A Lovesome Thing

Looking back to May 2016:

Dreamland Garden is an ambitious enterprise:  a garden in the desert.  For a person reared in New England (dark, rocky soil; okay for planting; short growing season) and recently expatriated from the mid-Atlantic (insanely fecund), nothing in Namibia looks garden-able.  The south is rock and sand and no rain, with blazing summer heat and freezing winter nights; the north is deep sand with four months of downpour, eight months of dry, and hot, hot, hot most of the year.  However.

Seriously, is your first thought, "Let's plant some cantaloupes!"?

Namibians have figured out how to grow stuff.  And Patrick, our Peace Corps Namibia Director of Programs and Training, is not intimidated by anything!  He served in Peace Corps in Tanzania in the Agriculture program about ten years ago, and now gardens here in Namibia.  Namibia has a few more (like, a billion) gardening challenges than Tanzania, but he is digging in (ha ha) and getting the thing done.  And he likes training us newbie volunteers, too.

Where shall we put a garden?

So in May he hosted a permagardening workshop for the southern PCN contingent, and about 12 of us made our ways to Otjiwarongo, where T. volunteers as a PCN teacher.  His school was allowing us to construct a garden on their grounds during vacation week.  T. had promised Patrick that the soil was dreadful, and by T's mid-Atlantic standards no doubt it was.  By my Namib Desert standards, it was Eden.  Patrick also felt doubtful of a real challenge to vegetative flourishing.

Positively brown, that Otjiwarongo soil.  Paradise.

We had three days, and spent a few hours of each in the conference room, with Patrick teaching us about the correct ratio of nitrogen to carbon in our compost, which plants cross-cultivate best with which others, the academic understanding of double-digging and other invaluable topics.  Then we drove out to T's school with a full load of tools and materials, and Patrick tried to share his eye for scrounging valuable gardening resources with us -- look, cardboard by that dumpster! -- on the way.

First we had to consider sunlight, shadow, distance to water tap and
administrative preference to determine the best location for the garden.

On day one we sited the garden and built a compost pile.

Otjiwarongo has tons of brown and green material you can chop up with a hoe
to start your compost pile.

T. knew where we could find cow poo to add to the compost pile!
(A judicious amount, blended with the leaves and dried grasses.)

Patrick carefully directed the blend of brown, green and manure.

Brilliant!  We covered the pile with straw to help it stay moist.
The kid, Mario (green t), joined us while we were scooping manure,
followed us back to the school, and stuck with us through the workshop.

On day two we double-dug two beds.  The raised one incorporated plant compost, which gardeners in this area do not typically use, and the flatter bed contained just manure and the local soil.  That second approach is the commonest locally.  Thus T. would have a test bed to demonstrate that, most likely, the raised-bed, compost approach works better, yielding more and more fertile plants.  With an hour or so to spare (many hands make light work, though if you only have one pick and two hoes, 12 pair of hands don't make that much difference), we added a third bed and planted all three.

In Britain it's sometimes called 'bastard trenching,' which I love.  And in
Virginia's clay soil, where I double-dug two fair-sized beds solo, it was quite
a labor.  However, I did not have a pick-axe.  Anytime you get to swing a
pick-axe, you have to admit to at least a little bit of fun.

I punched holes in all the soda bottles.  Fill them with water, and it will
gradually leach out into the soil, nurturing your plants.

On day three we fine-tuned our beds, poked at the compost and urged it to hurry, and 'cemented' the modestly decorative rock wall around our raised bed with a dirt-manure-water mixture.

 

 

L., crouching, is flinging a big ball of home-mixed concrete substitute
onto the rock wall.  This was fun, too.

 

Patrick brought all the tools, some pre-fab compost, some marigolds and
other plants, up from Windhoek.  We had to pack them carefully so he
could also get several PCVs into the combi and save us from the horrors
of hiking home again.  At least part way.

 

Ta-dah!

Throughout the three days, we reveled in the magical properties of the Otjiwarongo Super-Spar (big supermarket), the limited wifi and miniscule wading pool of our lodge, and listened or, maybe, sang along with K. and others as they tore off 'She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy,' 'Seasons of Love,' the Spongebog Squarepants theme song, 'Let It Go' and other seemingly random selections of musical pop culture.  Ah, you guys are fun.

Now I am working to share some of these ideas with Dreamland to help them increase production and stave off insects (stupid insects; go someplace fertile).  I haven't had an update from T. yet on how the garden's doing, but I'll share this post with him and ask.