Satnam...Grace of God

I'll play sweet music and sing a devotion for you everyday
And I'll forgive myself, in my heart,
If ever I forget.

I'll release your lilac spirit from dark bonds that may hold it
And carry the heaviest load, walk the steepest path, clean the filth of ages,
with joy in every pore,
And I'll forgive myself from the plumb deep of my innermost heart,
should I ever forget.

I'll speak your name with reverence and recall your face with love
I'll play and jump and dance to your memory,
And, if one day, it so happens, I let you slip from mind,
I'll open the profoundest chamber of my heart's heart
and release the winged and dappled unicorn...

And I'll start again.

5 O'Clock Shadow

I don't usually give an explanation of my poems, but this one's a bit abstract. One evening, during my last 10 day silent meditation course, looking over the mountains from my room in Worcester, Western Cape, I saw a shadow cast over the slope that brought this one to mind.


5 O'Clock Shadow

Comic hillside giraffe

Shadow dog

What can you teach me about death?

Why I love Swaziland (2)

I feel very blessed to have been able to re-visit childhood stomping grounds in Swaziland, finding places and people reassuringly like my memories in many ways (mists on the hills at Hawane, the smell of woodfire, men in traditional dress carrying knobkerries, raucous and drunken nights of darts and philosophising around the log fire) and curiously changed (mobile phones ringing on the combi bus, finding blue cheese in a choice of supermarkets, American rap blasting from a market stall). Spending 8 years of my childhood there has set Swaziland firmly in my heart and I can never say never but for now I'm back in the leafy green and perfumed early summer of Brighton, another warm and safe home.
These are some of the things I love about Swaziland:

 Rushing, cold rivers you can risk a swim in.

 Watching a baby giraffe, with not another vehicle in sight.

 The ever-present possibility of danger.

 Deserted, beautiful places you can just enjoy.

 The easy way that Swazis laugh.

 Thatched roofs in any light or weather.

 The love of Joyce.

 Frost on the fields around Hawane.

 Sharing a room with any number of amazing insects and spiders.

 Music and shaking our asses.

 The fly way so many people dress.

 Randomness and acceptance.

 Sharing spontaneous experiences with wicked friends.

 Driving on red dirt roads.

 Openness to new and controversial ideas (this is a humanure processing system ie compost from human shit- best tomatoes I ever ate)

 Taking good ideas and running with them. This young man introduced a bunch of home-steaders to the idea of swales on contour with great eloquence and passion.

 Njabula- my friend and mentor at Guba- a Rastafarian and therefore a vegetarian in a country of meat addicts.

 The flowers of Malolotja- the widest variety and craziest styles I've ever seen.

 The easy way my Swazi family can smile and enjoy when really they have so little material comfort.

 Traditional dress and how warmly Swazis will admit me to their clan.

 The mountains.

 The rocks and the aloes.

 Mystery and ancientness.

 Playing bar games with beautiful souls.

 Fun and high jinks!

 Men who know how to braai.

Art.

We Can Fly

 

I watched a pair of

White-collared crows

Bounce and swirl on the

Salty current of a sea breeze

And my heart remembered how to fly.

For brief moments, plumes of light

Burst forth through every pore

And thrilled my very being.

I spun and dived with

My winged brothers:

For the fun

For the joy

Just because I could

A Gift of Love

 I picked up a guy on crutches today just outside Piggs Peak. A very similar feeling overtook me as did the day I picked up my first lone male hitchhiker in France. I followed my heart. That time my mind quickly took things over and wondered if I should possibly hide my purse from this well-built Italian with dreads. I never feared that he might do anything nasty to me.

I was even more confident today. And sure enough, rather than getting raped and my body dumped by the side of the road, I was given one of the strongest lessons of my life. This man has had an ulcer on his leg since 1999 which won’t heal after lengthy stays in hospital, antibiotics and anti-retroviral drugs: He was ashamed when the doctor recommended getting tested for HIV but finally agreed  when he was promised that, were he positive, he would be healed by the drugs he’d be given. He is HIV positive and has been taking the anti-retrovirals since 2004. The ulcer still hasn’t healed. He’s been told he will eventually die as a result of it.

I asked this man, who’s name I may never know, if he believed in God. He told me passionately of his great love for God. How God has helped him to lead a good life, free from alcohol and anything else I could think of. How, despite his predicament, he believes that God will one day cure his ulcer. Until then, he trusts that whatever he does is blessed by the Lord. I shared with him my favourite saying of recent times:

“In God I breathe, move and have my being.’

And he told me that he prays everyday when he wakes up, when he eats, when he goes to sleep, when he does many things. He told me how much gratitude he has for the life he’s been given. He has a family, a home…

And although he doesn’t have a job, he has taught himself to make floor polish and other cleaning products, which he sells. He does his best.

