Under South African Skies: An MCCer Living in the Rainbow Nation

June 30^th, 2011

My last day in the gardens at Project Gateway and the final numbers are in! We’ve added up the remainder of our food tallies we’ve been keeping all year and now know how much food in total we’ve grown for the kid’s boarding house. I’m pretty happy with the results. However, much of what we accomplished this SALT year isn’t tangible or measurable which I kind of like. How do you measure friendships, conversations, mutual learning, and building into people’s lives? You can’t!

Tomatoes:                     40 lbs.

Sweet Potatoes:             92 lbs.

Bringel (Eggplant):         14.5 lbs.

Spinach:                        1 lb.

Spring Onions:               0.25 lb.

Carrots:                           12 lbs.

Butternut Squash:          6.5 lbs.

Cantaloupe:                   2 lbs.

Ground Cherries:           1 lb.

Beans:                          49.25 lbs.

Radish Tops (Umfino):    92.5 lbs.

Radishes:                      113 lbs.

Corn (Maize):                Lots but unsure of the totals as it is still drying and needs to                                             be ‘de-kerneled’ before weighing, but ya, lots!

 

 

 

 

 

June 2^nd  –  Help on the horizon!

I finally have a partner in crime to help me in the gardens here at Project Gateway, woot woot! His name is Thabiso and he is a local 21 year old who is living in the township called Imbali just outside of the city. He’s a polite and funny young chap who works so hard he’s putting me to shame a bit to be honest!

Thabiso came to Project Gateway’s attention just recently. He’s starting his college degree in Marketing Management just down the street from us here. He is going to be living on site so that he doesn’t have to make the huge and costly commute into town each day. For June and half of July he has nothing to do so the powers to be have asked him if he’d be willing to help me for the time being. I’ve been asked to teach him everything I know about Farming God’s Way with the hopes that he could perhaps be permanently involved with our project. He’s seemed to love everything we’ve done so far (that, or he’s a really good actor) and is really keen to learn more. Already we’ve planted more sweet potatoes and harvested another row; we’ve cleaned up a bunch of mulch and finally finished yet another round of mulching to the garden, and we’ve cleaned out a new area of brush that we want to turn into a kind of ‘forest garden’ with bananas, papaya and cassava. Thabiso was able to identify guava trees and black berry shrubs that I would have otherwise cut down in our clearing. Needless to say it’s been great having him around!

It’s been fantastic working with someone for the last couple days. I’m really excited about the opportunities to teach this guy all about gardening and, better yet, I’m excited of what I can learn from him! He told me the other day that he’s happy about what he’s learning as it ‘will help him with his future.’ That’s what I like to hear!

May 24th 

Sometimes you just don’t know what you have right in front of your eyes. We’ve been growing these fodder radishes (see March 28th below) not for eating but to improve the soil after our bean harvest. I was intending to just cut off the green leafy parts and lay them down as mulch. Well, some of my coworkers here at Project Gateway brought to my attention that the leaves are actually great eating! Zulu people call it ‘umfino’ and it is cooked and used just like you would spinach. We essentially found a crop we didn’t even know we were growing!

So today was spent harvesting this umfino and making sure everyone at Gateway got to take a bunch home with them. Aunt Nonto, the boarding house mum, was very excited about it all and started cooking with it right away. Who knows what other surprises are in store in the coming weeks!

May 5th

Today I started to uncover our sweet potatoes and it looks like there are going to be tons! So exciting! Some are the size of my head! I’m pretty stoked because planting them was a huge experiment. We had the vines donated to us and I just researched what to do with them and tried it out. This is a total cliche but it goes to show that nothing ventured is nothing gained!

   

May 3rd – Compost

I finally finished getting the compost ready today. The Farming God’s Way model has its own recipe to make compost and it seems to work pretty well. First you put down a layer of ‘dry or woody’ plant material as your base about 45cm high. I’m using mostly palm leaves that fall from the trees on the property as there are several that fall every day and no one seems to know what to do with them besides using them as brooms. So there’s no shortage of dry or woody stuff for the first layer.

