permaculture advocate in Zimbabwe - too little/too much rain

ha ha ha... exactly my reaction, it is like gold sitting so openly and free of charge.

I am always excited to write about benefits, and every Saturday we will be recording the number of plants/ or other, we can harvest, paying special attention to diversity. Today we have carrots, tomatoes, shallots,spinach and eggs. With today's meal components we are literally among the elites in my country (to be able to have these things for a meal), and I am glad it did not demand so much, monetary wise. We have two beds we have improved in successive planting in the kitchen garden. With one we are replacing a plant by another when we harvest one and then the other one had tomatoes and we planted carrots, beets and pepper before we removed the tomato plants. We are moving away from having a bare bed, after harvesting a mono crop, like the one that we harvested peas from.

We managed to spread a thin layer of the black soil we found in almost all the beds at the plot. I have started a trial of making liquid fertiliser from this soil and putting it in the kitchen garden to see how the plants will respond and we can adopt this at the plot. We have been using compost as well as using manure from chickens and cows for our liquid fertiliser.  

This Saturday's harvest from the kitchen garden is a good one, topped by some beans from the plot.

How did your three month test with the corn go?

We had enough corn to last us for three months and, 1 and a 1/4 month's worth of maize extra.

Rufaro nice thread and very interesting . Here in South Africa , Zimbabwe is again in the news for the wrong reason with much doom and gloom so it is inspiring to hear and read about your successes in a tough and challenging situation . The pandemic has hit us hard in South Africa and I suspect the real damage will show itself in the months to come plus I also fear our neighbours will also feel it
The need for us to become self sufficient is now more than ever not a matter of choice but of necessity . I cannot see Southern Africa progressing if we do not learn to grow our own food and share the knowledge.  

Your succulents posted 5 months back - the first one looks like a member of the Sedum genus and r popularly know as jelly bean plants.Most of the members of the Sedum genus are from the Northern Hemisphere The 2nd picture looks more interesting and could be a member of the Cotyledon or Kalanchoe genus. Zimbabwe has a rich and diverse flora and is well represented with  succulents. I visited Zimbabwe in 1990 but was not interested in botany in those days but I would  plan to re visit Zimbabwe and explore the wonderful flora it has to offer    

Thank you Andrew.

Today's harvest, carrots, rape,onions and eggs. I was worried that l might not have more than Two different types of vegetables to show.

Today we have vegetables being sold away from home. All along, all vegetables would run out, being bought by customers who would come to us, harvesting so many leaves and still leaving so much in the garden to be sold at home is definitely a first.

Today's harvest marks a month since l started posting Saturday harvests. We have managed to harvest more than just chomolia and onions for most of the month even on other week days.

There is an area that has not been too easy to grow on as it is too sandy. The onions we planted did not do too well, we did feed but it was limited by what was available and the water the area demands is so much more. There are adjacent beds we are working on that also have onions still in the early stages, we put the black soil, mixed it a little with the sandy soil and then covered it with the partially rotten leaves we have been collecting. We will see how the beds will improve with time.

The maize growing period has arrived and this year we received a good amount of rain for some days at the beginning of October. We were now used to getting very light showers for a day or two and a substantial amount of rain would come towards the end of October and consistent pour would then come in November leaning mostly towards the end of the month. The weather pattern seems to be changing, the pattern is getting difficult to follow. The weather pattern used to be so predictable, such that most of the names for the months, in Shona, are named after how the weather pattern used to be like throughout the year. The names are as follows:

Ndira (January)- was named after a black beetle that would be seen mostly in that month

Kukadzi (February)- Women would be excited and busying themselves with the few first fruits from the field after a long period of limited food during the dry season.The word is derived from mukadzi, meaning woman.

Kurume- men's activity would be hyper as they would be catching animals, closer to their fields ...etc. These are things that would have been drawn by the first fruits

Kubvumbi (April)- Is a month that had a continuous drizzle. The word is from the word "mubvumbi", literally meaning persistent drizzle. I was surprised to find this out, because April is now usually a dry month.

Chivabvu (May)

Chikumi (June)-

Chikunguru (July)- light wind starts and it rolls light weight material lying on the ground. Rolling is called "kukunguruka" which could be where the month's name comes from. Another name which could have been the reason for the month's name is the nhunguru wild fruit which is red in colour which rippens in this month and this color is intensified by the color of the budding musasa and mutondo trees.

Nyamavhuvhu (August)- means the windy one, because there are strong winds experienced in this month

Gunyana (September)

Gumiguru (October)-  gumi means ten

Mbudzi (November)-  my favourite month. Its a month of regeneration, mbudzi means goat and goats would give birth during this time, most herbivores would too and so many other things. It is a sacred month with a lot of myth surrounding it.

