Permaculture advocate in Zimbabwe - too little/too much rain

I am waiting eagerly for water. We used up all the water we had to the last drop, last night we don't even have driking water. Today is water day, when we get water, and usually it should be coming out and it's not. We barely watered all our plants because we did not have enough water this week. This is the reason why I harvested most of the spinach leaves at the beginning of the week, to reduce water losses, I left the middle leaves, the small ones only. This is how my garden looks (in the pics), after seven + days of barely watering, of course in the afternoons the leaves will be badly wilted. They look healthy and this makes the trouble of the keyhole garden, filled with organic material, worth it. It was so much easier to just grow on the ground like in most households and the rats are not as stubborn, but the keyhole bed is now paying off. It keeps the moisture and needs cloe to zero feeding.

I gambled with the long Thai bean plants. I had put it in a pot and the level of the soil had gone down a lot after sometime, so I took it out and filled the base with cut banana trunks and added more soil, to create more room for roots to grow in. My fear was I would l disturb it and potentially kill it, but I did not, so that's a relief. For the pumpkin plant, I keep working on the fence and today is the first time I have not seen any of the leaves eaten, maybe I have managed to close all the big openings that the rats would use to get in.

We had rice and spinach stems today. I was concerned about how my sister would take it, she didn't complain so I am guessing she is okay with them. The spinach served us two meals in this week and we have 4 more servings from frozen spinach. I can safely say we can now truly afford a daily meal that is eaten by the poorest households, of starch and kale, which can be eaten daily in bad times. This is without any assistance from our sister.

I tried to bring up the time issue with my sister and it was almost going south. I was not direct, and I don't think she has a clue of what I want to say. Tonight I am going to be direct, and I will ask her to help me on how I should have communicated softly. I have done all the actions I can possibly do I am not getting my message through.

Today is not the best day for bringing up my issue. I had a discussion with both my sisters on whether we need to verbalize values and consciously plan some common ones and they seem to believe these things just happen on their own. So I am still going to wait for an ideal time. I will not push to verbalize things too much, but things are changing a lot and we cannot afford not to talk about somethings for us  to have unified actions to make things better and in a direction that's intentional.

I feel betrayed today. I mentioned earlier that this month we will be eating the chickens we have. We we got our share and we found that the chickens had eggs inside of them. I cannot help thinking that Mai Kumbi and her family have been eating eggs and claiming that the chickens have not been laying any eggs. I am trying to find ways to make our place profitable with the little we have and if there is a chance that they have been eating eggs and lying about it, it is not fair. Maybe we could have been adding pan cakes to our meals for some time now....

We were not able to fetch enough water for the week because the hours we got water were few. So again this week we have very little water for watering plants. I cut beet greens and we had them for lunch. I actually like them. This is the 3rd day in a space of two weeks when our relish is from the keyhole garden.

My sister has started putting her own plants in pots. She has a strawberry plant she planted and it already has fruit.

I woke up to seeing a male pumkin flower on my plant and the plant still looks healthy there is no mould on the leaves. I am still working on getting the rats out, they keep finding a way into the fenced area.
I have started planting sweet potatoes in bags.

The plants are not doing well in the heat anymore. We talked about how we want to use our water with my sister in normal times. We are to fetch enough water to use in the house as well as watering our plants. Then we will also do our washen as the week ends, as opposed to doing it on a Saturday. This gives us enough time to concentrate on just fetching water on the days we get water, which is Saturday and Sunday. I assumed that when we do not get enough water, we will remove washing from within the week and put it back on Saturday. My sister sees it differently.

I can not go against what we spoke about, but I am tempted to sneak some water out of the house. The desire is so strong, and I don't want to start another conversation on this because already I have pending issues, and I am boring my sisters with talks. Relationships have a huge impact on progress and also on the choice of actions people end up doing. I am almost going to steal water. These moments are very humbling, and in life I will judge people less.

All the areas I am focusing on,  seem to be changing levels at the same time. I spent the last week + working out  where I need things to go. I will start with the easiest of them, the keyhole garden. The plants are growing beautifully. The beets I transplanted have changed and I enjoy watching my sister picking things from the garden. The rats are now digging from underneath the wire mesh.  However unlike all the other times, this time as I am figuring out how to deal with the rats, I know it's me who has an upper hand and a couple of plants will be damaged, but I cannot take things to heart, because this is life. It's a constant battle until I find a solution.

My plan is to use whatever resource I have. The level of the soil within the beds is lowering daily and this is starting to create a gap between the soil and the wire mesh, so I fill the edges with soil. Then I found some really old fence and laid it around the plants, followed by potato sacks and then a lot of twigs which I got from the guava tree. Last night was the first night after putting these layers and it's the first night in 2 days that no rats got into the spinach area. All I need is to keep the nice spinach plants big and healthy until the 8th. I will be showing mai Kumbi the garden, for her to see what can be possible especially with beets if we feed our soil good enough.