The second layer is your ‘green material’ so that’s anything from veggie scraps in the kitchen to weeds pulled from the garden, grass clippings from the yard and leaves swept up from the parking lot. This layer should also be about 45cm high.

The final layer is your smelly stuff – cow or chicken manure. Place about 10cm of manure on the top and repeat these layers one on top of the other for however high you’d like to go. I’ve made three tiers of the three layers. You then dose the whole thing in water (I drowned out a family of rats that were living in my layers when I watered mine!) and cover with some extra palm leaves.

After three days you must turn the entire thing upside down to release the heat that is trapped inside. Another three days pass and you flip it again. Leave it for an extra ten days then flip once more and you should have a good, moist, fertile pile that you cover and leave until October when you’ll need the compost for inputs in the garden. We think that with this pile we won’t have to purchase any inputs at all next year saving us tons of mullah! Yeah composting!

April 20th

Today was a great day because I got to plant a tiny little ‘children’s garden’ with the kids from the boarding house. We planted every winter crop that I could get my hands on from cabbage and kale to carrots and beetroot. Each kid got to plant ‘their’ little piece which gives them each ownership over part of the garden. Umlundi was so excited to plant his carrots. Aphile is looking after his beetroots. Za is taking care of the kale. Days like these are truly rewarding, it’s why I came here in the first place.

April 19th – Disaster Strikes!

With so much unseasonal rain this fall and now an extra 50mm on Saturday we have food rotting on the vine! All the butternut and cantelope have just browned and rotted. A couple squash were harvested before the big storm and only one cantelope has made it through. Ah well, you have to take the failures with the success right?

March 28th

Another relay crop that we are trying are … radishes, who would have thought?! James says that planting ‘fodder radishes’ after a crop of beans will help improve the soil. So beans are a legume and put nitrogen into the soil right? Radishes suck up a ton of nitrogen and turn it into a more usable form. By leaving the radishes in the ground to rot, they will slowly release their stored and improved nutrients to next year’s crop of corn. Brilliant!

   

We’re experimenting with two types of fodder radish – regular red garden type and a long white variety called ‘icicle radish’. It looks like the second is producing a greater quantity of leaves which is great for mulch on the garden so it takes the cake this year!

March 15^th – 17^th – Cover and Relay Cropping

Now that both the corn and the beans are all taken in, it’s time to start thinking about what to plant for the winter. We’re in a bit of a predicament though. My placement will be completed at the end of June (coming way too fast!) and no one will be around to take care of the crops until late in August. So what is a farmer to do?

We think that the best option is to grow crops not for their food but for their ability of producing mulch cover. Large leafed, hefty sized bushy vegetables that will die back, leaving a ton of bulk matter to add to the blanket that is ever so important in our model. Cover crops of Lab Lab beans, cow beans and sugar beans will do the trick! And not only do they produce lots of mulch but, being legumes, they add much needed nitrogen to our soil. In the courtyard we will plant equal sections of the three types of beans. That way we can compare which grows the fastest, which suppresses weeds the best and which leaves the most mulch.  We plant them in the exact same rows as our previous crop to take advantage of the better soil fertility and left over nutrients that are found there.

We are trying something interesting over in the corn crop. After harvesting the corn cobs we left the dry stalks in place. James and I planted Lab Lab beans in amongst the stalks so that they can use them to climb up. Lab Labs love to be supported by something and these left over stalks saves us from creating trellises. This ‘relaying’ strategy comes soon after the harvest last week. By planting the Lab Labs now the needed nitrogen will be added back to the soil, stolen from the corn itself. Planting before harvesting though creates competition between the two plants, and no one likes quarrelling, so we keep them separate from season to season.

March 11^th – Bring on the corn!!

