A Time to Plant

looking back to November/December 2016:

Our estimable Director of Programs and Training, Patrick, led a couple of permagardening workshops for PC volunteers in 2015, with a view to having his mentor and PC permagardener extraordinaire Peter Jensen visit Namibia from his home in Ethiopia for a master class in 2016.  It wasn't until late November that we finally got to meet Peter, and learn so very much from him.

We started in the classroom, but quickly moved into the literal field.
It was really hot up north in late November and early December, so we tried
to get the physical, outdoor labor done early in the day, and usually failed.

He's an RPCV (Returned PCV) of about 30 years' standing, and he's gardened around the world, adopting sustainable techniques from anywhere he can find them.  I yearn for a chance to get him to Dreamland Garden; I bet he'd have some great ideas.  They've tried a bit of hugelkultur there, and some composting, and both have worked very well.  They need to do more, but wood is hard to come by in a place without trees, and compost takes some creativity in a very dry environment.  (Hugelkultur involves using wood - usually just logs and sticks - in the growing medium to help conserve water.  You throw a few logs on the ground, pile your dirt or sand-and-manure mix on top, and then plant.  The logs absorb water that would otherwise drain into the deep ground, and release it gradually to your plants.  Clever and simple.)

In Ongwadiva, they have grass and trees.
We do not get those where I, and Dreamland Garden, live.

Peter uses lots of mnemonic devices to assist his trainees' learning.  One is CLOSE - he wants community leaders with an eye toward gardening to keep their projects Close, Local, Organic, Small and Easy.  A project that's far from the people operating it, that requires importing foreign or buying synthetic goods, or one that's too large or too complicated to maintain probably won't succeed.  So he urges us to think about all those factors when planning.

Right next to a PCV's on-campus housing

Then there are the Six S's, which come with a warm-up-and-stretch exercise.  These are the critical steps in water management:  Stop, Slow, Sink, Spread, Save and Shade.  In a lot of climates, rain is a seasonal thing - you have rainy season and dry season, and plants can drown in one and wither in the other, so you need to think about how to collect the water and disperse it more gradually than the natural cycle would do.  We built berms and swales, and intercropped both for pest control and to allow taller plants to shade shorter ones.

Here we are Sinking and Spreading in the Shade.

Peter spent a lot of time on soil conditioning, too - we added charcoal, egg shells, coffee grounds, and elephant dung, as well as more conventional ungulate dung, to the sandy-but-okay soil of Ongwadiva.  We double-dug with traditional short hoes; we kept the beds narrow enough for two people to shake hands across them.  We collected brown and green compost from anywhere we saw it on the grounds of the school where we were planting, and built a compost pile for future conditioning.

The completed compost pile, with plastic to help keep it moist in
this arid climate.

Soil amendments from breakfast

We mixed little twigs into the soil, too; mini-hugelkultur.

And, of course, elephant dung.

Double-digging is sometimes called 'bastard trenching' in the UK.
And it's not nearly this hot there.

We also spent time in the classroom, discussing the heartbreaking conditions of malnutrition, and especially the deleterious effect it has on early childhood development.  Stunted growth doesn't just mean a child is shorter than s/he should be, it also means all his or her physical systems - the nervous system, the brain, the heart - aren't as robust as they should be.  Given high levels of poverty in Namibia (masked from international aid organizations by the very high income disparity, so a few very wealthy people skew average income for the whole country), many children here suffer from stunting.

Future nutrition in well-nourished soil, with a layer of pine-needley stuff
to help Shade and reduce evaporation.

Future nutrition in need of immediate resuscitation

Close, local, easy gardens are a great way to provide vitamins and minerals at low cost.  They can also help ameliorate the impact of climate change, and maybe a tiny bit help to slow it down.  Grow local and organic, and you don't have to ship food in from more expensive, more fertile places.

We got us a garden.