Rufaro Makamure

I am glad Apo managed to travel today. I was sensing that he was kind if loosing hope. I pray the people at his rural home, that he left with peanuts seed will not let him down.

I am continuing to add organic matter in beds at the plot. I  got bedding  that was for chickens.

I met with Apo, he has a lot of pressure. Mai Tendai was around helping him and we managed to talk, the three of us. We were open about the common misconception of how business are run. An employee just expects to get paid and cares very little about what their input to the business is like and now more than before, there is less working in companies than there should, yet people still expect to get paid. Then for the employers, if they could, they would have people working for them for free. Both of these perceptions are causing businesses to fail. To change things these two ways of thinking need to change, starting from Apo as an employer and then mai Tendai as an employee. While I was there, a child who had just finished his primary level came looking for some work, and he said he wishes to go to secondary school but he knows he has no chance unless he raises his own money. He wants to beat the odds and so he is starting to look for work now, he might be able to raise enough money by January. There are not many opportunities for children to help themselves if they can and I couldn't help think of this space as a potential opportunity. I didn't voice this out but it did cross my mind.

Apo hasn't had time to go out to look for nuts, since the boys he got left. He is leaving for his rural home tomorrow to go and see the  nuts that were harvested from the nuts he sent for growing last season. Mai Tendai will be making peanut butter for people who bring their nuts, to be processed, for the days Apo will be away.

We will have another meeting when he gets back and we have the knowledge of the amount of nuts he will get.

I was harvesting vetiver grass today. We haven't harvested it since we planted, and today I am putting a little in the beds, on top of the leaves I put last week. I will be putting organic matter in bits and pieces as the plants are growing, by the time they are big they will be having a generous layer of mulch from different sources, to make sure different nutrients are present. The part I cut the grass from is so small, but it gave me enough grass for the beds I was working on today. I think I have enough grass for what I am planning to do this season.

There is a lot of bermuda/couch grass around the new beds. I will be using the weeded bermuda grass to stop it from growing. I will layer it in between garden beds together with any other weeds that we get. This will suppress any growth between the beds and we will be saved from constantly weeding, at the same time this will be perfect feed for the beds with time. Stepping on the weeds as we walk along the paths in-between beds will be helping in breaking down the weeds. We can then have periodic times when we shovel the feed into the beds and start the process all over again.

Our weather switched from two days, of a lot of rain to very high temperatures. Our high today is 32°C. We have not received rain since we planted.

I am continuing to fill bags with soil for growing more plants at home, away from the plot. I also managed to get a hold of the boiler maker who worked on Apo's  first motor, and I painted a picture of what it could be if his business, which he is still starting up, creates a relationship with Apo's business. The work that has to be done for now requires a team of people that see into the future. If the project grows, the boiler maker will have a place for doing routine maintenance, which is guaranteed and this is stability job wise. So for him it is like growing a tree, and it requires him to create some time outside the jobs he is getting elsewhere, which I am assuming pay him better for now, but are just random and temporary. After this business grows it is going to one space where jobs will be created.

I also talked to one lady who has been helping Apo for years. She used to be an employee, but now she is not. She is called to help out when he has no one or when he needs to travel. She sees so much potential in the business and she wants to work with me. When I talked to her the last time and went back to Apo to find out the possibility of him taking her back, he was not too keen, he has now changed his mind, but she has her own conditions now and one of these has always been a raise in salary. I am going to the plot today, so I will be meeting with Apo and the woman tomorrow to see if she cannot be permanently re-engaged. Otherwise from the peanut butter customers side they just want their peanut butter and they have no idea there is trouble in the business.

The final section on areas I am working on,  that I have not talked about is Apo's business. As I was concerned about Apo's issue with his employees he got people to help him and they only lasted a month. It took him almost a month for him to tell me, and his reason was he did not know how to. That shows he cares about my opinion in his business, I was happy.

I am still waiting for my friend to help me with finding a person who has a very successful business to talk to Apo about the importance of an employee. In the meantime, things that are happening are forcing him to pay more attention to my concern. He is now asking himself questions on what he is really doing wrong and he is even considering the chance of increasing the salary of one person to oversee things and then grow from there, this is such a big step, basing on the history I have with him on this topic. The challenge is that these gaps where he doesn't have people cripple his business very much because his production is greatly limited. We spent the weekend without peanut butter and our customers kept on coming to look for it. We now have it and he produced it all by himself.
The guy working on his motors has still not showed up to work on the second motor and he has already been paid. The potential this business has is a lot, but it needs support to see it through the changes that are required. I have been getting help from my sister and my friend, but I have gone to them so many times, I am now ashamed to keep asking for their help.

The things that all the systems I am interested in have to overcome are too many, and now I understand why when NGOs come with brilliant ideas, there is progress to a certain point and things stop progressing. The time and resources that are required to keep searching for the actual problems, admitting where as change drivers we lack and fixing this and then bringing everyone on the same page, is something that cannot be easily predicted.

We are going to the plot in the mornings to water our plants. I will put in parallel the work that mai Kumbi and her family have started doing since we started our area. They have cleared the beds that had onions and they have planted beans. They have also started removing weeds in and around garden beds. We have been growing in terms of recenue, but we have so much potential and we will see if this way of doing things will push us.

The rats were relentless last night. Peas, herbs and lettuce were eaten. There are some peas plants,  that are grown, these are not being eaten, so I just thought the rats do not like peas, just like they rarely eat beetroots. I was very wrong.

We went to the plot, to water our newly planted seedlings. Most beds were already watered, so we spread some chicken manure and a few leaves on top. We will keep adding the leaves as the plants grow. We got all the leaves from under the trees that  are very close to the beds, so this was not a difficult task at all.

The visual worked!!!
Mai Kumbi was drawn more to the spinach and how big the leaves are. I was honest with her about how I felt and things were a little difficult to handle at first and mai Kumbi was panicking. I told her we should be comfortable to criticize each other for the sake of progress. I am not used to this too, and I had to fight the urge to want to be nice by sugar coating how I truly felt. I was kind though, well I think. In the end we agreed that she will work on her space and we will work on ours and see how things go. We are past pushing each other, I am working on my personal shift of mindset, in the way I am involved in the growing of things at the plot, so we are both battling our issues, no one is going to have time to follow the other up.

Again our revenue increased. I was afraid that she is putting some of the money she is making from her flowers so as to impress me, because the area she left with plants growing is so small. She swore she was not taking money from anywhere. I really hope she is telling the truth, because if she isn't whatever I am celebrating will be false growth.

I am preparing for my meeting with mai Kumbi. I will be showing her the plants in the keyhole garden and how healthy looking they are, without any commercial fertilizers or sprays. I also hope to show her how we can utilise our space to the maximum, by never leaving the land we have idle, after harvesting. The rats couldn't get into the spinach patch, so I have the healthy spinach leaves to show case as well as beetroots. Within the beetroots, I put peas today, that I have nursed in tissue roll cores. When I am harvesting the beets, something will remain growing in their place, that way there won't be a time when the space has nothing growing on it.

I have also grown sweet potatoes in sacks and I  am trying out ginger which I put in an old TV case. Within the sweet potato bags, I put dill, and parsley and then I grew lettuce in the ginger pot. A tomato plant grew on it's own and I am letting grow.