Tag Archive: garden

PCVs Sharing Knowledge with Kazo town

Our first working day was on Friday, providing sessions to benefit the town of Kazo. We dug a demonstration permagarden behind the Catholic Primary School, taught financial literacy to local farmers, and taught RUMPs to a vocational sewing school. It all went well.

They removed too much top soil in prepping the land so we had to bring some of it back. Notice the adjacent roof which will help drain rain into the garden

David brought his illustrated grain sacks to explain this type of garden

A color-full plate grown in a garden next to your house provides year-round good nutrition even in hard times.

 

Add ash for minerals, manure for nitrogen, charcoal for water retention, and egg shells for calcium

Scott pours a full Jerry can into one of the corner holes to show how much the garden can retain. The water seeps deep under the garden.

The MaMas dig as well as the men!

We planted our color-full plate of cabbage, carrots, eggplant, cucumbers, and simi greens (collards)

Since the garden is dug so deep, you can plant the seeds closer together. The roots will go straight down and seek out the water that is stored. The surface growth, being closer, adds shade and so there is less surface drying.

Spectators from the classroom

Finish with a cover of straw. Water a bit if it doesn’t rain, allow the seeds to germinate, remove the covering.


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After digging the garden, we moved inside a class room to teach a session of record keeping

They are paying attention too!

Scott invited the farmers up to record the cash book entries

Meanwhile at the town’s vocational school run by the Blue House on it’s grounds, Kelly and Mackenzie teach how to sew Reusable Menstrual Pads (RUMPs) with the school’s teacher Musiime as their able assistant and translator. These students come from the town and nearby villages. Some board in a nearby building during the week. One student is a Blue House girl.

I love this photo but I can’t rotate it!

 

In the background on the chalkboard, Kelly has has done the math to show the cost of commercial pads for three women in the family is 216,000 UGx, compared to 15,000 UGx for RUMPs. They help keep girls in school the full month. They also can be made and sold to other girls as an Income Generating Activity

Finished RUMPs. A girl snaps it into her panty and can remove the absorbent cloth from under the ribbons to wash and re-use. I’ll show this better in the Blue House camp post

Karen set out piles of clothes for the girls made at, and donated by, students in a clothing design class at the University of Minnesota

Back at the Guest House we relax and plan for the Blue House Orphanage Girl’s Camp the next day

Permagarden 101

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Matthews likes to add banana leaves for protection of the tomato seedlings. We also planted spinach, carrots, and cabbages. The slope runs toward the people, the holes trap some of the flow from a heavy downpour, and the beds are dug two feet deep to trap more water and allow the roots to go straight down and allow for closer planting.

As I had indicated in an earlier post, ATEFO has a new contract to work with 1500 youth in 110 groups in Bugiri and Iganga. Part of the contract is to teach and dig 600 household gardens before the contract expires in July next year. These would provide a steady source of nutrition for the household with minimal maintenance. It’s a daunting goal.

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Becky shows how deep the top soil is, about an inch, before the double digging allowed more manure and air to permit the stick to go down two feet. I particularly enjoyed the fact that Becky could teach this, as I have been chiding Adams that he only hired male trainers for the new contract. He blames it on the lack of skilled female motorcycle drivers to get into the deep villages.

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Carson talks to the group.

Matthews and I organized trainings in Iganga and Bugiri for the ATEFO trainers to learn about digging permagardens. For the first training near Iganga, I recruited fellow Peace Corps volunteers from my Lusoga Language cohort, Becky and Carson, to help out. They had been trainers for the new Agri-business cohort that just arrived in June, and had received a permagarden refresher from my hero, Peter Jenson. It was a great session. I think the ATEFO trainers present were impressed, and most of all, Matthews is sold on it. I had dug such a garden last year at the office, but this lesson connected the dots better for him.

The next day Matthews and I dug a smaller garden, with two beds instead of three, for the Bugiri Trainers. Slipping back into Uganda’s ways, that day’s program was plagued by time conflicts, and poor communication, which resulted in some trainers and youth not attending either session. So a challenge remains to spreading the word for 600 permagardens. You want to connect with at least one “early adapter” in each youth or farmer group, who will appreciate the demo garden we dig, then dig his own, then perhaps help a neighbor dig another one too. That’s how to get to 600. While digging these gardens we continue to teach sack gardens.

