Permaculture advocate in Zimbabwe - too little/too much rain

The final section on areas I am working on,  that I have not talked about is Apo's business. As I was concerned about Apo's issue with his employees he got people to help him and they only lasted a month. It took him almost a month for him to tell me, and his reason was he did not know how to. That shows he cares about my opinion in his business, I was happy.

I am still waiting for my friend to help me with finding a person who has a very successful business to talk to Apo about the importance of an employee. In the meantime, things that are happening are forcing him to pay more attention to my concern. He is now asking himself questions on what he is really doing wrong and he is even considering the chance of increasing the salary of one person to oversee things and then grow from there, this is such a big step, basing on the history I have with him on this topic. The challenge is that these gaps where he doesn't have people cripple his business very much because his production is greatly limited. We spent the weekend without peanut butter and our customers kept on coming to look for it. We now have it and he produced it all by himself.
The guy working on his motors has still not showed up to work on the second motor and he has already been paid. The potential this business has is a lot, but it needs support to see it through the changes that are required. I have been getting help from my sister and my friend, but I have gone to them so many times, I am now ashamed to keep asking for their help.

The things that all the systems I am interested in have to overcome are too many, and now I understand why when NGOs come with brilliant ideas, there is progress to a certain point and things stop progressing. The time and resources that are required to keep searching for the actual problems, admitting where as change drivers we lack and fixing this and then bringing everyone on the same page, is something that cannot be easily predicted.

I am continuing to fill bags with soil for growing more plants at home, away from the plot. I also managed to get a hold of the boiler maker who worked on Apo's  first motor, and I painted a picture of what it could be if his business, which he is still starting up, creates a relationship with Apo's business. The work that has to be done for now requires a team of people that see into the future. If the project grows, the boiler maker will have a place for doing routine maintenance, which is guaranteed and this is stability job wise. So for him it is like growing a tree, and it requires him to create some time outside the jobs he is getting elsewhere, which I am assuming pay him better for now, but are just random and temporary. After this business grows it is going to one space where jobs will be created.

I also talked to one lady who has been helping Apo for years. She used to be an employee, but now she is not. She is called to help out when he has no one or when he needs to travel. She sees so much potential in the business and she wants to work with me. When I talked to her the last time and went back to Apo to find out the possibility of him taking her back, he was not too keen, he has now changed his mind, but she has her own conditions now and one of these has always been a raise in salary. I am going to the plot today, so I will be meeting with Apo and the woman tomorrow to see if she cannot be permanently re-engaged. Otherwise from the peanut butter customers side they just want their peanut butter and they have no idea there is trouble in the business.

I was harvesting vetiver grass today. We haven't harvested it since we planted, and today I am putting a little in the beds, on top of the leaves I put last week. I will be putting organic matter in bits and pieces as the plants are growing, by the time they are big they will be having a generous layer of mulch from different sources, to make sure different nutrients are present. The part I cut the grass from is so small, but it gave me enough grass for the beds I was working on today. I think I have enough grass for what I am planning to do this season.

There is a lot of bermuda/couch grass around the new beds. I will be using the weeded bermuda grass to stop it from growing. I will layer it in between garden beds together with any other weeds that we get. This will suppress any growth between the beds and we will be saved from constantly weeding, at the same time this will be perfect feed for the beds with time. Stepping on the weeds as we walk along the paths in-between beds will be helping in breaking down the weeds. We can then have periodic times when we shovel the feed into the beds and start the process all over again.

Our weather switched from two days, of a lot of rain to very high temperatures. Our high today is 32°C. We have not received rain since we planted.

I met with Apo, he has a lot of pressure. Mai Tendai was around helping him and we managed to talk, the three of us. We were open about the common misconception of how business are run. An employee just expects to get paid and cares very little about what their input to the business is like and now more than before, there is less working in companies than there should, yet people still expect to get paid. Then for the employers, if they could, they would have people working for them for free. Both of these perceptions are causing businesses to fail. To change things these two ways of thinking need to change, starting from Apo as an employer and then mai Tendai as an employee. While I was there, a child who had just finished his primary level came looking for some work, and he said he wishes to go to secondary school but he knows he has no chance unless he raises his own money. He wants to beat the odds and so he is starting to look for work now, he might be able to raise enough money by January. There are not many opportunities for children to help themselves if they can and I couldn't help think of this space as a potential opportunity. I didn't voice this out but it did cross my mind.

Apo hasn't had time to go out to look for nuts, since the boys he got left. He is leaving for his rural home tomorrow to go and see the  nuts that were harvested from the nuts he sent for growing last season. Mai Tendai will be making peanut butter for people who bring their nuts, to be processed, for the days Apo will be away.

We will have another meeting when he gets back and we have the knowledge of the amount of nuts he will get.

I am glad Apo managed to travel today. I was sensing that he was kind if loosing hope. I pray the people at his rural home, that he left with peanuts seed will not let him down.

I am continuing to add organic matter in beds at the plot. I  got bedding  that was for chickens.

Hope is what keeps us going. I last spoke with the boiler maker who is supposed to be working on Apo's motors on the twelfth of this month. I never heard from him since then and Apo couldn't get through to him. He called me today and I will try to write his words that were very deep to me. "Sister when you called me that day, I heard God, please pray for me, I drink but I need help and your call was filled with so much hope." He promised he would go and work on Apo's motors tomorrow. The economic situation is taking away so much from people and most man are resorting to drinking. If there are more stable working opportunities it will change things because, it seems some of the people who end up drinking excessively, would not, if they had steady jobs coming their way.

