Rufaro Makamure

"CAN WE MAKE A CHANGE?"This is a question that I have been asking myself a lot this week. My answer came when I least expected it. I was lying on the bed thinking of the sorry  glances that I am getting from those who know me when they pass me as I sell peanut butter. I know exactly what they are thinking because I was once in their position. If ever I would see an ex-classmate or someone I grew up with,  selling in the streets, I would see poverty and misery. To an extent, it truly is a reflection of this, and when I  accepted my state economically, it has made selling so much easier.

Some of my selling good experiences are not making things better. We are on survival of the fittest mode, and I am not one of the fittest in this context. I am stuck in survival of the weakest, where everyone  watches out for each other. On Sunday, some women took some peanut butter, the biggest sale I have ever made, and they would give me my money the following day. I have been to their place more than 5 times now, and I don't think I am getting any money from them. I am frustrated, but I am considering this as money that I dropped and lost. This is what made me lie on the bed asking myself if change was possible.
I was startled by a call from my sister asking me what permaculture was, and inwardly, I was thinking here we go again. I have explained this to her a number of times, but my sister is so polite that she will look down upon your work in the most polite manner, but you will feel it and I thought this was one of the times. I told her that in agriculture, it's when you design things to be the most productive you can be while mimicking nature, which will result in sustainability and eventually lower costs. Then she said, " I want you to do a permaculture  design for me at my place, and I will pay you for it." I was stunned, and I did not know what to say. Suddenly, I remembered the plot progress and the growing business relationship I have with the peanut butter guy,
which I will talk about in the next thread. This is change that is happening. Right now, all I need to do is to design a beautiful goats pasture for my sister. I know that if it is successful, the people in her circle who will see the design might also want it, and that's how I will be spreading permaculture.

Broiler chicks were not easy to get. Rearing chickens is the most popular way that most households are earning extra income for them to survive, so chicks are on great demand. The queue to getting them in all proper shops meant we needed to book and wait for our lucky shot at getting the chicks.  Mai Kumbi booked some chicks,  she  was told to get the birds after a week, and when she went there at 6 am the queue was already so long and she couldn't get any because they were finished. She ended up getting back our money and went in the streets and bought some chicks that aren't broilers.

I wouldn't have advised her to buy these ones, it will be months of buying chicken feed, yet I just wanted us to take advantage of the free mulberries to supplement stock feed. The idea was to keep chickens that we wouldn't have to keep for months. I had already started selling peanut butter, physically (I started selling on WhatsApp a while back but sales flattened)  since the beginning of the week. It is now possible to actually sell because I am done with home schooling. In the coming week exams will be starting, so my aunt's daughter went back home to prepare for the exams. If I get good sales, it's going to help with this little situation of ours and so much more with regards to the plot.

The beetroot beds have responded well to the termite mount soil. The leaves are green now.

I am now concentrating on the keyhole garden. The pumpkin plant has been growing, but the flowers dry up when they are still coming out. I have covered it from direct heat, I am managing watering a lot more, and I soaked banana peels so that I can use the water, incase its got something to do with the nutrients. There is some soil I will be adding gradually,  so as to bury as much of the pumpkin stem as I can,  with the hope that it will grow more roots and take up as much of the nutrients as possible.

I am growing seeds from scratch indoors, my first attempt is with cucumber, I am finding the seedlings a lot more difficult to grow outside from scratch either because of rodents or lack of nutrients or just plant diseases. This will give me time to work on the soil before I put the seedlings down.

I am going to buy chickens for home consumption. Meat is a really important part of meals, and a significant part of income, in relation to how much someone earns, is channeled towards meat. I have decided to buy chickens (broilers) for home consumption for my family and for those at the plot. This came about as I was thinking of an incentive to keep the excitement level high at the plot, and I was looking at the abundance of mulberries from the two mulberry trees in our yard. Most of the fruit is just dropping and going to waste. This is a resource that's slipping through our fingers, and it is about to change.

I have started collecting the mulberries, which I will be drying, and I will mix the dried mulberries with maize and have this ground. I will do more research on proper mixes with maize grains, and this will buy me more time with the guys at the plot. Already, mai Kumbi is really excited about the whole idea. She has started drying leftover starch from her household, to add to the mix and again this was her own initiative.

I got to the plot just after 7am, and two beds had already been planted with beans, (we are planting beans where onions were). Mai Kumbi planted before she left for work, and as she was planting, the son was watering the other beds. By 10am, the family was busy with their life, apart from plot business. Mai Kumbi asked me for plant spacing before she planted the beans. It means that they now trust me.

