Permaculture advocate in Zimbabwe - too little/too much rain

I have used pine wood chips with no noticed plant problems. I don't have chickens, but I think if the poop is too fresh, that might burn your plants. If that is a problem, leaving it in a pile to compost ought to fix it. I don't know how long that would take in your climate, but surely it would be ready by next spring.

My plan with sales has been to sell to the people who live around me, but some of them are not paying for the vegetables they get. Because we are still small, we cannot afford to have these losses and I have decided to find a market in town and when we are stable I can concentrate on those that are around me.
I was helped once more by the peanut butter guy to find a person in town who bought my vegetables ( I am realizing my circle of my go to people is small, but at least I have one sure one). Then Kumbi's mother volunteered to go with our orders whenever we will have, on her way to her work place, which will temporarily cut our transport cost until we can manage this.

I am pushing hard for our revenue to make sense, Kumbi is really believing in what we are doing and I need for him to earn properly, that way he won't be pushed away by the need to survive.

We got an order of x6 yesterday's order....! The people are buying spring onion too, I got it years ago but we were never successful at selling it and I kept a few of it with the hope that one day we would find a market.

I'm now properly mapping out every inch of our garden beds to see how many plants we can grow and possibly calculate how much we can really earn from them.

On the side of business ethics that we are trying to develop with my friend, ethics that are built on mainly trust, integrity and empathy I am finding out how our culture contributes to people manipulating each other and in some way slowing down progress.

All the small businesses I am working with so far are people who I have relations with, which is how I would have known them, but I
started knowing them in the recent years of my life and because I am not as social, so we were kind of strangers to each other before my conscious effort to connect with people that I am now making.

So the chicken lady is a distant aunt who is a stay home mum and she needed an income but had no money to work on the project she had in mind. I talked to my friend, the one whose mission is to help small businesses and he was willing to help. My aunt has to give some small interest monthly. When the time for her to bring interest came she started talking about how she needed to send her children to school early and afterwards she will be occupied with church things, meaning there will be no time to meet with me. The agreement all of a sudden did not mean anything and to a certain extent because she is a relative I had to understand. Well I didn't and I was surprised that she found time to bring the money.
A few days later she talked about bringing back money from peanut butter sales she made. I had given her a case of peanut butter for her to sell,  that I had taken on credit, hoping that she will add to her income and at the same time the peanut butter guy will have gotten a customer who would definitely pay on time for the peanut butter they would have taken. This was because I had assumed my aunt would be empathetic in how she would work with the peanut butter guy as well as with me. I ended up paying for the case. Like what I did with the peanut butter guy, I hope to work with her until she realizes how we are selfish without knowing.
I could be wrong but I found it selfish for my aunt to say she had school run and church as an excuse for not bringing her payment on time. What did she expect me to say to my friend whom I have to answer to.

Yesterday I got a visit from child care services, they wanted to assist me....!!! I am a grown woman...! I am a petite person and I struggle here and there,  but never had I thought it is to this extent.

With where I am coming from, presentation has been the least of my worries but I think I need to make it a high priority item. I still believe I need to work on healing the land and the relationships that we create, so I will still work on this. I do ask God though, to help me because if I am leaving this impression then I need his help in accelerating my results, without compromising on some key principles, mostly regenerative ones.

Hi,
after a deay, finally a link about the production of biochar:
https://www.ithaka-institut.org/en/kon-tiki

The Kon-Tiki is one of the simplest way to produe biochar I know of. You dig a pit, start a fire at the bottom, add biomass as soon as the uppre layer start to tun into ashes, repeat. When the pit is full, extinguish, let cool down.
After that, you have to mix the biochar with compost, urine, weed juice, or other similar things to charge it with nutrients. Otherwise it might reduce production.

Advantages of biochar compared to compost or mulch are the longevity. The beneficial effects of biochar stay for centuries.

Thank you Hans.

What I did to see if we can work effectively:
I managed to measure out all the beds we have so as to get the total area of the land we are working on. I calculated the total number of choumollier plants we can have if we space them at 30cm each. I then estimated the number of plants we need, for us to have a bundle which we sell for a $1, it varies of course but we now have a range we are working with. I used this to estimate the maximum income we can get from choumollier for the area. I did the same for the beetroots that we will be intercropping with choumollier.

No matter how hard we work or how much we feed our soil, there is a ceiling we reach in terms of the potential income we can get from the two plants we are growing. Choumollier gives us very little money as opposed to what we would imagine, and I am glad I discovered this now for it will help us with effective planning. Beetroots will be a very good boost, once we develop a market for it. It will give us almost an equivalent amount of money we will get from choumollier for the time equal to the growing period of beetroots.
Because of our common market, we will grow choumollier and in the process we will grow our beetroot customers. So I am now assured that we will be able to increase our income substantially, once our beetroot sales become consistent.

My niece whom I went to visit, will be coming home. We had had a disagreement, "we", referring to her father's and mother's side and I expected her uncle to refuse with her. He was so nice and the phrase he used was, ,"a child is like a blanket and people can share one blanket." He also emphasized how much we need to work together as Tariro needs people from her mother's side and her father's. This puts value to what is said, that it takes a clan to raise a child. A child with a bigger clan supporting him or her will feel less of an opharn when biological parents pass away, because everyone in the clan will be a parent.


We are going to host 6 children this holiday. There is now significant space for people care in my project. The people include me. I had my nails polished today to give them color and to boost my confidence around family during the Saturday function.

