Rufaro Makamure

I woke up to seeing a male pumkin flower on my plant and the plant still looks healthy there is no mould on the leaves. I am still working on getting the rats out, they keep finding a way into the fenced area.
I have started planting sweet potatoes in bags.

We were not able to fetch enough water for the week because the hours we got water were few. So again this week we have very little water for watering plants. I cut beet greens and we had them for lunch. I actually like them. This is the 3rd day in a space of two weeks when our relish is from the keyhole garden.

My sister has started putting her own plants in pots. She has a strawberry plant she planted and it already has fruit.

I feel betrayed today. I mentioned earlier that this month we will be eating the chickens we have. We we got our share and we found that the chickens had eggs inside of them. I cannot help thinking that Mai Kumbi and her family have been eating eggs and claiming that the chickens have not been laying any eggs. I am trying to find ways to make our place profitable with the little we have and if there is a chance that they have been eating eggs and lying about it, it is not fair. Maybe we could have been adding pan cakes to our meals for some time now....

Today is not the best day for bringing up my issue. I had a discussion with both my sisters on whether we need to verbalize values and consciously plan some common ones and they seem to believe these things just happen on their own. So I am still going to wait for an ideal time. I will not push to verbalize things too much, but things are changing a lot and we cannot afford not to talk about somethings for us  to have unified actions to make things better and in a direction that's intentional.

I am waiting eagerly for water. We used up all the water we had to the last drop, last night we don't even have driking water. Today is water day, when we get water, and usually it should be coming out and it's not. We barely watered all our plants because we did not have enough water this week. This is the reason why I harvested most of the spinach leaves at the beginning of the week, to reduce water losses, I left the middle leaves, the small ones only. This is how my garden looks (in the pics), after seven + days of barely watering, of course in the afternoons the leaves will be badly wilted. They look healthy and this makes the trouble of the keyhole garden, filled with organic material, worth it. It was so much easier to just grow on the ground like in most households and the rats are not as stubborn, but the keyhole bed is now paying off. It keeps the moisture and needs cloe to zero feeding.

I gambled with the long Thai bean plants. I had put it in a pot and the level of the soil had gone down a lot after sometime, so I took it out and filled the base with cut banana trunks and added more soil, to create more room for roots to grow in. My fear was I would l disturb it and potentially kill it, but I did not, so that's a relief. For the pumpkin plant, I keep working on the fence and today is the first time I have not seen any of the leaves eaten, maybe I have managed to close all the big openings that the rats would use to get in.

We had rice and spinach stems today. I was concerned about how my sister would take it, she didn't complain so I am guessing she is okay with them. The spinach served us two meals in this week and we have 4 more servings from frozen spinach. I can safely say we can now truly afford a daily meal that is eaten by the poorest households, of starch and kale, which can be eaten daily in bad times. This is without any assistance from our sister.

I tried to bring up the time issue with my sister and it was almost going south. I was not direct, and I don't think she has a clue of what I want to say. Tonight I am going to be direct, and I will ask her to help me on how I should have communicated softly. I have done all the actions I can possibly do I am not getting my message through.

When mai Kumbi came she brought veggies for the week. It's now a lot and we have a consistent supply. I am sharing my part of the profit with my sister, the one I am staying with, this is because my siblings have allowed me to freely work at the plot without much trouble. Also it's only fair for her to benefit from her property. All this while she was not entirely supporting my approach to the kind of labor I want and what I believe they should get, even how I farm was kind of of an issue.

She has not said much, but she is becoming more supportive and her nonverbal actions are leaning more towards okaying what's happening, and it's  coming from within her.

The next step is to figure out how to make her see that as opposed to the norm, we can use the properties we were left with as a stepping stone to earning our living, as opposed to relying on  the properties to take care of us, without any of our own effort. This way, we will have something sustainable and fair. This means that we now have to work to develop things so that we keep on improving mai Kumbi's living standard, it will in turn push her to want to do more and growth will be inevitable, for both our families.