His journey to Piggs Peak, which takes 2-3 buses and at least a couple of hours from Manzini where he lives, came about because he wanted to help out with hospital bills for his nephew who was hurt in an accident on the road to Matsamo.

When he got out of the car he told me that he hoped God would bless me.

Experiments in raised beds

Thanks for the helpful comments and ideas and links. Please keep them coming!
As the design for this garden won't be complete until May at the earliest and I'm going back to the UK for 3 months in June, the first plan of action is to 'grow' soil in the kitchen and training gardens.
For our zone 2 and 3 areas we've decided to plant green manures and we're going to have our own section of alley cropping: sannhemp(a fast-growing nitrogen fixer that provides excellent chop and drop material) and possibly sorghum or other drought-resistant cereal crop.

In the training garden, we'll intersperse small leguminous trees with some ground cover nitrogen fixer like clover(any suggestions of which one?-apparently Alysicarpus vaginalis is grown for pasture and green manure in many areas of central and southern Africa some of them much drier than here). I'm trying to rein in my excitement about developing a small forest garden here but if that is part of the design, I think these choices will be good preparation for that-any comments?
In the Kitchen Garden(zone 1) we are experimenting with a variety of different raised beds so that when implementing the design we can choose the ones that were most efficient and easy to use.

We started with a regular bed built up of topsoil, compost mixed with a little well-rotted horse manure, cardboard and straw and pawpaw leaf mulch (in the foreground)

The second bed we made is based on keyhole beds in Lesotho but adapted to better suit our environment (we've added a water-harvesting trench around the sides and back which is filled with organic material like bark, wood and straw and some soil- the bed is in a corner on the downward slope of the garden so water drains in that direction) and built it with logs we had to hand rather than rocks, which are in shorter supply here. We filled the bed itself with tin cans, branches and bark, subsoil, topsoil, compost and a little manure, a thick layer of newspaper (to keep in moisture and to smother weeds) and a layer of mulch.

We also want to build a bed by re-cycling tyres, a resource we use a lot here and have a supply of. I would also like to experiment in this bed to determine which plants are suited to being grown in the tyres as I've noticed differing results in the plants already being grown in the garden. My suspicion is that, because they create heat, the soil in the tyres dries more quickly and so they are more suited to drought-resistant, heat loving plants.

We'll also try a bed made and maintained in the way most people here do on their homesteads. Like the sweet potato spiral in this photo.
We'll record the following information for a period of 6 months and try to determine which method or combination of methods will suit our site:

• man hours and ease of building and maintenance- intial and ongoing
• monetary cost and potential to re-use current resources
• yield
• prevalence of pests and diseases

I hope this will guide my choices and help other members of the team to feel included in the decisions we make as well as to clarify the reasoning behind our design.

Any comments or suggestions will be very gratefully received. Internet access here is a bit dodgy so rapid replies are often not possible!! Sometimes it goes off for days. More time to spend in the garden and the hammock!

Letter to friends in Permaculture

Dear Patrick and all those permaculture people I've bumped into over the past few years.

 I'd like to update you on my recent and present forays in the world of permaculture design and gardening. Patrick, I was overjoyed to discover your blog the other day- it's like a tether on a vast ocean of the exciting and unknown!

I also recall (or is it wishful thinking?)that you spent some time in East Africa and, although there are many differences I'm sure, I would be interested and grateful for any comments you (and anyone else) might have on my situation here in Ngonini, Hhohho (not joking !), Swaziland.

I grew up near here, in the Highveld of Swaziland, in the late 70s and early 80s. Where I am now differs, in that, being on the edge of the lowveld, we have a tropical climate. That means short, dry winters, long, wet and stormy summers, 2 growing seasons (although a lot of veg you can grow all year round) and flattish land. We are situated near a small river from which we get half of our water supply (the rest being harvested by guttering and water harvesting tanks).

 Food crops that like living here and produce well include avocado, paw paw, pineapple, banana, citrus, mango, groundnut, sweet potato, sugar cane.  If it makes you feel any better, I spent an hour in the garden this morning at 8a.m., laying out a herb bed. By the end of it I had to down a litre of fluids, change my clothes and have a lie down. 30 degrees, 90% humidity and the pressure feels like a storm!

I work for Vusumnotfo (Grow the Economy) a grassroots non-profit, brought into being by a group of chiefs from the Hhohho districts. They wanted to develop awareness of food security issues among their people and to train people in methods to grow and store healthy, nutritious food and to improve their community environment for better yields, less degradation of soils through e.g. erosion and improved quality of life due to e.g. planting of trees to create shade around homesteads.

My work is twofold really. On one hand, I facilitate the smooth running of workshops logistically speaking (in permaculture gardening and early childhood development).

My main role is in design and gardening: Our aim is to re-design the entire site to create a working model of landscaping, water harnessing and short and long term soil improvements as well as a certain amount of food production. We also have a training nursery and garden and a larger nursery where we propagate hardy, ground cover, live fence and flowering shrubs for use in pre-school yards. Teachers come for workshops and take cuttings for their schools where some are also growing vegetables to supplement their meals.