After this I will be taking care of the area but the actual plan is to allow the soil to go as low as is possible and I will put the mesh right around the pavers layer as well, to reduce any possibility of rats getting into the bed.

I managed to talk to my sister about my issue with our shared times. This time I didn't confront her directly and it opened up a whole new chapter, conversation wise for us. I did acknowledge that I needed to be less direct with my communication, so I kept my feelings for long, trying to figure out a less direct way of communicating and it didn't work. I went to her for help, with a way to communicate my issue and I told her what it was I was struggling with, and she gladly helped me with alternative ways of sending the message. She also heard what I wanted to tell her in the process. Now its a battle of who keeps time better. On the day, I had cooking duty and we have devotion at 6pm. We do this as we take our evening tea. I completely forgot I was on cooking duty, do I didn't make tea and my sister sat on her sofa chilled. About 30min later I remembered and I was all over the place. She had the widest smile and she knew all this while that I was supposed to make tea and we were 30 min late for devotion. She just told me I need to take it easy with life and we laughed about it. This would have gone a completely different way if roles were flipped. I took note of this and I am learning.

Where we are now with my sister:

The slight confidence I developed in our communication led me to think it was now time to start talking about being productive outside the house. She has grown in the past years from being very depressed and now she is so much better. It was difficult for her to do much, but when she would do anything she would do things so good. Now she is very involved around the house and in helping me sell the peanut butter. I felt it was time to stretch this. We talked about being productive and it was a good talk. Because the plot is the closest opportunity for us, she will have beds of her own that she does projects on, taking care of everything from the planning, finding resources and everything she needs for her to harvest. This is running in parallel with where I am taking my relationship with mai Kumbi to, (I will talk about his in my next post).

Rufaro, can you capture dew at night, with a sheet of plastic directing any moisture to a container?
Do you have dew at all?
As an aside, I have dealt with depression for many years, care is needed by anybody getting me to do things I have no or little interest in.
Logic does not always apply in such conversations.

Thanks John.

It's dry, there is no dew. About my sister I learnt about depression the hard way. It's not something that is considered a problem in too many households, so for my sister to even know she had depression was a good thing for her. I only realised it after she told me a number of times when I would expect more from her. It didn't make sense initially until I started being conscious of traits that depressed people have when I would watch movies and watch my sister and I became more understanding.

So over the weekend, a friend offered to help me at the plot with the next step I am getting into, of engaging a paid person to work in parallel with mai Kumbi's family ( more when I talk about the plot so that I don't mix up things). I automatically went to my sister and started making plans including her in them, it took me a night to realise that I just assumed she will want to do what I am doing and that she had nothing of her own planned. I then had a talk with her the next day, highlighting this and removing "we" from my projects to let her know that we are individuals and she needs to have her own time to figure out who she is and what she wants to do. She was the one who chose to join me, but she will be taking care of her own beds, her own way.

The heat in the past days was very high. To protect the pumkin leaves which were wilting even when I would have watered the plant, I threw some banana leaves on top of the fence protecting the pumpkin plant and the shade was goodbenough to keep it from wilting. We started eating leaves from the pumpkin plant today. My initial plan was not to eat the leaves and to allow the plant to grow without being disturbed. Its the first plant in the yard that has not had mould on the leaves. I changed my mind when I saw a tiny hole on the first female flower. Some pest got to it and now its turning yellow and its not growing.

It seems there may be dew in your area, you may be missing it.
"Understanding Dew in Harare
• Dew Point: Harare often records nighttime and early morning dew points ranging from 45°F to 56°F depending on the season and recent moisture.
• Conditions: Dew appears most often in the early morning hours before sunrise when temperatures drop close to the low temperature forecast.
• Seasonality: It is more common during humid or transitional periods when moisture levels in the air are higher."
If you can harvest it you may be surprised at the volume of water coming each night.
You can expect to harvest roughly 0.1 to 0.5 litres of water per square metre of collection surface per night from dew in Harare.
Starting with a sheet of plastic suspended in the air, it can be collected off roofs as well.

John, I looked more at water harvesting from dew collection and it's far from what I was imagining could be possible. I had an image of wet grass in the morning, which usually happens when we are in the rainy season and there is moisture in the air. I could hear you, but I didn't  exactly understand I think, the words were making sense but not the idea (I don't even know if this makes sense). After a little search and seeing images I have a clear picture of what you were saying. I think this is an interesting concept indeed. I hope I will be able to share if I fetch some water this way.  

Today I woke up and it was raining, I managed to fetch some water. It is odd though that it's raining this much now. It is also cold like we are in winter.

John C Daley wrote:Rufaro, can you capture dew at night, with a sheet of plastic directing any moisture to a container?

Thank you for this fantastic reminder. Can you point to any further discussion of the practicalities of dew collection? Many thanks.