permaculture advocate in Zimbabwe - too little/too much rain

I'm sorry for your loss Rufaro.  Nothing can take away the pain just now, but try and remember the good times together.

Whatever happens, the knowledge you have built up will not be lost.  i hope you can still continue the work you were doing together.

I am working on being clear of what we have built, to have a rough idea of where to start. I will continue at the plot and I will share what the place is like, with the hope of continuing and growing into a food secure and warm place. The memories form the backbone of all we were doing and l will start with sharing some of our moments together. We got the gift of plenty of time together and l find myself battling between, the question 'why so soon' and appreciating the privilege we had. l did not have that much time with dad but l feel  l shared time with him through mum as she was building on their dream.
 

The second thing I will share is what we built together. Below is a set of goals I wrote 4 years ago:

As I mentioned the objective of my farming is to introduce sustainable agriculture in my area.

Second would be the introduction of indigenous crops that are more drought resistant (still focusing on food crops) and also to introduce variety for nutritional value.

Third goal would now be to concentrate on conscious action to improve our environment,...

What we achieved, is

a place to explore regenerative (better than sustainable) agriculture, in baby steps. So far we have replaced fertilizer with soil growing, replaced mono-cropping with inter-cropping, introduced water harvesting and water conservation techniques. We have one official follower, my uncle, whose progress I will share. One neighbor used zai pits last year, l will  share what will happen in the coming planting season.

we now grow cowpeas and these have resulted in an additional meal 'mutakura' i.e boiled grains

we have grown some trees in an effort to improve the environment

Automatically, there were personal skills being improved along the way. Like planning, financial literacy and communication. Communication is the area we had started to actively work on.

Now I am continuing with what we had mastered to grow a bit consistently i.e. choumollier and maize. We are almost done with digging of zai pits and we will be filing them up with any manure we can get our hands on.

We increased number of onion plants and we are adding beans. These will be inter-cropped with choumollier. When we started, we planted the beans directly into the beds, but the mulch seemed so thick and had the highest probability of obstructing the proper germination of the beans so we planted some beans in pockets from egg trays and we are excited it seems to be working. We are also planting lima beans along the fence.

We are suspending chickens and tomatoes for when we have stabilized.

I am also going to keep working with my uncle, on his homestead. He sent images on his progress. We had talked about a fence for his garden because almost every year his garden would be destroyed by cows and goats. We also talked about the importance of securing basics first like food before aiming for high goals. He sent images of the live fence he grew and also the maize he has been barter trading for, with his tomatoes.  

Rufaro Makamure wrote:We increased number of onion plants and we are adding beans. These will be inter-cropped with choumollier. When we started, we planted the beans directly into the beds, but the mulch seemed so thick and had the highest probability of obstructing the proper germination of the beans so we planted some beans in pockets from egg trays and we are excited it seems to be working. We are also planting lima beans along the fence.

We are suspending chickens and tomatoes for when we have stabilized.

I still have stacks of egg trays--I used to use them for starting tomatoes and such, but they were so tiny that the plants outgrew them within a week. I started using toilet paper tubes instead.

Our efforts to increase productivity continue and it's still pretty much learning and establishing systems. The germination of beans that we directly planted in beds as well as in trays was not a success. We counted the seeds we put in the trays and in total they were 216, only 32 germinated and the rest rot.  That's about 14% germination rate, the ones in the main beds are still popping out, but it's equally as bad. We still want to give beans a try so we are willing to experiment again. I noticed that the trays allow us to control different things better than if we plant in the actual beds. Watering trays also takes up less time and energy since we only use half a bucket to top up trays once in two days.
We have already planted more seeds and they are about 7 days old, this time we are lowering our water quantity. My fingers are crossed we make it this time around.

I find that too much water is often a problem with germination. Are you planting beans you harvested, or seeds you purchased? Beans you harvested will usually do better.

It is a mix actually. I didn't think it would matter much.

And it may not. It has been my experience that seeds harvested from my own yard do better. I will get 10-20% germination from purchased seeds, and an even smaller survival rate. If I can get one plant to seed, the 2nd generation jumps up past 50% germination. And by the third generation they're trying to take over the world. :)

The bean seeds are promising this time around, we see a number of them starting to come out. I have been telling my niece that we grow our own money and we can tell if we get a lot by checking how good we take care of our plants from seeds / seedling stage until they mature. She also noticed that we might have many seeds germinating for our second trial, and in her head it meant we will make a lot of money. So she asked with concern if I would still go to the plot if ever l make a lot of money  ( she loves going to the plot, a lot). I told her I would, because it's actually a privilege to be in my position, where something I enjoy can potentially earn me a living. I also took a picture of my "work" environment and told her to look back at this moment, when she gets older and she will understand why I am privileged as an adult, I play and enjoy and this is work for me.

