Farming

It's been a busy week! We had a couple good rains the past few days, which means more trips out into the fields. By now most of the crops are big enough that almost everybody has a role to play. The machines are still at work, troweling the ground to pull of stubborn weeds and cover seeds with dirt, but there is also work to be done by hand. In the morning, everybody who can hold a handhoe heads out into the fields to dig around each individual crop, row by row, raking away weeds and grass. I've managed a row or two, but it's an exhausting, tedious task; bent over at a 90-degree angle, scraping away in the soil. But, it's good to have things to do! After the first nice rain I finally seeded the test plot in my backyard. I planted mint in one of my tires, and also a plot of beans near my concrete douche, and also cabbage, onion, collard greens, beets, and bissap in my garden. Nothing has sprouted yet, and it maybe never will; I am not an experienced gardener. But I thought I might as well try. Out behind my house, in the area reserved for me by my counterpart, I am practicing a no-till farming technique. Only working the ground where I'm seeding is the idea, leaving all the rest at Nauture's mercy. So I have a few rows of beans, come corn in zai holes, and four short rows of sesame. The seeds came from ECHOnet, an excellent organization that is a resource for lots of agriculture Volunteers. Also, I transplanted some of their basil. Basil grows fabulously here! And it smells so good too. Now one of the test fields is being treated with neem-leaf solution as a pest repellent, twice a week, and we're going to thin the millet test plot tomorrow hopefully, so people can observe what thinning method produces best. Once the corn grows to knee-height we'll plant the cover crop, lablab bean, in-between rows. It's supposed to serve as a green manure and protect the soil, as well as supplying edible beans. We'll see how all that goes. But, meanwhile, the evenings are cool, the mornings dewey, and I'm enjoying my time walking to and from the fields.