in your climate, and what efforts you do to make it possible!

the soil with added organic matter (nut skins)

Proof that you grew soil.  Notice the contrast when you watered the transplants that the soil clumps remained intact instead of dissolving like they did in the dirt in the next picture.
I would encourage you to cover those soil nodules with whatever you can as soon as you can after transplanting to prevent the sun and wind killing the soil organisms in them.

We have started harvesting the maize. Its all stacked now and it looks really promising.

I decided to check out last year's yield (when we received the best rains ever in my lifetime), against the general expected yield in my country. One of the reports from the internet presented a record of the overall recorded yield of 2.2 million tonnes, over 1.9 million hectares. From the report this is a massive achievement my country has ever had for over a decade, its like *300 the year before it. Reducing this yield to an area of half an acre was shocking (hoping I calculated properly). On reducing the area that was farmed to 1/2 an acre, the yield reduced to 232kg. This is equivalent to 4.64 '50kg bags'. That same year we got 14 bags over 1/2 an acre.... This affirms that food security is not a far fetched dream. It is achievable!!!

Amazing work !

I hope many eyes are following you in your country, as you are going forward with an excellent example that many can benefit from emulating.

Nice to see such healthy plants and such healthy food !

Fantastic!  Well done. You will be a leader to others in the future.

And you have all those stalks and leaves you can use as mulch to improve the soil when you plant the next crop!

I am in a too little/ too much rain area also. I am working on a greywater system to water my tree in a mulch pit - almost done digging! On the post above by gustavo alcantar (page one of thread), he shows putting a cardboard barrier down before multch. I have not seen this before. Why is the cardboard used?

Hi Melissa,
The cardboard use was new to me as well, but I thought its just being resourceful, using available materials to mulch. I had not given it a lot of thought, but I just assumed that the cardboard serves the same exact purpose as any common mulch, moisture retention, weed suppression and maybe eventually degrading thereby adding to soil improvement. It would be interesting to know if there is a different reason to the use of cardboard.