It's over 3 days since we planted the first few successful bean pockets in the choumollier beds and they look beautiful. The onions inter-cropped with rape are also looking good. The choumollier though, has some disease where the leaves start turning yellow and then dries up and for some plants the stem is affected and the whole plant dies.
Our kitchen compost which is about a meter+ deep is full and thats going to be manure for our maize in th coming months.

That Choumollier doesn’t look good.  To me it looks like it may be a fungal disease, like blight on potatoes. Has anyone else in your area got similar symptoms? I would be inclined to remove the affected plants if possible to try and stop it spreading. You could try spraying  the other plants with dilute milk or a solution of sodium bicarbonate. Both of these have a mild anti fungal action and may give a little protection against spores, without being toxic to yourselves or wildlife.
If you do ‘hot composting’ this should kill fungal spores, if not, then remove or burn the affected plants, since the spores could come back another time and affect future plants.
Maybe the plants are a bit stressed, is it hotter or drier than usual?  Maybe a compost tea pick-you-up will give them vigour to fight it off.  I’m only guessing at a distance, but hope it helps.

It sounds like sometimes you have too much and sometime not enough, so what you need, essentially is a way to equalize the amount of water over the course of a year. Do you think it would be possible in your area to have rain barrels or better yet buried cisterns? It should not freeze, in Zimbabwe so the cisterns can remain full to help you in scarce days? I like the idea of swales too but they represent a lot of work to create. Long before we had reliable wells, and electricity, some folks built cisterns under their castles in Europe, and water could be drawn with a pail and a pulley. And yes, it is true that some children would sometimes fall in, but that can be remedied by keeping a heavy slab over the cistern.
https://www.oldhouseweb.com/blog/cisterns-historic-water-convservation/
A cistern could be made of several concrete tanks buried in the ground side by side and communicating, either in series [if you have a slope or in parallel if you are on flat land [a bit like we build septic systems]. At the end of this system, perhaps a pond or a lowland that would be good for water loving plants? I'm not sure what it would cost in Zimbabwe to bury several concrete or plastic septic tanks, but here it can cost.  The good part is: once it is built, it will last forever. It can be fed by gutters or channels, storm sewers, but then the rain would need to be decanted and the bottom of the cistern cleaned once in a while.
https://homeguide.com/costs/septic-tank-system-cost
With electricity, you can use a transfer pump to water your crops, do the dishes etc. Depending where you get the water from, it may not be potable, but for agriculture and washing, it would be quite suitable.
If it rains too much, that pond could be used at the end of the system and allowed to go dry during the dry season?

I am itching, to post an image of the germinating beans, l had to hold myself and at least wait for tomorrow, there are still more that have their tips showing, at least the number will be more tomorrow and it's exciting.

What l can share though, is a non tangible or invisible achievement that my niece and l are celebrating. My niece started staying with us last December and we have been trying to kind of home school her so that she does not fall too far behind with her school. She was supposed to have started her form one, that is, moving from primary level going to high school, and she will. I started trying to follow the method of teaching from my days in school and it seemed like it was working. One day l gave her maths word problems and she did not get a single problem right. I was a little angry because l was so sure she knew the math concepts being tested.

I think l showed her how dissapointed l was, maybe said some discouraging words. I honestly felt like she was being ungrateful for the time and effort l was putting. It crushed her a little bit and we had to work again to rekindle her interest to read, for sometime.

When we were revising the test, l realised she did not understand a thing and l had already raised my voice. I assumed she could read, she had finished grade 7 and every single exam is in english except for the Shona exam, so there was no way she could not read. She had been going to school, but l do not think there was much room in her class for a teacher to make a follow up on whether each child was getting what was being taught. She read shona perfetly, but when we would try an english story it was like torture and she would tear up a little bit sometimes, if l would ask her to raise her voice because she would whisper, she did not want to read english at all. But we could not leave english because every single opportunity l can think of is made easier when one can read or write english. Any formal job interview l know of is in english and almost all exams except for Shona are in english.  We had to drop all other subjects and try to figure out how she could learn better and how l could also teach her better. We ended up hunting for novels to try to excite her and we started with relatively books for older kids, but we had to keep going down to basics. She felt uncomfortale at first because she wanted books associated with her age group. But now we both have changed. I am so much more understanding and she is now excited with reading some stories and most of all she now understands some of the things. I feel like if she learns to read, the sky will be the limit for her because she can teach herself anything she choses to learn.