For months we’ve waited for this day, and so have the boarding kids. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a million times, “Stay out of that corn!” Well, today I got to say to them, “Everyone run into the corn and see who can collect the most!” It was absolute mayhem with kids grabbing corn cobs left, right and centre. As a group we pulled off each mealie, pilled them into wheelbarrows and stored them indoors.

Like the beans, we’re letting the corn go past its ripeness and into a hard, tough state. Right now the cobs are at 120 days of maturity, meaning that they have reached their potential and won’t get any larger. At this stage we put them inside to dry and at day 200 they will be dry enough that the kernels fall off easily. These kernels will be ground up into a fine powder that locals here turn into a paste-like food called mealie meal, the basis of most dinner plates. This mealie meal has the texture of mashed potatoes and tastes pretty bland but when mixed with a curry or bean stew is very nutritious and delicious! Very happy that all our hard work is paying off!

February 28^th

The beans are now at their optimal dryness and ready for harvesting. I’ve actually left them a little too late and they are breaking open on their own and spilling out into the soil. We don’t want to lose any more! So I’ve embarked on an epic harvest that has taken three full days handing pick the dried pods off of their stocks.

Now we lay them out indoors for a few days for a little more drying time and slowly we are shelling them. Shelling has made for a create team exercise and has spawned many a good conversation with the people who work at Project Gateway. On my lunches I will just bring a bucket of beans with me to where we all sit and relax and soon enough I’ll have half a dozen people helping me break open the brittle shells and sorting through the beans that are good to keep and the ones that have gone rotten. This repetitive task allows for talking and sharing and just being together. Each evening, I also bring a bucket of beans over to the kids at the boarding house and in the morning I come back to a fully shelled pile of beans. Is that considered child labour? Haha, the kids have said that they like the task! I promise!

February 15^th – The Dog Days of Summer

Heat and watering, weeding and bugs. That pretty much sums up the days right now. With nothing to harvest yet and it being the wrong time to plant anything, most mornings are centered watering and checking on the crop’s process. It’s simple but I love coming in every day to see the progress of things growing. The eggplants are starting to bulge out and the butternut squash are coming in droves! Tomatoes are soon to be in large supply as well.

However, by 11am it’s too hot to do too much of anything! The temperature soars to over 35 degrees most days, sometimes nearing 40 and the sun is just too intense to be out in. Well, at least for this northern Canadian. So during the hottest time of days I’ve taken to doing little tasks like little fix it jobs or cleaning out and organizing the tool shed. All in a day’s work!

February 2^nd

Today was a really cool day because I got to plant our first tree in the garden. And it wasn’t just any tree, it was a clementine tree! I’ve never been up close to a clementine tree before, let alone planted one.

Planting this tree was special for two reasons. Firstly, the money needed to purchase it was donated by the missions committee at my church back home in Canada, so a big shout out to Breslau Mennonite! After all of their support to get me here they keep on donating with things like this, Thanks guys!

Secondly, I didn’t plant it alone. I got the kids who live at project gateway to plant it themselves so it is now officially their tree. It’s amazing how much kids love to be out in a garden. The kids were so excited about planting this tree and have been back every day to check on how it’s doing. I felt like we were instilling a bit of sustainability knowledge into these young little minds. I think that moments like these are what SALT is all about. Maybe one day they will want to plant their own trees and start their own gardens as well!

February 1^st – Companion Planting

Besides the beans and corn, we’ve been experimenting with a whole variety of other vegetables to see how they perform with our conservation agriculture model. We’ve planted sweet potatoes and tomatoes, kale and carrots, and squash of all kind. We’ve discovered, however, that planning out your garden properly can greatly increase the yields you harvest.

