permaculture advocate in Zimbabwe - too little/too much rain

2019 images, l also got a priviledge to take part in tree planting in Hwange homesteads, and I think there were more than 20 trees planted within half a day (which is where I am getting ideas on tree planting in my community)

Did you manage to get the solar cooker up and running? Your maize is looking good!

Rufaro Makamure wrote:Yes it is still 15+ hours

Oof, I thought is was though when we hit 8 hours down in SA but that's even worse. How is the mobile network coping? I've read that Econet swapped from generators to battery packs for their towers and that they're pretty content with them. Still having access to the mobile network helped a lot during load shedding.

What really surprised me was how most people defaulted back to tea lights and kerosene lamps for lightning, even though they already had a power bank for mobile phones. I got some LED lights that you could plug directly in the usb port and they worked pretty well. They were also surprisingly cheap at around a dollar per light, so they earned themself back within weeks with the savings on kerosene.

Our mobile network is still okay. Occasionally it slows down or the electronic money transfer stops working,  but it is more rare than it is often.

We used to use candles mostly for lighting when there was no power and we had two solar torches. Only three days ago did we manage to put up DC bulbs in two rooms. A funny incident happened during christmas, we had power and it had been a while since we had power, anytime before 10pm and after 6am. l kept on asking what we had changed in the house, furniture wise, it looked different and I hadn't thought it's just the bright light in the evening.

We used the solar box cooker twice so far and we have not properly baked anything yet. I will relook at the box. I had put a glass slightly smaller than the oven opening (readily available material), l did not think this would affect the oven much, but this is my biggest suspect as to why its not working well. I will have to replace with a big glass and see how it goes.

We found a bird plum tree (munyii) growing in one of our flower pots. Someone must have dropped the seeds there unintentionally and it is now a positive thing for us.

We are slowing down on activities at the plot, giving ourselves time to review and assess how we are progressing and coming up with a common plan on where we want to go with our home and how.

Communication was one of the things we realised needs so much work, last year we decided to share ideas for the growth of the plot in presentation form, allowing one person to say out all they need to say, and responding with a presentation. That way we give each other time to digest whatever we would have heard and preparing a response, makes us think more clearly. We will do this until we understand we all want the same thing and that it is okay to have different opinions.

I am presenting first on why planning is important and l found a great story, that brings this out from Royston Guest's blog 'Why failing to plan really does mean planning to fail". I hope this will initiate a discussion on how we see modern families, successful and not so successful (relative to individual definition of success). Maybe we can come up with a common way of defining success and then make our year's aim based on a common thing.

It's like we opened PANDORA'S box with the topic on planning, especially because of Scott and Amundsen's story on their quest to go to the South pole. I think the part that was so familiar was words from Scott's diary which blames things on bad luck. It would have been difficult to see how much Preparation Amundsen, put in, for his trip as it is not apparent.

We looked at our own individual lives and how we blame so many things for our failures. Things like family background, culture, tribe, race, politics, location,...e.t.c. It is true these issues affect us today, but which things are truly stopping us from achieving our goals

I am going to make  a series of presentations, and these will go into detail of the individual excuses we make.

We have monkeys now visiting our field, some of the cobs that had started emerging were opened up.

We have had major ups and downs with our chicken rearing. Since we managed to get all available ingredients, and made our own feed, we have been watching gradual improvements. We are also casually talking about reconsidering our capacity, at keeping the number of chickens we have, until we finish with all the experiments, and have a concrete method. We did visit someone who is keeping chickens and he is doing a great job, all his chickens have feathers and are big. We have started making adjustments in our chicken run from the notes we took.

Time management skills development, was the next topic we discussed. We talked about the difference between effectiveness and efficiency. We also discovered that we have activities that we want to do, but we either do not have a full vision of what we really want or it's so blurry we end up getting confused as to what it is we intend to achieve. We end up mixing so many things and sometimes not getting things done. The other thing is daily tasks are determined mostly by what has been done in the past (based entirely on societal expectations) or shaped by a job that one does.

When we came up with long term hopes and wishes, we found out that unintentionally we were expecting too much from each other and in some instances getting in each other's way. We still need to focus on this topic, until we create enough time to include planning in our routine, and develop it into a natural habit.

