Absentee Bloglord. Part Three: Anything and everything you could desire to know about what I do in agriculture, not including my work at the college - ha!

RAINS, DIGGING IN GARDENS, AND PLANTING.

Installment One: March

Towards the end of dry season (March), you wonder that anything could be different. The ground is hard as rock, baked into granite by the never-ending sun. All manner of vegetation is dead and desiccated. A few trees sport their green leaves for the long haul, but others stand bare, either having dropped their clothes, or having had them eaten off by Lulu caterpillars, grasshoppers, or some other ravenous thing. Shades of bleached brown, red, and yellow stretch out as far as the eye can see - and owing to the lack of vegetation, that's a long way.

And then some rain comes. Almost before you see the first drop hit the ground, it seems that lush, almost painfully radiant greenery springs forth in every direction! Seeds, waiting for the slightest hint of moisture, shoot into over-drive in their fierce will to survive long enough to carry on their families and set new seed before the water runs out. Likewise, my life leaps into overdrive. Keeping up with gardens and weeds during rainy season is an insane race. Getting all your seeds in the ground asap is the same story. It's wonderful, and exciting . . . and exhausting all at once.

What I have to work with here at our compound could make a garden lover cry (and not with tears of joy): a thousand life times' supply of marram (spelling?). This chippy, rusty, volcanic looking orange/red rock is found in boulders, underground mountains, and sprinkled everywhere in pebble form. EVERYWHERE. My back garden is more like a gravel pit than anything else. You can't even sink a hoe deeper than 5 to 10 centimeters. The soil is nearly void of organic matter, and has virtually no water holding capacity. With nothing to absorb it, it just pours down through the rock. Disaster? Bah! I shall not be deterred.

Each year that I am here, I've learned more, I get my act together more, I'm more prepared, and more excited about the agricultural possibilities than the year before. My month spent at ECHO last year was a huge encouragement, and I gathered plenty of great ideas to help me this time around. This year, with the help of Caleb, Heidi, Melissa, and Liana, I've collected plenty of dried grass and sorghum stalks for mulching; rich chocolatey soil for seeding new trees in bags; hefty wheelbarrow fulls of sand from the river to mix in with the clay areas of my garden; termite soil and goat poo to use as fertilizer; wood ash as an amendment for our acidic soil; and let copious amounts of leaves dry and rot over my garden during the winter, leaving a beautiful layer of top soil.

Collecting perfect mulching grass from the bush around our compound

Tree Seedlings, Fences, Goats, & Tukuls.

This year's agricultural season got off to its start in early March with my first purchase of tree seedlings from Juba: teak and mahogany to raise until the rains and then transplant into small plots for timber; and bamboo for windbreaks and an easy building material (fences, trellises, roofs, etc.)

Caleb and another worker built me a beautiful fence round one side of our team house to enclose my new seedlings - a defensive measure against the neighbors' ever voracious and destructive goats.  [Read: MAJOR frustration. Despite our pleas to tie the goats, they mowed through every last piece of my ailing dry season garden, and were still gallivanting around our compound like they owned the place.] But back to what I was saying: tree seedlings. These seedlings would be joined by others that I would start as soon as I'd collected soil and filled more bags. Things like leucaena; cassia; desmanthus; the turmeric I brought from Zanzibar; chaya, mulberry and bougainvillea cuttings; tamarind; indian jujube; macadamia; and cashew, to name a few.

Meanwhile, I got cracking on another construction project: erecting two local-made mud and thatch tukuls (huts) behind my house. One would be a long awaited store and work space for me and all things agricultural. No doubt the whole team will be jumping for joy to be rid of my endless plates and jars of drying seeds, tools, reams of drip tape, dehydrators, and other assorted paraphernalia that now adorn our houses and compound. The second tukul will, I very dearly hope, be the brand new abode of a waddling, quacking family of Khaki Campbell ducks! That is, if I can manage to find a provider somewhere in Kenya or Uganda, and find a way to get them here. Those are some big ifs, so please pray for that!  Above you can see us on our adventure to people's compounds to buy bundles of grass for the roofs.

A couple months later, when it started raining & we could dig mud, the tukul walls were ready to be mudded

To come next post: more on agriculture - what happens in April . . . stay tuned! :)