Many plants can benefit from being planted next to other specific plants. Some benefit from mutual nutrient exchange in the soil with one plant adding a nutrient that the adjacent plant needs a lot of. Other plants attract different types of pests and if planted together confuse bugs, increasing their chances of not getting eaten. There’s whole books published on this companion planting idea but here’s a good quick source that I’ve found helpful planning out new beds and gardens. http://www.ghorganics.com/page2.html

I made a grave mistake and planted our cauliflower next to our cabbages, both of which attract the dreaded cabbage moth. By concentrating the two vegetables together we’ve made it easier for the moth and it’s larvae to jump from one plant to another. To combat this we’ve planted some wild garlic and thyme between the rows. Apparently the cabbage moth hates the smell of both of these and we hope that it will eventually ward off the intruders. At the same time the wild garlic blossoms and attracts pollinators while the thyme can be harvested for use in the boarding house kitchens!

January 27^th – The First Harvest!!

Today was a really great day because we got our first crop of beans to harvest! Finally we’re reaping from some of our hard work form the last few months! Back in November, I got the kids who live at Project Gateway (from left: Sne, mBali & Trustie) to plant a few rows of beans for their families. They did the whole process themselves from digging the little trenches to putting in the compost to planting the seeds the right spacing apart. They were very excited when the seedlings first came up and were anticipating this day for a while!

Right now we’re harvesting a few buckets of fresh green beans but surprisingly I’ve learned that most Zulu people really don’t like fresh beans like we do at home. They do however love baked beans and beans in curry or stir-fries. So the plan is to leave the beans on the plants for a few more weeks, letting them dry on the stalk into the hard, tough beans that you can buy at the bulk food store (currently they have about 35% moisture and need to dry back to approximately 10% moisture content). Harvesting dry beans not only is sensitive to the cultural diet here but also is convenient for packaging and storage.

January 17th

The corn is so tall now that if I reach up and jump as high as I can, I still can’t touch the top of the leaves! It must be over 7 feet tall! At this stage the corn starts to tassel out and starts showing the development of cobs. Now is another important date in our schedule – Second Top Dressing. Just as before we make a small 3cm deep hole about a hand width away, up slope of each corn base. Then we place a heaping teaspoon of store bought fertilizer in the hole and cover it up.

James came up with a brilliant solution to bending over each and every time you come to a corn stalk. One of us goes down the row first with a long stick to make the initial hole. The next guy follows with a piece of hollow PVC tubing with a funnel on the end with which he uses to put in the fertilizer. You simply push the soil back over the hole and there’s no bending or back-breaking involved! The lazy farmer’s way! Innovations like these are important though to save a rural farmer time and energy. We’re just growing a small veggie garden but imagine completely this process over many hectares! Any time saving techniques are more than welcome for larger scale farming.

Water is also important at this stage. The cobs are just starting to develop and if the plant doesn’t get enough water at this stage the kernels won’t fill out properly. And with this hot, dry weather we’re experiencing I fore see myself watering a lot in the coming weeks.

January 13th

After the holidays were over there were tons of jobs to catch up on. Luckily for me I had some help. Phil and Susie (our two other SALTers) didn’t start their placements until later in the month and could come help me for an entire week. The following week a friend of mine from home, Andrew Bubar, came and volunteered with us for a few days. One big job that we got done together was sheet mulching. We’re already thinking about expanding our territory and adding a new garden for the winter.

To do this is a two man job so I’m glad that Andrew was around to help. The space we want to become a garden is currently grass, grass that needs to be killed. So one of us would place newspaper and cardboard boxes down on the ground while the other spread our famous and well-used mulch on top. This will cut out the light for the grass and by the time May rolls around when we want to plant. hopefully all of the grass will have died. It’s a great and simple way to turn a lawn into a veggie garden! Andrew helped out with a plethora of other jobs like watering and weeding, painting and planting a new little garden by the TB clinic. His work has been much appreciated!

December 27th

While my girlfriend Quinn was here in town, we went to do a holiday check up on the corn. It’s looking great and right on schedule. The milestone day of December 21st has past, the longest day of the year when the sun is at its highest in the sky. On this day the corn is at an optimum age to reap this maximum amount of sunlight and is closing its canopy, deterring weeds below. I think Quinn was happy to see the progress we’ve made, but even happier that we were on holidays so that I didn’t put her to work! Just kidding.

