On Bowes' farm

I've always enjoyed having a vegetable garden. I can remember back to when, as a young boy, I tried to coax tomatoes to grow out of a patch of barren ground in our back yard. I don't recall having any success. After Kathy and I were married, we bought our first home and I enjoyed turning the adobe clay of our back yard into fertile soil by adding to it copious truck loads of compost from nearby horse ranches. Livermore, San Bernardino, Germany, England, Los Angeles and finally Bakersfield - all provided gardening experiences.

I'm not sure what I was thinking when we moved here to Kitale. I knew that our house had a big yard and there was an area for a 'shamba' (garden) on one side of the house. I also knew we'd be busy, and that it takes a lot of work to do a good job of raising vegetable. But, oh for the taste of fresh tomatoes from the garden again.

Enter our day man, Daniel, a farmer by trade. Daniel is supposed to take care of the yard, so having him set up a garden for me fit his experience and responsibilities.

The results so far are promising (if not downright intimidating). Daniel has increased the size of the shamba three-fold by converting attractive, but non-edible lawn into farm land. He set up bedding areas and then proceeded to plant ALL the seeds in the seed packets we purchased. In the accompanying pictures you see the garden as it is today.

The top picture is of our sukumawiki bed, into which Daniel has just transplanted young sukumawiki plants. Sukuma is either the Swahili name for kale, or a close cousin of it. The second picture is our potato patch. We're growing common reds. The third picture is one (one!) of our tomato fields. Each stake you see represents one tomato plant. The other field is larger. "What will you do with all the tomatoes," you ask. We reply, "We don't know!"

The final picture is of our chicken. We didn't plant chicken seeds, or find him on the road. We've begun working with another of our Mt. Elgon staff members to acquire a good milk cow (see a couple of posts down for details). His wife came to our campus today to attend a seminar for pastors' wives and brought us a box of vegetables and a live chicken.

So, if you're in the neighborhood, just stop by Bowes' Farms and we'll fix you up with whatever we're harvesting. But you'd better act fast if chicken is on your shopping list, because this kuku is soon for the soup pot!

Dealing with Pests

We have a lot of pests outside our house. We have bats and birds in the trees surrounding our property (lost our first carrot crop to birds). We have rats that have become more intrusive this past month (they got our worker's avocados which he'd stored in a bag that he hung from a rafter in the tool shed). And, we have ants - big, black African ants that are quite aggressive in building their nests in the lawn, the driveway, and at the foundation of our house.


We asked our day askari and gardener, Daniel (on the left), to do something about the ants (and the rats and the bats). He let us know that he'd need to have some equipment to do the job since he'd be handling some poison that is apparently fairly powerful stuff. He gave me a list and I acquired it. This is a shot of him suited up to do battle with the ants. The sprayer can also be used to apply fertilizer to the crops, so it'll do double duty.