Sack Gardens and the Ag Fair

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Matthews killing it in Ronnie’s village. Upon seeing the sack garden garden for the first time, Ronnie said it was “awesome”

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Instead of using a match to make the holes in the grain sack, this guy was holding an ember between two corn cobs.

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Even moms with babies on their back can make a sack garden

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Can you see how well this farmer took notes?

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A volunteer stirs the liquid soap mixture. I couldn’t understand the lesson, but Matthews was suitably impressed with Ronnie’s presentation.

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A job “well done”


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Someone in the village covered the new sack garden with this huge basket, to protect it from thieves and goats, I guess. Matthews thought it was hilarious.

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I went with Adams, Mathews and Jedidah (office admin) to the annual Jinja Agricultural Show.  It was interesting to see new technologies.

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The Ag Show was like a state fair on steroids. The crowds were huge, oppressive and there were hordes of uniformed school groups.

Sack Garden Matthews and I are starting to get around to our farmer groups to build demonstration sack gardens. After enduring my programs on record keeping and budgeting, it’s an entertaining show. I previously showed how these were made here. The village is supposed to prepare a place for the Sack Garden and provide a grain sack, a wheelbarrow of manure, three wheelbarrows of dirt, and rocks. This seems like a challenge, which is a bit frustrating, since we wind up having to do more site prep before the lesson commences. Still, it’s quite amusing, since no one can understand what we are doing until we have assembled it. On Saturday we made a sack garden in Ronnie’s village, after he taught how to make liquid soap. Matthews is a good teacher, always striving to interact with the people. I am more passive, allowing Ugandans to teach Ugandans. Plus it saves on translation time. My presence in Ronnie’s village is exploited to help draw the crowd though.

 

What’s for Tea Mum?

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A nearby view from Karen’s place of some of the tea fields. These are actually trees which are kept trimmed into shrubs. After planting they take 3 years before the leaves are tea-worthy, and then they produce every growing season for 100 years. Most of these fields were planted in the early 1960’s. Karen frequently sees baboons, which inhabit the wooded valley below, but they were not around on our day there. A couple of days later we saw baboons on the road to Queen Elizabeth National Park. We did see white-tailed monkeys called Colombus in the plantation’s forest. Couldn’t get good pictures.

 

My fellow fossil David, and still-too-young-to be-a-fossil Karen enjoyed a great week traveling together. Our first stop was the massive tea plantation at Karen’s site. Karen is a Health volunteer recently retired from her career in the Navy as an air traffic controller. She teaches about good, nutrition, HIV and other health topics to the several worker camps spread throughout the plantation.

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This selfie to mark the beginning of our travels was taken upon our arrival by taxi at the closest town to the plantation. Karen needs to summon a car from here to get home

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The field on the right and beyond has been sprayed with ground up limestone to treat algae. This is brand new technology. They will be growing again next season.

 

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Karen stands by her excellent permagarden by her home. It takes drainage from her roof and is double dug and everything. She dug another one at a work camp.

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The tea factory. There were conveyer belts with fans to dry the leaves and then they are ground down, separated by quality, and put in large bags, transported elsewhere to be processed into the tiny tea bags.. There are different grades of tea. They make black tea. Green tea is from the same leaves, just processed differently.

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This is a tasting room. A spittoon in the right foreground. When new employees are interviewed, in the waiting room they are given the choice of coffee, tea, or other drinks. If they don’t select tea they don’t get hired!

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These are the machines to trim the tea trees. Run by two on each side, and a third person with a bag to collect it

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The plantation raises its own eucalyptus trees, which are fast-growing, and used to power the factory with steam energy

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Feeding the boiler

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Karen and her supervisor Elijah at a work camp. In Uganda, no matter where you go, you have to sign a guest book. I have signed dozens of these.

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An artistic representation of a crowded taxi for sale in a hotel in Fort Portal. The tires are bottle caps. I plan to buy one to bring home when I return to America, but it was too delicate to lug and too expensive ($12 US- ha! Uganda!) to get now.