December 8th

Today was an important day in the Farming God’s Way schedule – Thinning and Top Dressing. In the 6×6 demonstration garden we plant too many maize seeds purposely to account for the likely situation that not every seed will germinate. Seeds can fail for a number of reasons like insect problems, birds and chickens pilfering your garden, or faulty seed storage that has caused the seed to die even before planting. By planting more than needed we avoid having too few maize stocks at harvest time. We’ve had some loss in our garden but overall the seeds have done well. So to give adequate space and optimum growing conditions for the garden as a whole, we need to take some out. Seems cruel to pull a perfectly good little seedling but it benefits all the others in the end!

To thin, you take groupings of three planting stations and you want an average of six plants between them. You pull the ones who aren’t doing the best, are small or have any insect damage. If they are all doing equally as well then you take out the middle seedling.

Next we top dress with this special fertilizer stuff by putting a small hole (a hand width away from the plants and 3 cm deep) in the ground upslope of the planting station and put in a heaping table spoon of the granules. When it rains, the fertilizer will be washed directly towards the roots of the plants and give them a nice big boost of energy! Now we pretty much sit and wait and let the garden take care of itself, adding more mulch if needed and keeping a sharp eye out for those pesky cutworms!

December 6th

A little piece of me died today. Anyone who knows me well and my hippie-granola-child-save the environment ways knows how much I hate pesticides and their overuse on our crops. Well, I had to break down a bit and spray one on our crops! Nooooo! It was not a good day for our Mother Earth but what were we going to do? Aphids, cutworms and this small little black fly were taking their toll on our beans, maize and and raspberry plants! We almost lost the raspberries and many of the beans won’t recover. I guess this is just one of the realities of farming. Either spray for these culprits of destruction of have nothing to show for all your hard work. This reality is even more devastating in a developing country where you either spray or have no food to feed your family.  When you think of it like that the decision becomes much easier that’s for sure! If anyone has any hippie approved organic ways to deal with these bugs please write an let me know!

December 2nd

Weeding is the name of the game for the next little while. The Kukujia grass is so wicked it feels like by the time I’m done weeding the whole courtyard it’s already sprung back up on side where I started. Even with the mulch layer it still hangs on there and can poke up out of the covering. With time, continual adding of mulch and consistent weeding, about once every two or three days, we hope that it will eventually peter out.

Here’s an article released by the BBC about our agricultural model. It’s a pretty old article and about Zambia not South Africa, but it does a good job in explaining of conservation farming and the awesome benefits it has on the soil. Feel free to check it out! http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8582353.stm

November 23rd – 30th

All of our rows in both the courtyard and the garden across the street now have beans or corn seedlings sprouting away! It’s amazing how fast they are growing. Every day, sometimes even within the same day, you can see a difference in their height and size. When the sun comes out, which it hasn’t in quite some time, the bean leaves fill way out to suck up the sunlight and they look even larger. The problem now is just cutworms. Tell me, where do these things come from? Neither of these spaces have ever been gardens but as soon as we plant things cutworms are there mowing down whatever they can get! Over the past few days I’ve gone row by row finding cut seedlings then digging around their bases to find the culprits and squash them. Then we can plant a new seed in its place and hope for the best. There’s only a limited time though that we can keep adding seeds as we want the canopy to grow as a unit, closing in together to create even shade over the ground. If we plant too late then the newer seedings will just to completing with the older ones.

November 22nd

Things are finally starting to come together in the courtyard. After almost 8 days of planting and with the help of my roommate Emmanuel and the local kids, the beans are all planted and now loving all the rain that we’re getting. We didn’t do any chemical fertilizer and stuck with the cow manure to beef up (no pun intended) the organic content of the soil in this space. The whole thing got a generous helping of mulch on top to seal in the moisture and help keep the weeds at bay. Unlike corn though, beans have difficulty pushing through a thick layer of leaves so we had to leave a small space right above the seeds for them to emerge. When the first leaves break the surface I’ll push the mulch right up to the plant base.

