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.