We teased that Karen’s place is “Posh Corps”. She has tremendous views, good electricity, running water, a kitchen similar to a US suburb (both gas and electric burners, gas oven, many cabinets), western style toilet, a nearby club for executives Karen may use (free beer) and even a nearby landing strip. David and I stayed at a guest house a few minutes from Karen’s home. We had a cook and our clothes were laundered.

We walked through the tea fields to the Tea Factory and received a tour. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures in the factory. Later we enjoyed the free beer at the club and a lively conversation with Karen’s supervisor, Elijah.

Farmer Dave

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On the right is a key hole garden. Dave was growing collard greens, kale and coriander. When he returned after our trip, pigs had escaped their pen and totally destroyed it. He thinks they like kale. On the left is a hugelkulture garden. He buried timbers which soaks up water so the roots continue to be nourished during dry season. It is growing collards, beans and peppers

After two nights at Karen’s tea plantation, we stopped in Fort Portal. It’s the closest big town to Karen and David and gets a lot of tourists on their way to national parks.

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Heh- Super Bowl game face

Karen dislikes football, and chose to stay at a hotel for Sunday night.David has great internet reception at his site, a large demonstration farm on the top of a hill. We went to bed early, and then streamed the Super Bowl beginning at 2:30 a.m. Monday morning.A glorious victory for the Broncos!

David had a career as a graphic designer in the states, though he “woofed” at some farms in recent years (room and board in exchange for labor). He calls Wisconsin his home state, lived in Pittsburgh for many years and most recently he lived in North Carolina He has dug eleven different gardens on his site. (My own permagarden is a disaster in mismanagement and neglect- except for the carrots. Matthews transplanted my cabbage and my broccoli did not grow. I’ll do better next season.)

Dry season is intense out in the west, with only negligible rain since Christmas. Dave’s place had a dry water tank, so no bathing that night.

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Another hugelkulture garden, growing Russian comfrey, which is fed to chickens to make their yolk yellower and eggs tastier.

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David made this with bamboo, called reeds here.. He needs to add Madagascar! When he isn’t researching how to be a concert impresario, he enjoys painting in the evenings.

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Like I do, David greets many children on the trek to his place. Which of us will have the first heart attack from swinging children around ? I usually prefer the fist bumps followed by hand disinfectant 🙂

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David has an ambitious secondary project. He wants to promote a three day
music fest in Fort Portal. beginning on World AIDS day December 1, Anyone who voluntarily tests for HIV two months earlier, will be admitted free.

Raining Cats But Not Dogs

My diabetes story got the second most reaction of all my blog posts, following only my tribute to Jan last August. I enjoy getting emails from all of you. I encourage your questions and comments. Sorry Uganda, you weren’t really in either top post.

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A road on the way to work after heavy morning rains

The rains have been loud and brutal at times on the roads. Tis the season. At least my bore hole doesn’t run dry. As a I hop over the mud and water patches on the road, I think of taking a bad spill with one misstep, so I have to focus. Most of the time I’m walking with my backpack carrying my laptop. I honestly worry about breaking my laptop in a spill more than my own bones!

My Lusoga language cohort friend Becky has a nice blog. She has posted a video you should watch. Her blog is here. The video is also on YouTube here. It does a fantastic job capturing the “Flavor” of our experience. Well done Becky!

When I try to click on Becky’s video, it says that its blocked in my country (Uganda) due to copyright. Only thing I can think of is the Kinks song she uses for background music. She showed it to me during IST so my comments are from memory of one viewing two weeks ago..

You will notice a few snippets with me in them. In one, I am sort of standing there like a lump while the others sing. This was our “entertainment” segment for the town dignitaries and home stay families at the Fare Well to Home Stay party. My language cohort is performing a song I did not know called “Day Man” from the TV show “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”. I would have preferred a Ugandan folk song. Kids. I should have been more enthusiastic. I did give a good speech though, which is more my forte. It was a day mostly of speeches and eating.

One day I will upload my own video. Even with my 3G modem I can’t even send a short video by email. Becky used the free WiFi at Sol Cafe, so maybe I will try that.

