Preparing the ground

Getting to the point of growing anything useful always take a lot of work. This post is the first of two that fill you in on the background work.

It all kicked off in November when I employed a friend, Okot Ceasar (yes, correct spelling), to clear the bushy weeds that were invading the area outside my back door. Here you see Ceasar at work with a hoe, assisted in this picture by Odong Patel, one of our guards. A few days later the dried brush / weeds, seeds and all were burned.

I want to note here that I am generally dead against burning because among other things, it sends all the useful material into the sky and leaves behind nothing benefical. So at all other times I have insisted that organic material be left in the field to be ploughed in. This has not made the work any easier because cultivating through plants, dead or alive, is much harder work than for a bare, burned field.

After that it was a time of planning. Mechanical ploughing was required but a walk over the field showed that there were many tree stumps hiding there, buried but putting up shoots. Any one of them could break a plough or puncture a tractor tyre. In the first weeks of January my friend Okeny Tiberio (say Ocain) got to work. I think I can safely say that I have seldom met such a persistent and skilful worker. With only a hoe and an axe he located in the order of 60 stumps, exposed them by digging round them and then, below plough depth, chopped them free. It took around 2 weeks.

The dry season is over Christmas and in to March; whilst our land dries more slowly than other areas, when it does, it sets like concrete. With the field now clean of bush and stumps, the plan was to get a tractor in before our land dried. It was booked but there were delays, it was working in a different district, would come soon. When it eventually arrived on 22^nd Feb, the ground was too hard to plough and after a few furrows were laboriously turned the tractor retired, defeated.

Now we had to wait for the rain to come and soften the ground. When it did rain, the tractor was delayed again, in Gulu district, and then we were told it had broken down. Another tractor was located that was being prepared for the season by CCF, a friendly local NGO. We offered to test it for them, knowing that our ground was free of stumps.

When the tractor was ready for testing on the 24^th April, the tractor struggled but ploughed the land, more or less. It was really too dry and hard but the job was done. It left the field deeply rutted and not really ready for planting.

What next? A tractor again for a second ploughing? There was an availability problem; and would the field really be flat enough? An Ox plough? We booked an Ox team and they tried but gave up because the dried grass on the surface (that I refused to burn) was clogging the plough. This picture is not of the one that came but a different one in a neighbour's field.

Now what? Time was flying, it was time to plant! Bring in the diggers! Three casual labourers living in town but from a different region were contracted to dig and level the field. It took several weeks from around 13^th May; working from early morning to mid day and then, on a good day, from 4 till dusk, they dug away until it was done, skilfully burying green growth and levelling the plough ruts. As soon as the digging was complete on the first part of the field we started chasing them, planting first rice and then sunflower. But that is for another post.

Adventures in Tropical Agriculture

I mentioned that we live on a large grassy compound (please see the first post). In fact it is split into two by a fence and most people only see the upper compound. My back door opens on to the lower compound which was virtually unused, and reverting to bush. Its usable area measures around 45x90 metres, about 1.3 acres . It seemed a waste of good land, particularly as it is fenced, keeping stray cattle, goats and opportunist thieves outside.

The project began last November with the clearing of some bushy weeds. Then ploughing was planned but that meant getting the old tree stumps out. There turned out to be around 60 of them that had to be dug and chopped out, all but a few by Okeny Teberio, a tractor driver, my agricultural consultant and labourer. The tractor eventually ploughed after many delays, but the land was too rutted to plant. An Ox-plough was brought in but the ground was too difficult and they withdrew. So diggers were hired, the human kind, and dug it all over, levelling the deep plough furrows and clearing the weed growth.

The land is near the bottom of a shallow valley, very poorly drained; it is prone to be as hard as concrete in the dry season but waterlogged as soon as the rains start in earnest. What to grow? We settled on rice and sunflower. The sunflower because we hoped to harvest before the heaviest rains and rice because it likes it wet. We hoped to plant both 'Upland' and 'Super' rice but in the end the seed for Super could not be found. In the end we only used an upland rice variety called Narika 4; this rice does not need to grow in a wet paddy field but is happy enough in ordinary farmland. The sunflower variety is DK 40-40, which it is said is best suited to oil production and it is resistant to water-logging. This is what the two (chemical treated) seeds look like with a cm scale:

Planting of the rice, in rows 25cm apart was done in the week of 20^th May. It was hard work for a team made up of deaf and hearing friends, some paid, others volunteers. We started at 7:30 and went on to around 11:30 and then had breakfast together; it is normal practice here not to eat before work. It was all done by hand using hoes and a long piece of string.

Then it was the sunflower in the following week, in rows 75 cm apart (so faster progress) using much the same team. I had mentally divided the area into 3, for sunflower, super and upland. But when the super could not be found we decided to fill the last third with wide spaced sunflower and under-sow with upland rice at the first weeding.

Now, 11 weeks later the rice is showing more ears of grain every day but so far the seed cases are empty. On Monday 5^th Aug, I noticed the first flock of birds on the rice. Hmmm. Maybe they are waiting for the grains to fatten. Scarecrows required?

10 weeks after planting this is the sunflower, with some 'plates' drooping, heavy with seed already. But some have still to form flowers. The heavy rains have caught us before harvest but the plants do not seem to be complaining. Maybe they really are resistant to water-logging!