We got very beautiful rain. It rained in the early hours of the day as well as late afternoon, into the evening.

It is almost two weeks now, since we started talking about coming up with clearly defined long term visions from the two of us (mother and myself), to help us with a skeleton of our daily task.From the many things that came out, we managed to get, at first, a blurry idea of both our wishes and we refined these to somewhat clearer visions. I can safely say yesterday was our first day to put our combined daily plan into practice and, it is a long way in a positive direction from where we were.

I have been going on and on about a sustainable home. What exactly do I mean, why..., and all the other questions crossed my mind as l searched for a way to condense my wishes in one long term one. Could I be all about maize, chickens and chimolia? It has been 3 years, since l have fully engaged my self into trying to help build a productive place at our plot, and the hard reality is, though I have spent all this time and we have moved astonishing strides toward being self-sufficient, we still have not figured out how the place can be self-sustainable and stable. Yet still, the passion still burns even more than when l started. So many questions were answered in our dialogue and gladly I am not all about chickens, maize and chomolia!!!

I was not at all surprised to head my mum's wish. All she wants is "To leave a legacy for generations that are coming after her", l had already assumed so many things in line with this about her, including what I thought she would want to do with her plot and it was spot on. The only thing is, with our different experiences, our interpretations of a number of things are very different.

You have a goal, a direction. Your current position on the trail doesn't matter as much as that you keep moving toward your goal.

You said that part of your goal was to provide a way that your mother doesn't have to work constantly just for her daily needs. That was a sub-goal that led you in the direction of your primary goal. You wanted to prove that sustainable agriculture worked. Another sub-goal. Little goals achieved along the way make the travel a lot easier, and as long as they do not lead you AWAY from your primary goal they contribute.

Even the sustainability is just a step along the way to your primary goal--which I think is taking care of your family over the long term. I may be wrong, but I think you and your mother are essentially working toward the same end goal, just going about it in different ways.

Rufaro, I am so impressed with what you're doing.

True, our goals are so connected and talking about this subject is helping us a lot.

It was my turn to share my wish in life. Well l ought to be a little embarrassed because my ultimate goal is all about me, but I am not and l will give a reason why. I want a "Happy and purposeful life " l am not embarrassed because there is only one person's life l can fully influence without doubt, and that person is me. I have made it a mission not to  intentionally make other people's lives miserable, or, do actions today that will affect someone in the future negatively and I figured that my purpose of wanting to positively contribute to food abundance and accessibility, is a pretty decent one. Of course based on a set of things l have collected both in my conscious and subconscious mind in my walk of life, my judgement of some things can be gruesomely flawed as l learn and improve every day.

So now we had the two wishes, the problem was, they were both too general. I knew this about mine and I knew l still had to add more detail, but how was l to ask my mother. Getting her to this point was a road trip on it's own. The subject had been triggered by the near catastrophe in our maize field this season, which was saved by the January dear rain.    

We had waited until we needed to use the drip system to check its functionality. What could possibly go wrong, it was working when we stopped using it. All we were going to do was clean it up and it would be as good as new, I was so wrong. I had also put my long term goals at the plot in a sequence and I was working on them one at a time and close to 95% if not all of my resources currently, were toward solving the problems we were/ are facing with the chickens. I had put the maize field in the maintenance zone for now, so we were only going to do routine activities and I put minimum attention there. I was unpleasantly shocked to learn the filter was not letting water through and the guy who helped us install is km away and I knew getting him to come, meant diverting resources and it was decision making time. It was either we continue with the undivided dedication on the chickens or, diverting and temporarily attending to the drip system. I chose the chickens, I found it difficult to break my sequence and it was the rainy season, plus we had gotten so far with our maize outside the rainy season, I anticipated a fairly good harvest especially after I had looked up the weather forecast for November and December.  The rainfall pattern did not follow the weather forecast, and sometimes when it was close, it would rain everywhere else around except our area.
I realised that, all this while, I was focusing on how we could improve our plot technically, which we have been doing, good soil, equipment …etc. As I stared at the filter the times I would go to the plot, I wondered a lot, what governed our decisions and also if we are actually going anywhere. Obviously our place has become so much more resilient, there are three fields I have seen so far, that have maize that is promising, of the few families close by, that grew something in their fields, and chomolia is scarce even at the common market place in town. But how do we make this resilience more than an event or bigger than a once upon a time story we will tell?