I was not too thrilled about the social welfare (child care) people's visit. But it turns out they came to the right place. I was meant to be a catalyst, connecting Mai Moyo and Mai Kumbi with these people. On the day of their visit I mentioned the above two women and the children they are struggling to send to school. Mai Moyo's children are going to get help and Mai Kumbi's nephew is still being assessed.

Then I received seeds through this thread and for this I am thankful. I actually thought I was going to get a drought resistant maize variety, but instead I got a variety of seeds which is really exciting.The one way I can return this favor is to develop a beautiful garden.

Lastly, the function I was preparing for was there during the weekend. We ended up celebrating life. 7 of my relatives were involved in a very nasty accident, on their way to the function which killed a lot of people. They all survived and 6 of them managed to be at the function. A bus had over 100 people on it, a lot of standing passengers and some were sitting on top of the bus, like lugguage. To be able to be with each other taking pictures was such a gift.

I'm glad your relatives survived the accident, you must have been so relieved.
We will all enjoy your present of seeds as you share their progress with us - Thank you!
And more good news about the children getting help going to school. Let us hope that Mai Kumbi's nephew will get the help too.

Some of the kids I am spending the holiday with, arrived yesterday. This time I was a little nervous than usual, maybe because I am now aware of things like health and education from  a home environment perspective and I know my responsibility. For the first meal I blended vegetables and made a stew with them, they ate without complaints because the meal looked exactly like the common rice and stew. Today we tried chopping up the vegetables into chunks and the youngest one picked them out from his plate. So we will be blending most of the vegetables for them.

All the children I had hoped to have over are now all at home. Things had slowed down because we had a really bad flue and for sometime we were just concentrating on managing the flue. We did a lot of steaming and we used so much onion and I am glad we managed it. We have started classes and we are continuing with experimenting with food. The 5 year old though came to me yesterday and told me he was hungry specifically for sadza, so I decided that one meal of the day is entirely on them, they choose and cook what they want.

Today we were going to the plot and we decided to take the kids and have a day for games. They were initially not into it but they eventually warmed up to it and they enjoyed themselves. Children these days are now so used to coming from school and going to extra lessons, which l think is not too healthy. There has to be some playing somewhere. We all played together, there was no age or gender.

Things at the plot are looking good and we are discussing a fairly  long term plan that we can all follow.

The holiday is almost over and most of the kids have gone back to their homes as they prepare for schools to open. They enjoyed themselves and most of the things I hoped we would share, we did. There was a lot of learning and playing and in our day to day lives  I would introduce people care characteristics that we would discuss lightly on. What caught my attention was the idea of what defines a rich person:
For everyone rich means
-you do not wake up working, not even house chores, because there are people to wait on you,
-you are superior to those around them,
-you look clean and live an easy life and most of them associate first world countries with a wealthy lifestyle and the dream is to work there.

My next wish is for them to have some exposure to people who are wealthy and maybe see that some of these thoughts might be distorted because of a colonial background, where in the old days there was something called a superior being and inferior being but with an understanding of alternative lifestyles there is no need to adopt some practices because they really have nothing to do with living a wealthy life.

I watched them grow their bonds and open up to each other. We were lucky because there was an Agricultural show, which they all had never attended and the best was how they were willing to share their clothes and be the same on the day. The day was a memorable one and it was an easy opportunity to show a different kind of wealth which involves unity and empathy.

I was not well for almost the whole time, the flue I thought I managed, came back and was unlike what I know flue to be. Kumbi's mother is also not well, but I have not been to the plot for me to see her. My plan is to concentrate on both our health as soon as all the kids return to their homes.

The past weeks since I wrote were interesting in how the lows and the highs were of great contrast. During this period is one of the times where Kumbi has been really engaged in the planning phase of what we want to do at the plot. All our shades were blown by the wind and he volunteered on his own to redo them and this was special. With this having been said, he still makes requests for things that go beyond what we have, as if at the back of his mind he believes I have a lot of money. I know we need a lot to have a stable thing going at the plot, but I also believe that the sacrifice comes from both of us, like when he offered to redo the shades, automatically I had to consider paying him for that task outside what we are getting from the field, to balance the effort out. I feel from his side when it comes to money he does not consider me, even when he can work around some issues without us having to pump out money. I think that's why I was so happy when he suggested he would redo shades voluntarily, since this project is our thing.

Then with his mother I have had to threaten her that I wuld chuck their family off the plot if she refused to see a doctor. She is not well and she had refused my offer to just have a doctor look at her even when I had offered to pay, ( I am not a big fan of hospitals but her condition was beyond staying home, it was getting scary). She eventually went and we will be starting on some diet that I am researching on to just get everyone in our families' immune system boosted. I understood her fears of helplessness where she knows she has no option but to work and even if she visits a doctor, it has no meaning because whatever steps that come next are beyond her financial means. What I know though is food might not give instant results but it might result in a long term stable health state and for now it's of high priority.

My plan was to start on our kitchen garden with the seeds I received. They couldn't have come at a better time. If we succeed in growing all things I received, it will be cheaper for me to have both families eat healthy balanced meals. I have had to delay planting because electricity is being cut at the plot area more than usual, meaning we have to wait for the rains so that we can support  watering with rain. The option was to buy drums for storing water, but I also have shelved this and am focusing on the food for both our families for the next two weeks until Mai Kumbi's health gets back to normal.