Kilimanjaro, TZ – MGA family garden – 16 Sep 2013
The MGA family has been eating vegetables for a few weeks now and their medium-term vegetables – cucumbers and zucchinis – should start to produce food in the next couple weeks. This past week they put sticks in their cucumber bed and tied the plants to the sticks with string so they would continue to grow vertically. We also started the first round of relay planting a – Chinese cabbage and loshuu (Ethiopian mustard) – as well as inter-cropping garlic into their eggplant bed. We also removed a bed of Chinese cabbage that was not growing well and replaced it with green peppers.
MGA family garden
Putting sticks in the bed will allow the cucumbers to continue growing productively. Learning this technique will also help them take better care of their tomato plants, which often require the same care.
Sticks put into beds to keep the cucumbers off the ground
The major challenge the family face on a daily basis is water. I think when they signed up for the garden they didn’t realize how much water it would require. Joseph told us he has to pay an average of 2,000Tsh / US$1.25 per day to have water brought to him. He said their children sometimes bring water but it is too far for them to carry a lot at once and they have school and studying so don’t have time to make a lot of back and forth trips. I asked why he didn’t do it himself and he said because he has bad asthma and gets asthma attacks from that kind of work. His garden looks very good and he says he really likes everything about it and getting food from it, but that he isn’t sure it makes economic sense based on how much he has to spend for water.
I believe one side effect of this difficulty is that the vegetables look very healthy when nothing else is affecting them, but they are more vulnerable to pest attacks because they don’t get water twice per day. His Chinese cabbage in particular has not been able to come well.
Written by: Sam Barnes