Gardening!

I’m a big fan of things that grow. But when it comes to making those things grow myself, I lack the necessary skills and talent. It’s never really worked out for me. I even managed to kill Norbert (my dragon-like succulent I mentioned several months back), a plant that only needed to be watered like once or twice a month! Epic fail. The last of two workshops I attended after our Mid Service Training was all about gardening. Permagardens to be exact, which I learned is simply a contraction of permanent garden. So this pretty cool dude from Peace Corps Tanzania came down and gave us this three day, hands-on workshop on how to create a permagarden. A permagarden, as it turns out, consists of double-digging the beds to allow the roots to grow deeper and to allow for closer plant spacing, thereby shading the soil with overlapping leaf growth, thus retaining more water. Part of the permanent structure also requires trenches surrounding the garden beds with holes on each of the four corners to collect and direct the rain water, lessening erosion, and again, retaining more water. The whole idea behind this kind of garden is that it’s sustainable, in that once you’ve dug the beds and trenches, you shouldn’t have to do it again, and it can be accomplished in a small space. These kinds of gardens are great for home gardens and especially encouraged for people living with HIV and AIDS. With a garden close to the house that creates a higher yield of produce, family nutrition can be greatly enhanced, thus strengthening the immune system and allowing the ARV’s to be effective. Also, an HIV/AIDS patient with good access to food is less likely to partake in illicit activities (such as transactional sex) to get money or food. During the three days our group of 28 people created a fantastic compost pile and one of these gardens behind the hotel we were staying at. It was very inspirational and motivational and the steps were made very clear and doable. So despite my history of ineptitude when it comes to things that grow, I decided to give it a shot. I’m off to a dubious start. My counterpart who attended the workshop with me, and is actually already pretty good at gardening, is unfortunately going through a family crisis and is unavailable at the moment. Not letting this deter me, I called up one of my counterparts from another training and she agreed to help me out in this endeavor. We started with the compost pile. I followed the directions a best I could given the availability of materials: layers of 2/3 brown stuff, 1/3 green stuff, some manure, some water, and keep layering. I was pretty optimistic until after several days it had failed to heat up. At all. These compost piles are supposed to reach a temperature of 140-160 degrees Fahrenheit within just a few days, indicating that the microbes are doing their job and decomposing everything. Two weeks later and my pile is still stone cold. Maybe I inadvertently killed my microbes. Maybe the dung was too fresh? Not fresh enough? After some time scratching my head and thinking “Great, Gabs, you screwed up the simplest task of the whole gardening project, now what?” I decided to plow ahead. Today my counterpart brought along two friends and we spent the better part of the morning loosening the top soil and digging up weeds and grasses in a 6m x 6m plot of land at my host mother’s house. It sounds like a simple thing, but it was hard work. At the workshop, our facilitator instructed us to do this gardening demonstration in the worst possible soil so as to give those participating hope that they could also grow things, despite the quality of the soil. Luckily this first garden is just a practice for me and my counterpart as well as an experiment for me to see if maybe I can get something to grow after all. And also maybe virtuous is the fact that this soil we’re digging in looks to be pretty good already. I dug up some volunteer onions from when Gogo tried to garden here years ago and saw some worms crawling around in there. This is a good sign (I think?). I figure, maybe starting off with good soil is kind of cheating, but I can use all the help I can get.