In the past days I have been praying so hard myself, about the peanut butter business and for Apo. This boiler maker's call to me, was also close to how he felt my call was to him. I do not have any answers yet but he did give me hope.

I called Apo on his way back from his rural home, to tell him the news and he sounded so excited. When I went to his work place, the roof of the shade where his roasters are had fallen and it seemed invisible to him he was just finding his way around the fallen roof. This man is very particular about his working environment and when I saw this I could sense he was loosing hope. When he heard the boiler maker will be at his place, he said he will try to fix the shade's roof and to me this is a good sign.

He said he got 40 buckets of nuts with their shells. He is not too happy about the size of the nuts, so we will see how many buckets he will get after shelling the nuts.

The boiler maker didn't go to Apo's. When I talked to him he said he will see what he can do tomorrow. So we will wait.

At the plot, plants that are under the shade of trees are thriving more than the ones that have no trees closeby. I have some mango and guava trees from my nursery, I will start planting the trees where the vegetable beds are. My original idea was to  grow trees starting in the maize field, but looking at the reduced effort needed to successfully grow vegetables in the high temperatures when there are trees, I will start with where the gardens are.

We have been getting herbs (parsley, cilantro, dill and coriander) from our garden and it's exciting. Plants like bottle gourd, ginger, sweet potatoes...e.t.c can be boring to water because they take forever to mature and the spaces with these plants will not give anything until after three months or so. So in the spaces I grew these, I put plants that take no time to be harvested, like lettuce and different herbs so that I get some produce within a short time and remain inspired to water. This has worked, the short term plants will push you to water them because you can see them developing fast and now the other plants are healthy looking and are easier to water.  I am mostly excited about ginger, which took its sweet time to pop out of the ground, such that I was beginning to think it was not going to grow.

The bottle gourd and the long Thai bean plants are sharing one pot and I was concerned about how I would split them as they grew. They were in the same wire mesh which they have outgrown  and I managed to split the two.

I used to celebrate harvesting spinach and beetroot leaves, I am so used to this now, I have ceased to celebrate this harvest.

Corn planting season is coming up soon, isn't it?

Yes, most people have and are preparing their fields. This year, I am not going to grow maize. I have a completely different way of seeing things this season.

I will grow beans on part of the field we would grow maize, and the rest I will leave without anything. We will be getting grass for weed tea and mulching from this space. Before, I was all about spreading regeneration and growing our own food. I am still very much into this, but from a different perspective. I want to make a lot of money (I never thought I would say this), so I am starting by doing things that will avoid me from loosing any.

I need people on my side. I was looking across the fence, watching my neighbors and their workers as they build. Their progress is very visible. The thing that is making the men there work in the scorching heat is because they are being paid. I looked at my sister and Kumbi working and I need them to want to be working with me, the only thing that will make them keep working is if they get the value of their work in the form they understand, money. So I want to make this money with them. Kumbi got a contract for a month, but it ended, and since we started going to the plot, he is working on his beds with some energy that is commendable.

Because of El nino, I won't grow crops that will need a lot rain for them to thrive. We will work on our vegetable beds and we will use money we get from the beds to buy maize.

I am going to be big on intercropping, working with the beds we already have first.

Kumbi today was mulching. His beds look so much better now, and the intercropped beets are becoming healthier. I will add a picture of the beets weeks ago and now. I have also added a picture of a bed of kale, that resembles what beds would be like at their best outside the rainy period. This best was not the best and it's changing. The beds that are being worked on by Kumbi are responding to what he is doing to them.

I now believe in myself more, my sister is  excited to be at the plot and Kumbi is working on his own initiative. I know this momentum can be maintained if we start getting money that makes sense, so all the concentration is going to be on an area that we can manage to water well and produce for selling.

I am so excited! The place I took a picture of the day before yesterday was weeded. Kumbi is on fire... On his side there are no beds that have weeds anymore.

Today has been one of the funniest. We decided to upgrade from the traditional sweeping broom to one we can use while standing and we decided to do a DIY using vetiver grass. We watched a video which looked fairly simple and we followed the steps. What we got versus what we expected are two different things. My sister was on the ground laughing the moment I tried out our broom for the first time. It's as stiff as hell..., but it gets the job done. Well, for now we will do with this broom but definitely it will be replaced. At least there is no bending as we sweep the outside.

We are four people now with portions we are working on. Mai Kumbi, Kumbi, Jackie and myself. I will be taking pictures of these different areas, the focus will be on
1) time and effort should show without words

2) how the land is treated as we focus on getting produce that benefits us. The things I will be looking at mostly are mulching and no commercial fertilizer use.

Today I took a picture of two spaces that are looking really good, these belong to Kumbi and mai Kumbi. The beans section and the new kale beds. The only thing I will be waiting for in this area will be whether there will be any mulching that will be put in some of the beds that are bare and how long it will take before  its put. I am hoping I won't have to push for this to happen.

I got a peach tree from the keyhole garden and my sister planted it at the plot. Its very hot these days, I hope the tree will survive. We surrounded it with mulberry tree branches.

I have included the rest of the spaces, Kumbi, my sister's and mine. We will be looking at the changes as we go. My sister is having problems with germination, but she is not giving up. Our soil is sandy, it needs a lot of patience.

I was pulling out some beetroots and there were worms on the roots, this is a win for me. The keyhole garden has so many garden worms.

The new project behind the house is shaping up. The number of bags with things growing in them is increasing. I have added potatoes to the mix and I picked up a cow peas plant that was growing on its own close to the banana tree, and transplanted this into one of the bags, I will watch if it grows, we can eat the leaves as we wait for the sweet potatoes.

I am getting some of the trees I will be planting at the plot from this corner.