My design situation is interesting on several levels: Firstly there are several, highly involved and very invested stakeholders and a lot of other less powerful stakeholders. I have had trouble simply observing this month because ideas are pouring out of people all around me. I'm listening with one ear as I try to stand back and work on my basemaps and questionnaires, but the basemap has already changed in dozens of ways in the minds of people here. Excited to be moving ahead, to have the funding to improve and expand and get this place looking nice and producing, it's very difficult to rein in the urge to make rash decisions.

Within this large remit are hundreds of little designs such as 3 for herb gardens in the 3 zone 1 areas, a shower area for volunteers, a wild life and pond area with possibly a swale, keyhole beds, irrigation systems, use of green manure and cropping. My knowledge is so little but skills in observing are coming in useful and thankfully I have some awareness of what to look out for!!

My director Kathy has a background in agriculture and bee-keeping and the three guys I work with in the garden have vast experience of gardening and these conditions and are very keen to experiment alongside me to try out different design solutions for our problems of water, lack of organic matter in the soil, livestock management, access to a variety of seeds and useful and attractive plants.

At the moment we are working on the kitchen garden where we hope in the long run to model a variety of different herb and vegetable beds using solutions like the drip bottles we have buried in the bed. They slowly drip water in a metre wide radius through holes at the bottom and work very well. We water a maximum of 3 times a week here using these bottles. 10 small chilli seedlings we planted in full sun 2 very hot weeks ago are thriving.

While the design process is ongoing and to give me the headspace to conduct the necessary procedures like base-mapping, overlays, questionnaires and research and because it's good practice, we have decided to concentrate our efforts for the next few months on improving soil quality in the majority of the garden. Growing green manure, using a chicken tractor and adding compost and manure are planned so far. I'm also interested in the idea of planting leguminous trees for mid-term use and swales and irrigation channels for manipulating available water more efficiently.

If anyone has any comments on any of this or the following list or anything else related, please share. It will be gratefully received. And if there's anyone out there also working in tropical/sub-tropical conditions, it would be great to share ideas and experiences.

Raised beds in the tropics- does the soil get too dry?

Green manures suitable to these conditions

Leguminous trees for a small food forest (sorry Patrick- but definitely no Medlar!)

Good gray water system plants

Anything on ants, pests

Happy designing and gardening!

Letter to a friend.

Howzit?!

Hope you enjoyed the views of Malolotja on the way back.

Very busy week but mostly  in a good way. I have spent A LOT of time in supermarkets though, which has been remarkably entertaining- like we have so much shopping we've got to have at least two trollies. So you fill one, leave it somewhere in the supermarket and go fill the other one. Then you come back and people have taken loaves of bread and other items out of the first trolley! So you have to count 15 loaves of bread again!

Also had a heads up with a school commitee in the MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, mental dirt road off that highway we took last week. There's a primary school who want to make money for the school by growing chillies for high quality sale. I listened and understood nothing of a meeting with the head, a chief's representative and other community members. The head is one cool lady, and the meeting agreed that the women we had trained ( in permaculture practices such as mulching, composting, compost teaing, using organic pest control, using bottle drip watering system, growing a live fence) needed to practice growing on their own homesteads before they could produce chillies of a good quality and a quantity that the buyer would travel a few hours to collect.

 The training went well- my team is Little and Large- 2 comedians who tease each other all day long. I'm sure there's something homo-erotic about it! That's Sonny who knows his gardening and has great ideas and Sabelo whose homestead I went to visit and it's amazing. He has a budding food forest of avocado (eeeesh! Too many- we can't eat it. We GIVE it to  others), mangos, paw paw, Fields of ground nuts and maize and sweet potatoes. And we also have Babby Mkonta who is our handyman and does the garden too. He has a cool idea to build a storage shed with traditional Swazi building materials and style. Very exciting.

Then I have been sorting out the menu for a bunch of guys from the Water Zone Mapping team. They are GPSing all the water sources and lines in Hhohho (still can't get over that!) They work hard all day and don't have lunch. We tried to feed them lentils one night and they were not impressed. I trecked back with half a ton of sausages and frozen turkey yesterday to cheer them up!

 Had a great time weeding the kitchen garden this morning- we have quite a lot of food growing but drowning in weeds. I love the way different weeds feel as their roots come out the soil.

So my job is to re-design the site to reflect the needs of workshops we run (in permaculture, food growing, water solutions, pre-school teaching and nutrition) and to be a working model of permaculture principles and ideas. There's some great work going on in Swaziland and South Africa and I plan to visit farms and homesteads where good practice and experiementation are taking place like at Sabelo's place

Swaziland is magical and beautiful. More people should enjoy it! Come here onyour next holiday.

Peace