Permaculture advocate in Zimbabwe - too little/too much rain

So glad to hear an update from you, Rufaro!! And how good that things are going well.

Mai Kumbi surprised me. She sent vegetables again this week. My sister and I harvested a bunch of bananas from our yard, which is adding on to the week's food supply.

The two vendors that I have added to the vendors to help with peanut butter sales are still asking for it, although the sales are still very low. One of the elderly vendors said he does not need any money from us for selling our peanut butter because to him, we are just like his children. I am not sure how to be with him. He keeps on saying I do not know how to accept a miracle. I have stopped insisting on giving him a token of appreciation, but he has left me with an itch to want to work with him in a beneficial way and as usual my brain has ideas swirling, and maybe when the time is right we will do something more than peanut butter selling together. He also gave me hope that we can be humane to each other for no reason at all, so he is definitely someone I want to develop with. As for the upgrade with Apo's business, my idea of growth is gradual and step wise growth. I am not sure if my friend sees it this way, and I did send him an audio, hinting on this, and it's getting to a week with no comment on this. I am afraid to ask him about this because I do not want to push this opportunity away.
I think slow growth can help us look at the business holistically and create an opportunity to grow the business into some really stable investment opportunity as opposed to if this business gets big sudden changes, which could shock the existing operations and risk destroying even what Apo has built for himself so far. I have to communicate this, but I do not know how without appearing as someone who is getting in the way of a big sudden growth.

I put pumkin, bottle guard, and long Thai beans in the keyhole garden from the seeds I received. I will keep on trying them until all conditions are good for me to grow them successfully. We are in winter, which might not be the best season, but I figured, if I have tomatoes growing, I could be lucky. If it doesn't work, I will try again in the summer.

One other random thing is that we used lemons, mint and guava leaves to help my sister fight off a flue which was promising to be a very bad one and she was not too affected by it. Everything we used is from within the yard.

Today, I  have an achievement that is not necessarily tangible, but it is worth noting. I managed to get some funds to continue to work with Apo. It involved knocking on multiple friends' doors, something I just started practicing, and being coldly rejected of any help by most people I reached out to.

The last time I wrote, we had made progress in getting help to mechanise the peanut butter production process, which is currently manual in a way that has made it fail to grow. The problem is that everything froze because I was failing to get any feedback from my friend I am working with on a concern I had with the upgrade. The proposed approach to upgrading the system is too big for where the small business is. The upgrade involves buying completely new big machines which are ideal for the business in the long run, but for now, the personnel and the environment might limit the success of such a system.

At the moment small steps in upgrading the system, utilising the existing equipment, can be helpful in that it will be extremely economical, it will also allow the people in this system to grow and to be ready to manage a bigger system. It will also allow the business to find ways to blend in our very complicated business environment, which, in my opinion, is unkind to thriving businesses, especially if their pockets are not deep enough. We still need to keep things at a family trading level as we improve the system's efficiency before we can even begin to consider going big.

I can write my thoughts well, but my biggest issue is not being able to articulate myself well in a conversation. Everything gets twisted, and nothing seems to come out right. One other thing is, how do you tell potential help to scale down their assistance a little. I did try without much success. I ended up going to Apo to find out the prices of putting a motor on one roaster so that I can look for help. The amount was equivalent to the amount I was holding onto, that I could not use because it is my friend's the one who has been helping me with this project, and he seemed to not have much time to entertain down scaling the upgrade idea. Well, today he did give me a go-ahead to use this money, but of course, it's not specific to anything, we still have not talked about the upgrade since its proposal. I now have the chance to have a motor put on one of the peanut roasters, which I believe will bring significant changes to the small business. I will show my friend that with a few dollars, we can make a huge difference through improving efficiency whilst prioritizing stability as we develop things. A sudden growth might look profitable, but it involves so many different aspects that can easily be overlooked, for example, the ability of the business owner and his employees to manage the introduced growth. So I will be going to Apo to start working on putting a motor on one roaster.

At the plot we have consistent supply of tomatoes and some greens. The images of the new beds they started, with no fertilizer application are really good. They are working so hard now.
At home I am doing experiments of my own and the rats are again a problem. My work on mixed cropping has been destroyed. I realised the fastest way to try things out is if I have a real life sample to show, and the rats have drawn me back so much. I have started fencing some of the plants on the smaller pots, once I buy a longer fence, I am definitely  covering the key hole garden area.

Twists come from the oddest things. Last week when I visited Apo, we talked at length about what we were seeing as a huge draw back in his business and we both agreed that we needed to start shifting from a fully manual system. The part of the process that he chose to start with was the roasting process, and the main reason was that it is the hardest part of the whole process, because of how hot it is for someone who has to rotate the roaster manual for the whole time the nuts are roasted. Having the roasting area outside makes it a lot more difficult in the hottest months.

Today when I went to celebrate with Apo, for the money we have for one roaster, I  was shocked to hear him propose we buy more nuts instead. I was both confused and disappointed because we had a lengthy talk about this. He has unprocessed nuts rught now, that are queueing to be processed from people who come for his services with their own nuts, he has even stopped processing his own nuts so that no one goes back without being served. This is something I thought would make us choose efficiency over anything else in how we should use this money because the volume of nuts coming his way this season is more than he can handle. He wants to get the peanuts before their prices increase, which I think makes sense, but I still don't agree with it being of more priority than putting a motor. If he buys nuts now, they will be parked as he works on nuts from people who are coming for his services, which is going to keep the capital locked in the nuts. If he has the motor installed it will be like additional manpower and it will speed up the processing of the peanuts and it will help with the backlog he has and it will also allow him to process his own peanut butter. We currently don't have any peanut butter to sell because he doesn't have his own, even though he has peanuts.  So we might get the nuts when they are slightly higher than they are now, if we go the motor installation way, but I believe it's a sacrifice that has to be made. To just explore the possibilities, we started looking around for things we need to put a motor on the roaster and the first task was to look for someone who is experienced in industrial machines. We got someone and what he was saying was strangely affordable, and Apo became a little excited, but the problem is an electric motor to fit into a motor sprocket with chain transfer mechanism, is not common anymore and the time it will take to find  the components we need might be longer than we both want. This time is making Apo choose buying of nuts first. He is now more open to the installation of the motor being of higher priority and if we are able to get the parts we need to fit on his roasters in a short space of time, we will work on the motor installation.
I had a good ending to our discussion now I need to figure out how we can get the things needed without taking too much time.