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!