Well, after a very slow start to the rainy season, we are now being inundated with rain. Another wonderful advantage of having healthy, heavily mulched soil–too little rain and it holds the moisture longer, too much rain and it is able to absorb and filter the excess through the soil and replenish the water table in the process! We have decided to post the same two pictures from the last post to show the changes that have occurred.
The neighbor’s field that was struggling to even survive has recovered somewhat, but it will still be about two months before they are able to harvest any food from the area as they chose only to plant maize.
Our field, by contrast, as can be seen in the bottom picture is growing much healthier and we have already been harvesting vegetables such as pumpkin leaves and amaranth. We will also not have to harvest every thing from our field in March when others are harvesting maize; our maize will be ready but then about a month after that we will get our millet and sorghum, a month after that our sweet potatoes will be ready, a month after that we will be getting our cassava, and throughout the dry season we will be harvesting our pigeon peas…in other words we will have yields coming from our field right up until next year’s rains! Now that’s Permaculture!
