LIFE BY LOUIS: Of days when the rains came on time

My nightmare was the flurry of farming activities before the rains came. ILLUSTRATION| IGAH

What you need to know:

  • My nightmare was the flurry of farming activities before the rains came.
  • First was germinating the young kales and cabbage seedlings in the nursery in preparation for the planting season.
  • In the evening just when I had worn my best three quarter length trousers and baggy Chicago Bulls t-shirt to go and hover around my girlfriend’s fence some 15k away, I was reminded that I had not watered the seedlings in the nursery.

When I was a young farmer in my village in Matimbei where I was born and brought up, the rains used to come on March 15 every year without fail.

This was always preceded by some white harbinger birds that hovered around like they were scouting for the first drops. The wet season was also preceded by intense heat and swirling winds and finally dark clouds that started hovering on the eve of the onset of rains.  

My nightmare was the flurry of farming activities before the rains came. First was germinating the young kales and cabbage seedlings in the nursery in preparation for the planting season.

In the evening just when I had worn my best three quarter length trousers and baggy Chicago Bulls t-shirt to go and hover around my girlfriend’s fence some 15k away, I was reminded that I had not watered the seedlings in the nursery. Nursery seedlings behaved like spoilt domestic creatures and they only consumed choice soil supplements and clean water.

Water for the nursery was not just there waiting to be given to the seedlings. You had to fetch it in some nasty metallic container with a long ugly neck and a sieve affixed to the end. I don’t  know who designed that crappy piece of farm implement. Half the time it was borrowed from a neighbor with just a one hour window to use by the whole village and return to the owner before dusk.

Just when I was in a hurry to finish, a frog or one of its children would enter the sieve of the containers outlet, blocking the flow and slowing the process down to a tearful dusk.

TORTOROUS

The pre-planting season was more torturous. First you had to dig the holes for planting, equidistant from each other using a string to ensure that they are in a straight line. They had to be of adequate but predetermined depth and breadth. On a crazy night it would sometimes rain and bury all the holes, creating double work for you the following day

There was then the task of carrying animal manure from a reasonable distance and neatly feeding the correct amounts into the holes. My biggest fear were some nasty looking worms in the manure, pretty harmless but just ugly and annoying. If manure was from the dry areas of the country, it came with some long sharp thorns and those were quite harmful because we worked barefoot and their piercing effect was very painful.

You had to then go back and mix the manure with the soil in the holes while being pricked by some notorious thorns that looked like stars. You could not start planting while the sun was up.  You had to wait for the planting hours when the sun had ran out of fuel in the early evening.

If you planted the previous evening and rains forgot to come at night, the following morning you had to woo the baby seedlings with a lot of water from the river and cover them with some wet leaves lest they were deep fried by the sun when it came up in earnest.

Just when the young plant was beginning to look healthy and greenish, a crooked worm would emerge from the soil and cut the seedling in half. You then knew that it was time to spray the whole farm with some noxiously smelling insecticide that left your stomach bloated.

The 15 litre spraying can was probably the heaviest thing I have ever had to carry on my back and it required a few days off duty to regain normal posture.

From planting to harvest time which was roughly 2 months, the young plants were very delicate and full of tantrums. They only fed on choice ammonium phosphate fertilizer and foliar feed.

They also required constant weeding, protection from worms and butterflies, blight and all kinds of vermin.

After you had overcome all this turmoil and the cabbages had matured and become well rounded with smooth skin and ready for harvesting, some brokers would come in and start fault finding on the quality of the green produce. They would complain that the cabbages were not fat enough, worms had invaded them, there was a glut in the market and they could only offer 1 shilling per cabbage.

For those who buy their kales and cabbage from Mama Mboga, just know that those greens have come from far like the soil that you dig from the pit latrine.