Reading this week:

• The Portugal Story by John Dos Passos

One of the things I was excited about for moving to undisclosed country was the ability to garden. As we’ve discussed, gardening on a balcony is not the easiest thing in the world. In undisclosed country we got a house, and like many houses this one came with a yard. And a yard means we can garden in earnest!

Mostly anyway. It is not exactly a field outside my old mud hut, the most important distinction being that there is a landlord with this one and we can’t really do major landscaping work without permission and that seems like a hassle to ask. Plus I have to be worried about digging up like a sewer or electrical line or something. So we can only do so much. But luckily for us we inherited a garden! That is very exciting. The previous tenants had constructed some garden boxes and had some plants going already when we arrived. As you can see from the top picture the garden was suffering a bit from neglect when we arrived, which is not the fault of the previous tenants, they had left undisclosed country so it was hard for them to do some weeding.

Another big difference between here in undisclosed country and back in Zambia is that here we have a gardener. Besides the garden the house comes with a lawn that has to be mowed. There was not an easy way to do this. I guess not a lot of people have lawns so I couldn’t find like a lawnmower to mow the lawn. So because we had no real way to do it ourselves we hired a gardener. He is almost too good. What we hired him to do was just mow the lawn (which he does an excellent job at) but since he is a gardener he also works on the garden. Above is what the garden looked like after he took a first pass at it, getting rid of a lot of the overgrowth and weeding out the garden beds. I say he is almost too good because I thought I would do some gardening as a hobby around here but I seem to have accidentally subcontracted that out. I only really wanted the guy to mow the lawn but he is really enthusiastic so who am I to stop him?

The crops the previous tenants had going were maize, kale, peppers, and parsley. Some of these were fairing better than others. The maize has grown tall but I think besides being too close together the climate just isn’t as suited to it. Maize needs some time to dry out and undisclosed country is simply not affording it that luxury. So a lot of the stalks have fallen over in the damp soil and weren’t really growing any fruit anyways. Oh well. The kale is growing well though, we have harvested some of that and used it in various dishes. It is also very popular with the snails, unfortunately. We also got a small harvest of peppers which was very neat:

As for the parsley, unfortunately tragedy struck. You can see better in the second picture, but the parsley was growing in an elevated garden bed. When we arrived it was already a bit rickety, being held up by a cinder block shoved underneath it, and I had meant to take it down and move it over. We had already transplanted some parsley (to mixed success) with that in mind. But then a heavy rain came in and we were down a garden bed:

The poor parsley! The other thing about having a gardener is that I feel like the garden can’t be too bad when he shows up. I hear people tidy up before their housekeeper arrives as well. So I had to do something with the garden bed before he arrived the next day. The rain didn’t let up, I didn’t have a hammer yet (it’s still coming), but I had to go out there anyways and do something about the poor fallen over garden bed so I wouldn’t be too embarrassed. Using some of the wood scraps I bodged this together:

It could be worse but it is pretty terrible I admit. It is held up by those boards in the front and the rock on the side. The dirt is just shoveled in there. When our gardener came the next day I explained it was the rain that took the raised garden bed out, lest he think I was just knocking over his hard work. He seemed suspicious but accepted my explanation. Then the next time I came out, there were two garden beds:

He not only fixed up and leveled out the garden bed I had put together, he had also transplanted some tomato plants into it and taken the rest of the scrap wood and created a whole second garden bed! He is too good man, showing me up, I am embarrassed. Seriously he is fantastic. But that is where we are at for the beginning of our gardening. We have hired a professional, gained a garden bed, harvested some of the previous tenants’ crops, and now just need to figure out how to get some seeds. That has not been as easy as I thought it would. But we’ll figure out a way. Can’t wait to see how it looks in a few months!