Zvita (December)- is a month of thanks giving, and it is derived from the word mazviita, meaning "thank you"

We are using a different approach this year as we monitor our maize plant. Instead of celebrating or mainly focusing on the final produce, i.e the maize cob, we are staggering expected results across all the growing stages, focusing on for example emergence, the different vegetative stages, through to the reproductive stage, that way we can manage our crop better.webpage

For example, we have already planted and as we planted, our aim was emergence of the grain and so we focused on whatever we had to do for the grains to emerge within the expected period (time taken being of paramount importance), given the conditions are optimum. When we planted,  we knew we were taking a risk because usually the rain then disappears for a time that is likely going to destroy any emerged plant. We covered our holes with leaves, grass and whatever organic matter we could get our hands on, the burning of surrounding grass this year was worse than all the other years, we used mostly leaves from our fruit trees that we had been collecting and for the first time this year we harvested leaves that would fall on a small portion that we grew a hedge on. Hopefully this will be a good way to market a live fence, over a brick-wall when the time for this comes. We also prepared our water accessibility. We have a drip but it is supported by a 1000ltr tank and has pipes that run across almost 1/2 an acre. This time, we isolated just over a third of the field and this is what is under the drip, that way the water being supplied by the 1000ltr tank will have a significant impact. As for the two pumps, to compensate for their sizes, we have added two more drums, coming to a total of 4 drums. We fill the drums up the day before we plan to water and when we start watering, we would have bought sometime because we will fill up an emptied drum while we still have other ones to fetch water from and still allow the pumps their desired resting time. We also adapted the well to a less strenuous watering system, we have a bucket with a hose connected to it and water is filled straight into the bucket going to the area which needs watering. We no longer need to carry buckets for long distances when we use the well.
Now the maize is at V2 stage and it looks beautiful. We are targeting V5 in the next 7 days. We fed with cow dung straight from a Kraal, this time we did not get the chance to make a compost in advance.

Some of the maize plants have developed the fifth leaf fully, especially those we had managed to feed with cow manure and mulched. It has been two days since we received the first rains after emergence phase and we are happy with how the field looks. The whole field has now been fed with cow manure and we expect the development of the rest of the plants to somewhat normalise, it is not bad, as the other plants have between 3 to 5 leaves that have fully developed. We expect the plants to have 8 leaves fully developed by next week. We planted cow peas and pumpkin in some of the maize holes this week. The plan had been to plant 7 days after emergence, but it was too hot and we decided not to take the risk.

The part with the drip has maize that has reached tasseling as well as cabbages, planted together with onions. For this year, we succeeded in growing different crop on this area throughout the year. We had maize from last rainy season, soon after we had beans and now there is maize, onion and cabbage.

The place where we have our kitchen garden has had water problems for most of October and progress stalled. We dedicated one bed from the plot to experiment with our kitchen vegetables since we have more control over the water source. The bed is beautiful, it has carrots, pepper and either broccoli or cauliflower (the seeds got accidentally mixed).

Cauliflower usually has pointy leaves, broccoli round ones.

It is over two weeks since the fifth leaf stage and still the best maize plants have 7 leaves. We increased watering, but it could be the way the maize variety grows. It has started raining, so we expect the water shortage/ deficiency to ease a little and we will see how much different the growth stages will be from the expected theoretical stages. The maize plants also have different heights across the field, with some being more than three times shorter than the best plants. On this issue we are almost sure it is the feeding amount and type. The sandy area we put chicken manure and mulched a little, not long after emergence, is the tallest. There were slight improvements when we put cow manure in the whole field. Using, the tallest plants as our standard, we are feeding all the other areas until we can be as close as possible to the height of the standard area. We got chicken manure which covered a certain area of plants with stunted growth, on another section we added compost from the kitchen compost, and a small area has not been fed yet, we will feed as we go.

We harvested onions from the garden beds which had poor soil that we worked on and there is such an improvement from the previous harvests. Some of the pumpkin seeds and cow peas seeds we planted have emerged. We grew our own cow peas seeds and we kept pumpkin seeds from the pumpkins we ate and a few are from friends.

We got  an indigenous vegetable last year, that some call mowa and some bonongwe (a type of amaranth I think) and it multiplied with literally no care whatsoever. However it seems to be more difficult to introduce an indigenous wild vegetable in the daily menu, than it is  to introduce a modern one.      

It has been raining for most part of last week. Our water harvesting tanks are over flowing, we are receiving a lot of water. We are emptying as much of the water as we can, into the maize field, where it percolates nicely. Throughout the year we have been pumping water from underground, we are taking this opportunity to have as much water (which could have been runoff) sipping into the ground, so that we separate ourselves from a mining approach in farming, where we just extract without replenishing.
The vegetable beds look good. Now, during the rainy period, instead of only focusing on building soil in the maize field, we have added soil building of the garden beds.