The onions have brought so much excitement, and it's such an incentive for developing a productive culture. The bulbs on most of the onions are not as big as I had hoped, so we are just going round, picking on the  onions that have fallen leaves, meaning they will no longer grow. We will give the rest more time, to grow bigger.
Even though the onions might not give us what we had hoped income wise, the attitude towards work at the plot has improved even more. For example, termite mount soil is being piled in advance on the side of beds that we intend to grow beetroots in, ( the bed that we spread this soil with, before planting beetroots has seedlings that are looking really healthy). Then the plan was that, once we remove onions, we will put beans in the all the onion beds, and already mai Kumbi and Kumbi, are planning to start collecting termite mount soil again, in preparation for this,  which will be spread in the beds, and it's their initiative. I need to quickly come up with a boost in the quality of life, in the present time, to keep these spirits up.

We will not be selling the onions now. We will be waiting for the time when the onion prices are high. This was made possible by my sister, who has promised to buy our onions with current market prices, but she won't take them. A few months from now, when the onion prices are good, we can sell the onions and pay her her money back. This she did, so that we can cover our current living expenses and benefit from our produce in the present time, since we don't have the capacity to hold on to our produce as yet, for us to waiting for best times to sell in the market.

We have started curing the onions, and as usual, my first thought was that, whatever I do, I need to explore using recycled material. When I went to our local scrap yard, I found out that the price of scrap was ridiculously high, and I ended up buying a simple fence for this.

Rats ripped the mesh wire I put around the space, where I am dumping my kitchen waste. These little creatures do not give up, I  am not about to give up either. I have to make this little garden work while at the same time isolating our biodegradable waste from any access by rats. This is not only to benefit from the nutrients, but if it works, maybe another family might adopt the method, and if I  am lucky, multiple families will take this up. If it spreads, it will mean less food for rats in my neighborhood, which, in turn, will reduce the rate at which they multiply.

We have started harvesting our onions at the plot, and I am yet to see how much we will get from our harvest.

I once mentioned how I am using waste from our dogs, where I take one year old decomposed dog poo, and bury it at the bottom of the keyhole garden. This was better in my mind than dumping the waste outside our yard or leaving it for the garbage collectors who will dump it at a dump site near other people's homes. But at the back of my mind, I still felt uncomfortable putting the waste in my garden. I am happy to say I found a new system for the dog waste. I will still be throwing it in pits that I dug inside our yard, and I use leaves or whatever is available to absorb any stench. When one pit is full, I use the second one and wait for a year before I take the decomposed poo from the first pit. Now, I am spreading it on our small lawn patch. The patch is surrounded by blocks that are quite high, meaning it's going to take years before I can fill up the lawn patch with the decomposed waste. It's been a few weeks since I started working on the lawn, and already, it's greener than before, and this is in the dry season. I am so glad that I am responsible for the chain of the dog poo waste, where it's not polluting the environment in any shape or form at any stage.

I went to the plot today, and the termite mount soil seems to be changing things, though it does not show much on images. My plan was to rush to the plot 3 times a week to carry soil from the mount in preparation for the new bed we will be planting more beetroots. Mai Kumbi said this is a task she can do because she is not doing much at her flowers stall. This means I can concentrate on another plan that can add to our income, or just improve our quality of life, so that I keep this family very interested and invested in this place. I can only do this if the quality of life they have a chance of living while they are at our place is better than they can find anywhere else.

The beetroot bed is looking good. I added soil from a termite mount because, Even though the leaves are green, the plants look smaller than they should. There is a space right in front of our yard that is being turned into a shopping mall. I was greatly disappointed, but yesterday, I decided to make the best of what is available, and that's how I decided to take the soil from the termite mount which is in this space. If this works. We can feed so many vegetable beds.

I visited my sister over a week ago and mulched her beds. I had never thought to ask if she wanted to have her beds mulched, I just assumed she had no time to mulch. When she came she was not too excited because she wanted her garden clean. She did not remove the mulch and a few days ago she called and told me how her view on mulch has changed because she noticed the great difference in the rate of water evaporation between  beds with a thick mulch over those that either had no mulch or those that had little mulch. She said she is likely going to be mulching from then on.

I had the first harvest of pumpkin leaves, from the pumpkin plant and it was a serving for 3 people. I am still finding things that do not attract rats to my garden, and I already succeeded with mint and onions. I have harvested mint once, and I am drying the leaves that I get and storing them for making tea. As for the onions it's been weeks since we have been using them in our cooking. It's still a very small garden, but I am just proud that it's an addition to our easily accessible productive space.

We have harvested the biggest banana bunch since we have started getting bananas from our banana patch.