We are so lucky to live in Africa - the real Africa, far from the cosmopolitan cities of South Africa, in deepest, darkest, hot and dusty Tete, Northern Mozambique.
'Why?' you might ask. Simple - the limited availability of food. Particularly fruit and vegetables (I'm less fussed about the narrow meat, fish and chicken options).
With energy sapping hot temperatures, averaging 36 deg C (so the official stats cite, but we easily measure in the early 40's, and it is not uncommon for the mines to shut down and pull the miners off shift when it reaches 50 deg C) and high rainfall in summer, to exceedingly dry winters (which I'm sure are worse. The dust is indescribable - fine and all-encompassing, not dissimilar to living in a cement factory, I'd imagine) and a 'milder' 28 deg C average, crisp, fresh produce is hard to find.
I want a variety of VEGETABLES!
The local market, always entertaining and interesting (I'll take some pics and post them at another time) has many stalls, all selling the same produce - tiny, dark skinned potatoes, a few sweet potatoes are on display as well, some chunky orange carrots, lots of plum shaped tomatoes, small red onions, larger brown onions, miniscular thin skinned green peppers, cabbages, okra and something which looks like kale, untried by us so far.
So finding some mysterious looking squash / pumpkins for sale was a real treat. Shaped like a hazelnut, smudgy green and yellow striped, about the size of a spanspek melon, it came home and was carefully dissected, steamed and eaten. Good!
Of course, we could visit Caldo Verde, the vegetable warehouse down the road. An industrial factory setting with an enormous walk in refrigerated area - complete bliss to linger in! But shock horror when totting up the meticais damage - a basket of these designer (well, beetroot, pineapple, melon, pawpaw, baby carrots - all in their natural state, not cleaned, washed or sliced in anyway) items cost the equivalent of a slap up meal in a fancy restaurant. With imported wine. The high price of fresh produce imported from nearby Zimbabwe. Delicious, but guilt over distance travelled to fork and cost sets in somewhere between stove and table!
To get back to why we consider ourselves lucky. With no Woolies, my mini kitchen garden in White River or my favourite organic vegetable box from Fountains Farm, we are stuck with what we can find in the limited local market. Which palls. So, doing what desperate people have done for generations, and having no option but to start it ourselves from scratch, we are turning into self sufficient kitchen gardeners!
Silly things like bags or truckloads of manure, compost, potting or seedling soil don't exist here. No Garden Pavilion, filled with tools, seedlings, saplings, herbs and arrays of fertilisers and soils exists in Tete. The earth here is pale yellow/grey sand, which sets rock hard in the cut up empty water bottles I recycled into pots for tomato seeds. The seedlings didn't have a chance - the sand formed a concrete like crust on top.
A Compost Heap
Back to the drawing board, and starting at the bottom meant a compost heap. Luckily, an optimistically built but empty brick flower bed was the perfect place to begin.
Our second stroke of luck is the off cuts from the MLT tobacco factory - we can fill up a bakkie with the dried stems and assorted bits and pieces, which are apparently very nutritious for plant growth. It's hard to believe that something which destroys lungs and lives actually fertilizes flowers and vegetables. Better yet, they want us to take tons of it away, at no charge!
So with the dry, lifeless tobacco bits laid out on the bottom, and scouring around for more branches, the base of our heap is laid. Now to persuade Sarita, with neither of us understanding a word the other says, that vegetable peelings, used coffee grounds and teabags, eggshells and the like, are to go into the bed and not into the general refuse hole.
Yes, that is a downer here - no municipal garbage collections, no recycling, just the good old hole in the ground and eventual burning. Before you shoot me, I HAVE got about 500 empty plastic water bottles (no potable water here, and you really DON'T want to play with the piped water, promise!) that I just can't throw away, but I am running out of alternative uses for them. And without decent soil to fill the bottles, the plan to create a vertical garden using the bottles as herb planters won't get off the ground. No matter how you look at it, the beginning of it all lies in compost. Plain old muck.
We should now layer garden cuttings in the mix, but we don't have a garden to offer up cuttings! First we need some good soil in which to plant grass runners we'll pull up from a friend's garden. See, I told you this was hand to mouth. No garden centre here! No instant lawn. No garden, just sand and Baobabs with a few scratchy shrubs and things.
When the energy surge hits me, I head off into the bush and drag back dead bits for the heap, but a top up layer of fine tobacco dust is probably going to do far more to get it going.
So, WHY are we so lucky?
Still not getting it? The excitement and stimulation of making do, of "maaking 'n plan" is addictive! Deciding that the veges sold in the local market are clear of any chemicals or modification, we are eating seasonal and organic. And the seeds from pumpkins, tomatoes and melons are drying in the sun as I write. They'll be packed away safely awaiting the first compost harvest.
It's very early days with the heap, and we're still not at first base with planting the vegetables in the recycled water bottles, but it's been a fun journey so far.
Now to research what fruit and vege's like a hot, dry climate with huge rain at times...
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