As far as my work goes, it appears I will do intensive training starting with five farmer groups, presenting perhaps 4-5 programs to each, once a week at their VSLA meetings. Then we will take on five more farmer groups, while following up on the first set every month or so, to see if anything “stuck” with them. This will help me with variety, and I’ll get to know these farmers pretty intimately. I continue to want to establish four youth groups in at local Bugiri high schools. So that is what year one looks like for me.

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I went with Sharon, Hellen and Simon to admit Sharon to the Iganga Nursing and Midwifery School. It has a beautiful manicured campus and the dorm rooms look first rate. We were not allowed near the dorms. I met the Deputy Principal, who told me that 97% of their graduates find employment.

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Some PCVs report that neither their office locale nor their home site are amenable to a permagarden. At IST my counterpart Matthews showed the Agri-Business cohort how to build an elevated garden and a sack garden. He did great, although we ran out of time before they could be planted. He made a special trip back to Entebbe last week to finish both of them. Hope the nuns are pleased. Matthews says people in the villages are not well versed in these gardens, so we will add them to our teaching package.

sack garden

For the sack garden, use two grain sacks for durability. As you put dirt and manure into the sacks, you use a cylinder to build a column of rocks in the middle for aeration of the water.

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Draw 8-10 columns down the side of the sack, and then burn 5 holes into each column with matches. Plant Japanese Onion seedlings or other types, and have up to fifty plants around the sides plus a few more on top.

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Voila. This is a sack garden at my office. Trim off the green part of the onions as you need them, and this particular sack will grow for 2-3 years.

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These are scratch cards you can buy from little stands everywhere. You load the numbers you uncover into your phone to buy airtime. Our Peace Corps issued “burner” phones by Nokia allow unlimited airtime to anyone else from the Peace Corps, a Closed User Group. You can also convert this airtime into internet data. You can also use your phone for “Mobile Money”, by giving money to an authorized dealer and getting it credited on your phone like a bank deposit. You can transfer mobile money to others or buy airtime with it. Most PCVs seem to avoid mobile money, but my landlord wants me to use mobile money to pay my electric bill, so I have to learn it.

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Meet my new roommate, Meowi Meowseveni, named in honor of the exalted leader of the Republic of Uganda. I will just call her Meowri. . I use a basin with my carpenter’s wood chips for a litter box. I have been feeding her ground up silver fish and hard boiled eggs and whole milk. She’s about three months old. We are getting along fine. Kittens are so photogenic.

Garden II

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This how it looked before I started. The roof line is along the left side, and the slope comes from the wall. Peter told me to change the direction of the garden by 180 degrees. Note the sack garden with onions.

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After Day 1, basically tearing up some sod.

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Day 2, moving dirt from right to left to try to level it. The roof line goes out just past the concrete

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Day 3, beds, pathways, and corner holes taking shape. I’m using a hoe for everything, just like in the village.

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The rains stalemated me a bit, and then I brought in Matthews who dug the crap out of the two beds and mixed in two bags of manure. It took him 15 minutes to do what I was calculating was a 2-3 hour chore

Ready for planting

Ready for planting


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Matthews panting cabbage seeds. I put in a berm on the concrete to the left to help direct the roof water in the garden.

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We planted cabbage, carrots and kale seeds. In training our planting day was rained out and Peter had to go to Rwanda, so I had to rely on Matthews. We didn’t do everything totally by the “book” and I might dig another one next season.

This is how it looked today a few days after planting. I have put grass clippings on it to protect from pounding rain. Sort of looks like burial plots 🙂

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I leave tomorrow for two weeks in Entebbe to re-unite with my class for In-Service Training. The second week, we will be joined by our counterparts. Some PCVs do not have access to garden space. My PC supervisor Meital, liked the sack gardens and this elevated bed garden of cabbage at my office and recruited Matthews to teach the PCVs how to make them.

Training in permagarden construction seems so long ago, but our teacher Peter gave us an excellent guide book when he left. I dug my own permagarden with Matthews during the past two weeks. It’s right in front of our office. Things were not so simple, however. I dug it to catch water off the roof, but the natural slope is not away from the roof. Much of my effort went toward trying to change the slope, not an easy chore. At best I made it level. I was sending pictures to Peter and getting his advice. Matthews came through like the calvary. These pictures will take you through the process.