My first year as a farmer

 

The goats having a bite at the kitchen garden fence while taking them out from their pen

With farming, you wish you had planted a bigger area when harvest is about. Not like the bother during tilling and weeding where you wished the area was small.

Me as a farmer I interpret rain as life. Early on while away in those jungle rental houses, rain was to explore my melancholic side – to keep me to myself and evoke memories, having cut short my cycling outings. 

The sun today either rejuvenates or worries. When it glows bright in the morning the farm responds smilingly, a pod is bulging or a leaf is spreading. When it goes for days without blinking it slows vegetables, kills the succulents and scorches the grass.

The male goat is noisy, unsettled and unruly. It has its fixed position by the pen door. There was an opening from which it could put through its head and bleat loudly. I later closed it but that has not prevented it from having peeping zones, bleating unnecessarily and terrorizing the new female goat. It appears it will grow into a big masculine beast that I am ready to keep and ape from – for fights. 

It would need much fencing to keep everything a little safe. The goats have a quick way of biting a plant at the heart, the hens killing the vegetable garden and the rats spoiling the store.  The cat died from a dog bite, another from ill health and another from eating a white lizard.

I live down by the tea thickets and I had wished to be further in the valley bottom that I can see River Izava flow.  The thickets invite animals of prey. Several hens have been found headless, gut open. Perhaps the carnivorous thing, small enough to penetrate the little spaces but wild enough to slit a neck is camped near my homestead. I need a hunting dog.

The hens are new. The first generation grew well, none dying or getting eaten by the wild cats roaming inside the tea bushes here. Looks like the best time to keep a brood of poultry is early in the year – not later. The diseases are now in plenty, short rains are long rains and every day is a burial day.

Then there are prey people. Who will spot you uprooting the cassava and beg for a piece. They will see the potatoes and ask for some. Your vegetables is that which they like much and your passion fruits not out of bounce to them. They will be speaking to you, new in the compound, while roughening the fruits out.