It’s finding out what governs our decisions, actions and use of our time. I have had to be very careful because we ended up talking about really sensitive issues, just to get each other’s blurry wishes out.

In the process of coming up with our wishes, there is one particular night that stands out. We had been going back and forth about why we needed to write our long term plans and break them down until we got to what tasks we prioritize in a day. There were times when it seemed like I was criticizing how we do things and it created an almost ugly environment, but there is something about love, it always calms things down. Even if, mother did not quite understand what I was trying to get at exactly, she wrote down her to do list and I was so glad when she gave me the paper. I had not wanted to give my written goal yet for the fear of clouding or biasing what she already had in her mind.

The list had things she intended to replace, bills she need to pay ...etc. It was still not quite what I was looking for. Instead of short term tasks, I wanted the reason why she felt she needed to do all those things. It felt like I was pushing her too much, and I should settle for the things we had so far. But if I did, what then, who was I doing a favor? Then I thought of a brilliant analogy of something we do often, i.e, going to town.Always, before we leave for town, we already know what our destination is, that way we never mistaken any other place we stop by for our actual destination. She even helped draw the route with all the bends, turns and stuff that we pass along the way. We might plan to use different routes or stop by a person's place but we always know where we want to end up. So all the short term tasks are like the turns and bends and stops along the way, the important thing to now is the main reason why we are on the journey. I also thought it was time to show my long term wish, with the broken down to activities I thought were a priority, governing what choice I make and what activity I choose to do daily. Some time passed and one night when we sat watching a movie, she was busy scribbling things and later on she just looked at me and said, "You seem to be crazy about things written in a flow diagram, I have something for you". I reached out, and there it was, her ultimate wish and other things linked to it, showing how she wishes to reach this aim. I was speechless and so happy (well, my long term wish is the easiest to achieve, I get pieces of it constantly).  From this we worked on both our goals clarifying them more, making them less general until we came up with two separate daily schedules.    

We are now talking about real life successes and failures, that we have seen around us. The aim is to see success and failure through each other's eyes and to learn from these examples. We will also check to see if we stick to our schedules and if we improved on anything. The two images I have included have, in one image, the chickens we went to see, that are being kept close to where we stay and then the other one, is of a really big marigold flower, above half my height and it is in our yard (we have never seen it grow this big and it does not show how hot it has been by looking at it). Both the chickens and the flowers are thriving, despite what the surrounding environment is like. This will serve as a constant reminder that we need to create micro-climates/ environments no matter how small and with very little excuses, for us to succeed.

We started looking at spaces and people very close to us. There are two elderly women who stay close by and have reached retirement. They are very hardworking and spend most of their time in their gardens. One has a space almost as twice or even thrice as much as the other one. The one with the smaller space has already harvested maize, pumpkin leaves, has chomolia and another bed with maize that has reached fertilization stage and this is between September last year and now. I am sure if we were to measure her longest garden bed, it would be less than 3m*6m, the other two beds are about half the size of the big one. She does most of her gardening by herself, she mentioned how when she went to visit her daughter in a different city, her grandchild literary dragged her to their backyard, so that she could help with their garden too, which she was delighted to do. After weeks her daughter sent her images of how beautiful her garden looked and she skipped a party, just so she could enjoy the view from her garden.

The second woman with the bigger space has had chomolia struggling to grow, her first planted maize failed and she has replanted again. Her visiting son passed a comment which showed little appreciation of the effort, seeing it as a mere waste of time. Both women have city council water,they grow similar crops and are equally affected by the same weather conditions. The difference is,  one is actually benefiting from her garden while the other one is loosing especially on time and energy, We talked about a lot of other examples, including local business start-ups which are usually very short lived. We even talked about the transition from a rural life to a more urban one. I will write about the expectations of urbanization in the next thread.