It’s looking much more like a garden now then the “weed indulged-garbage filled-hasn’t been used in nearly 20 years box” that it once was. We have a few rows of sweet potato vine that was donated to us and a couple tomato plants have made their homes in the old tires that we found. We have a rhubarb plant on the go and a row of raspberry canes have spruced up the far side of the garden. It’s really rewarding and energizing to see things coming together. Every time I’m done one thing I just want to move on to the next and the next. The snowball effect is really underway!

November 11th – Planting Day!!

Everything has happened all at once and so quickly. This week the summer rains finally donned us with their presence breaking an unbearable spring drought. There was one day that we got 33ml all of a sudden! So our furrows and planting stations have sucked up so much water and are now ready for the inputs.

We planned an afternoon (luckily one of the sunny ones) to all go out and do this process together. There’s a group of California students volunteering here at Gateway for the month so I roped them in to helping us get the job done. First we had to redig the holes as the thunderous rain had caved them in a bit and they were too shallow to plant in. I can see this as a potential problem for the large-scale farmer. How on earth is someone going to dig their entire field twice? On our small-scale it wasn’t a huge issue but otherwise definitely something to think about. After they were redug we put the correct amount of cow manure in to each. 350ml for each corn planting station and the same for every 60cm of bean furrow. We’re trying an experiment by using chemical fertilizer instead of manure on the top third of the garden to see what happens. After everything is added we push some of the soil to cover the inputs leaving 3-5cm of space for planting.

And now the moment that we’ve all been waiting for since August. Putting in the seeds! After soaking them for 6 hours to loosen the skins 3 corn seeds are spaced out in every planting station and bean seeds are placed every 10cm in the furrows. We cover up the little guys with the rest of the soil, add the blanket of mulch on top and presto, a garden! It feels very good to have something growing in the ground. Every day I go over to that side of the road to see if they have sprouted through the mulch. Nothing yet. While I wait I’m busy preparing the courtyard for the same process, slowly redigging the furrows, pulling weeds, adding the manure and backfilling to the correct depth. The courtyard is taking so long because the soil is still so tough to work with and this nasty weed called Kukujia is running wild. But perseverance is the key. I’ll get that side planted by the end of next week if it’s the last thing I do!

October 21^st

We officially have broken ground! Working off the enthusiasm of all the folks who came out to the seminar last week I’ve been able to start digging our furrows and holes (or ‘planting stations’). I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned that we have another garden in addition to our courtyard. It’s across the street from Project Gateway and is spilt up into thirds. Two thirds are going to be corn and the last is going to be beans.

Although the mulch layer has done wonders to the soil in the main courtyard, the prognosis is still not great. We’ve decided that the soil will benefit greatly by planting all beans, the best nitrogen fixator in the world!  We’ve got a soil sample as well but waiting to get the results back. It will give us a better picture of what we’re up against. So although the garden won’t be the varied ‘typically English’ garden that I had in mind, we’ll still be able to grow lots of food for our recipients and the soil will benefit in the long run. And just think, I’ll learn all there is to know about beans and then some! Resident bean expert!

October 15^th

We had our very first group training session this weekend and it went over amazingly smoothly. Despite the torrential rain and a very important rugby match that was on TV, we had about 45 agriculture enthusiasts come out for the Friday – Saturday session.  Grant Dryden and his wife (who are kind of the FGW gurus of the world, so excited to meet them, like meeting the Queen!) came all the way from Port Elizabeth to lead the weekend.

