Dreamland Garden

I wrote a few months ago about the Ûiba Ôas Crystals Market, one of my principal clients for business advice and support.  My other main client is Dreamland Garden, whom I introduced when I wrote about the Handing Over Ceremony in August 2015.  Dreamland Garden is an impressive enterprise with a lot of challenges and many, many strengths.

Spinach and parsley and Theresia and Elizabeth

Its primary strengths are Elizabeth and Theresia, two hard-working agricultural enthusiasts who keep the place running.  Elizabeth is the equivalent of the CEO of the enterprise, having co-founded it a decade or so ago with her husband.  They were out of work, with three young children, and needed food.  Elizabeth grew up near the northern border of Namibia, where there are rivers and this weird soil that is actually deep, soft sand in which plants apparently are willing to grow.  Bravo, plants.  I would never have dreamed you could push a seed in that stuff and ever see a result.

Co-founder Joseph building a seedbed that will hold a manure-sand mix,
as the un-enriched soil you see here does not inspire agricultural achievements.

Elizabeth smiles brilliantly when she remembers gardening with her dad when she was a girl, and she brought what she learned from him to her marriage and then to our decidedly un-fertile desert town.  She and her husband started their garden just as a way to feed their family.  When they managed to coax more than they could eat from the desert back yard, they sold and traded some of it to neighbors, and gradually expanded their plot.  Their church supported them; the town supported them; eventually my foundation and the Social Security Commission supported them.

We took an inspiring field trip to my Zambian neighbor's backyard garden.
Febby loves her veggies; Elizabeth started a compost pile.

Now they have a greenhouse – to provide shade more than warmth! – and numerous outdoor beds; water storage tanks; raised seedbeds and an automated irrigation system that isn’t yet in operation for various reasons.  They raise the plants in a mixture of goat and sheep manure and sand, and they grow the most gorgeous spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, eggplant, spring onions, occasional beets and cabbage and brilliant, deep green, crispy parsley.  I’m getting hungry typing.  They sell it both at the retail level here in town and in lots of 50-100 300g bags of spinach and what have you to the supermarkets in not-that-nearby towns.

Manure-sand soil ready for transplants.

I have never been a big fan of lettuce.  It’s just been a helpful filler for sandwiches, and a base for the good stuff in salads.  The lettuce at Dreamland Garden, last winter and spring, smelled delicious.  It tasted like a real vegetable, with an unique, clear, vibrant flavor.  My U.S. lettuces -- romaine and red-leaf, mostly - were just crispy water.  I bought a head every week or so at Dreamland and walked to the office sniffing it like a bouquet of roses.  Only hungrier.

Tastes good, smells good, looks good.  Healthier than fatcakes.

The number one challenge facing the Garden is the high price of the water they need in high volume to keep things growing in this hot, dry climate.  We’re looking together into the possibility of using ultra-violet technology to sanitize gray water, or finding a sponsor who’s willing to assist in the effort to help agriculture thrive in a place with very little, or maybe just maybe finding a water source nearby through their own borehole.  Not likely, that last one – even if we did locate water underground here, it would probably be very brackish.

Eggplant, spinach and spring onions from Dreamland = a feast tonight!

There are plenty of other challenges, of course, but also tremendous possibility (and really tasty veggies).  I love working with this group.

Theresia and Elizabeth came for the feast, having provided much of it.