This morning has been an eventful morning. It was not exactly exciting at first. My sister was late for devotion and she is not moved when she is not on time for things we agree on, and for 2 days now I have been watching this without saying anything. I am not good at time keeping either but we have been talking about how we need to change this, so we need to put an effort towards this, she is not. I cannot tell her how I am feeling because I am working on how to deliver issues I am not happy about in a gentle way, which has been something she has been complaining I am bad at. I have to figure out how to not be too blunt about this time issue. Because I have something I am keeping from her, it's been hard for me to converse with her, and she noticed it and she is also went quiet on me.

After yesterday, I decided to cut a banana bunch today, so that we can share with mai Kumbi. The challenge was that, I could not ask my sister to help me and the task took me long, as I was working out how to protect the pumkin plant as well as to keep away from the power line. Half way through my task I saw a chameleon on one of the leaves that I needed to cut off, as I was getting the bunch. I called my sister to help me remove it. She is terrified of them, but she came and she was supposed to keep the leaf steady as I cut it. I was under the branch, so any funny action the little creature was going to fall on me. We worked so perfectly together, in between so much screaming. I got the chameleon on a metal rod and it was staring right at me. Before, I kind of believed my feelings are close to zero, like, I feel indifferent about so many things that I see, as compared to those around me react to. I have removed chameleons but this one was too close for comfort, I was holding the rod and screaming at the top of my voice, I did not care what the neighbors would say, which is usually an important thing to me. I ran out of the gate bare foot my sister rushed to me at a very safe distance with my shoes and threw them to me. I was able to move the chameleon far from our house safely. The little creature got my sister and I talking, so I'm happy about that. I am also happy to experience feeling something (scared and knowing and expressing the emotion right in the moment like I did). I would love a lot of this, well not necessarily chameleons and being scared, but knowing how I feel when I am in the moment and being able to express it.

I met with mai Kumbi today, closing the month's sales. Again we increased our revenue. We increased by 26% from last month. The figures are still low relative to normal activities that can be classified as a business. I am glad that now we can buy a number of grocery items, that can push us a long way through the month.  We had rape and mustard leaves that helped us boost our sales of covo or kale. This coming month we won't be having these. What we did is to plant kale/covo in between rape and mustard plants. Kale remains in beds that we are removing rape, so this is what will add to the original kale beds.  I am hoping we won't drop in sales. I had thought that the beetroot we have been planting within the kale beds would have matured by now, but the beets at the plot are taking time to grow big. We are also getting one chicken each from our birds. They are not giving us eggs, and we both need meat for our households, it is a blessing in disguise. I think we did not have enough feed for this project and the chickens could not give us eggs consistently.

I am concerned about mai Kumbi's health, she looks smaller. I am suspecting her maize is finished and there is nothing I can do. We have to find a way to accelerate our growth, I know we will be okay.

I picked some lettuce leaves for breakfast today. We had buns that were baked by my sister. Lettuce added nutrition to the meal.

I harvested a good bunch of spinach today, and I will be putting the spinach plants on a periodic harvesting plan. The harvest was a big one, I cooked some and froze the rest for a different day.

I plan to get leaves after every three to 4 weeks. Our lunch was sadza and spinach in peanut butter sauce, a meal that resembles the common sadza and pumpkin leaves meal. The target is to reduce costs beyond just the financial cost. I am taking into account the cost it takes socially and environmentally to grow and all in all access things, especially food.
Again, the maize I used is from the field, spinach and tomatoes are from the garden, and the peanut butter is from the peanut butter business. This cut down my financial cost significantly. Then, in terms of the environmental cost, all the feed is from kitchen waste, there was no transport involved, moving things from point A to B, yhe garden is right in front of the lotchen. Socially,  the time to work on the spinach was not too demanding, I could not say it took too much of my time or any other person's time. I did have to buy a wire mesh, which is a cost that I could not avoid. From a preventive health care side, spinach helps with the blood and I have been told my blood pressure  is on the low side, though it's in the healthy range, so spinach and beetroots are an intentional addition to the garden from a health perspective. I might be   able to lessen the need for going to the hospital by having access to healthy food.