We went over the main principles and techniques in a lecture style but we broke it up with demonstration experiments and funny little skits. My favorite was the four of us SALTers who did a skit showing the principle of high standards. Elise and Susie played moms who were each baking a cake, Phil and I being the kids who were waiting to eat the cakes. Elise mimed baking a cake to high standards with measured ingredients and proper baking time and Phil got to eat the awesomely made cake. Susie on the other hand mimed baking a cake haphazardly without measuring then I had to eat this disgusting creation. Queue mimed barfing … now.

Saturday we all helped build a demonstration garden and got very wet in the process. But even though people were a bit discouraged by the cold I think most understood the principles and the general vision by the end of it. It was amazing to see the lights flick on above people’s heads when we started laying out the garden and digging holes. Very motivating to see and hear people getting excited about it all saying that they are going to try it at their gardens as well. Good weekend all around!

September 30th, 2010

Earthworms are great for two things; they keep your soil nice and fertile, making it awesome for growing lots of food. They also keep 10 year old girls at bay which these 10 year old boys were more than happy with. Sanda loved to pretend to eat the worms infront of the girls to gross them out, although I think only because he has a crush on one of them. Oh the politics of 10 year olds!

September 16th, 2010

Okay so all the garbage, grass and shrubs have been cleaned up and we finally have a blank slate to work with. Step two: soil. The soil in our space is really, really poor. You basically will have better luck digging into your living room carpet then the ground here. According to the model, however, we aren’t allowed to till the soil. So what are we to do?

Bit by bit we’ve started covering the entire courtyard with the mulch layer or ‘blanket’. By searching every corner of our compound for any leaf, stick and blade of grass and calling around to some local farmers, we’re slowing creating a simulated forest floor in the space. Coupled with round the clock watering, this litter layer will hopefully cool the ground and encourage the soil to break up. In two month’s time when planting season is upon us, apparently the soil will be more fertile and diggable (is diggable a word?). We’ll have to wait and see what happens!

In the mean time we’re busy planning for the year. James and Joan and I have come up with a few ideas for the space including a rain water harvesting tank for the roofs around the courtyard, a chicken coop, a ‘learning wall’ for teaching the FGW model, painting jobs, and a hammock for those mid-day siestas … okay, they might not know about the hammock yet but who doesn’t appreciate a nice place to nap after all this hard work right?

This Sunday we are joining a couple dozen others for a week long workshop on conservation farming. The workshop is taking place in the Maphutseng Valley in the mountainous country of Lesotho. Looking forward to gaining and whole lot of knowledge and coming up with even more ideas for our space here, all while camping under the southern stars.

August 29th, 2010

I have three words for what this garden needs … Lots Of Work! I don’t know if you can even classify it as a ‘garden’ yet. A “weed indulged-garbage filled-hasn’t been used in nearly 20 years box” would be a more appropriate name I think. But I am up for the challenge! But elbow grease can only get me so far.

James and I are using a fairly new agricultural model called Farming God’s Way (FGW). It’s basically a back to the land, conservation focussed method of growing food with high yields. Feel free to read more about it at http://www.farming-gods-way.org/ but here’s the Cole’s notes version:

First, the model is founded on no tillage, so that means never turning the earth over on itself. Instead, holes or ‘planting stations’ are dug for the seeds in the exact same spots year after year. Second, we cover the garden with a layer of mulch which the model calls ‘God’s blanket’. Just like the litter layer on a forest floor, this blanket keeps in moisture and adds nutrients and organic matter to improve the soil. Third, and perhaps most important, everything is done to extremely high standards. This pleases the Type A personaility in me. Exactly three seeds are planted in each planting station, precise amounts of compost and fertilizers are measured out for each seed, weeds are removed at specific times, etc etc. Very hard core – scientific.

Because of how much labour is involved, especially with your first season, we recommend you start small. We’re designing two 6 x 6 meter plots in our “weed indulged-garbage filled- hasn’t been used in nearly 20 years box” and filling in the left over spaces as we can. Step one: cleaning up all this garbage!! I’ve found things in this mess that have nearly made me gag and things with smells that will haunt me forever, but all in the name of sustainable urban agriculture!