My Garden

My program encourages us to maintain a backyard garden and I am absolutely thrilled.  The idea is that we keep a garden, thereby demonstrating to the village how easy and successful a home garden can be, and encouraging them to eat locally, independently and with the ability even to sell the excess produce and not just save money, but actually earn money!  Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), many people in my village already keep their own gardens and, while they often offer help to me, many times they scoff at my feeble attempts to till the soil or build a proper fence.

At any rate, directly behind my house is a flat piece of land that seemed perfect for my garden. Actually, there are a few faults- my clothes line runs directly overhead and the land is on the South side of the house, so it catches shade most of the day- but considering the amount of sun we get, a little shade ain’t half bad.  First I began by marking off where I would like my plots to be.  I then turned the soil.  I made rows between the plots and added the extra soil to the plots to make hills, thereby creating a draining system.  Chickens run loose around the village so as soon as I turned the soil, they started hanging around my yard to get the grass seeds.  (Also, there was an issue with dogs doing their duty on top of the piles of soil- I don’t know WHAT their deal is with that, so weird!)  Because of this,  I am currently in the process of building a fence around my plots.  Originally, I dug holes and sunk posts, connecting each post with a couple of cross hatching sticks, but I came to realize this was a poor excuse for a chicken fence as they had no problem walking through the gaps.  So now I am splitting posts and sinking them in, 5 inches apart and with one layer tilted in one direction and another the other.  Hopefully this will work.

Because I have clearly formed plots with banana leaves lying across them to keep the soil from drying in the hot sun, and I’m clearly working in the garden several hours a day, people ask me what I’ve planted.  I keep having to tell them that all I’ve planted so far is a fence.