Harvest season

Wow ... I am definitely disliking the new user interface for Blogspot ... you wait a long time while a little symbol circles around in the text editor. Maybe not long for others, but bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth, people ... not all information pipes are created equal. It reminds me of one of gmail's more appealing features when we signed up Mom; it was able to detect slow connections and consequently, had a much simpler interface one could opt to use. Oh well; wouldn't mean that much here, as people really hunt-and-peck when it comes to typing.

We're finally entering the cold [i.e., the cool dry] season. It's a relative term, meaning its not cold per se ... rather it's not as hot. Actually, check that; the late nights and just before dawn are actually quite chilly. Though it's hard to say what our temps will be, I've recorded 30F down on the Tonga Plateau two years ago at this time; we're a bit lower here, so we likely won't approach freezing, but high 30's wouldn't surprise me. High 30s doesn't sound bad for someone who grew up in the Upper Midwest, but the difference is that a) there is no temperature gradient between inside and outside, and b) this is Africa, for pete's sake! It can't get that cold in Africa! But somehow, it does, and it never fails to surprise me.

In the agricultural realm, this past and upcoming month roughly correspond to late September / early October back home, in the sense that people are putting up and laying by. Different from say, canning or storing things in a root cellar, but definitely a harvest period. What maize there was (conventional yields were stunted by our drought in February) is by now off the cobs and in the stick-and-daub grain bins, and people are starting to dig up their groundnuts [peanuts] and bambara nuts. It's far more of a continuous process here than in other parts of the country, as the lack of commodity markets and the inherent difficulty of growing maize causes people to diversify a bit. For example, though the maize is a wash, the sorghum [Sorghum bicolor] and pearl millet [Pennisetum glaucum] seem to be doing alright and are just now starting to dry up; they originated in Africa and tend to be less drought-prone than the better yielding but infinitely more finicky Zea mays.

I don't have that much to harvest; my conservation agriculture plot was mostly a wash, and the only things that grew alright were the cowpeas and bambara nuts. To be fair, it was the lousiest soil I've ever seen; when weeds don't even grow, you know you have serious fertility issues. Anyway, it wasn't so big to make any real difference one way or another, and we'll pour the manure to it in a few weeks. No, what interests me this time of year are the random green manure or agroforestry species that grow wild around the town. Often planted out of curiosity or simply by mistake, we are blessed with a couple of really helpful species: In the case of the former, velvet beans [Mucuna pruriens], a creeping annual that fixes a lot of nitrogen and smothers undergrowth (imagine kudzu, but not quite as tough to eradicate], and for the latter, leucaena [Leucaena leucocephala], a fast-growing tree that also fixes nitrogen and produces a lot of high-value leaf-litter.

The leucaena isn't that tricky to harvest ... it produces huge volumes of flat, brownish-black seedpods in clusters, each pod containing 20-30 small, brown seeds. You simply grab a cluster of pods, yank them off the branch, and stuff them in a gunny-sack. If the pods are dry, they have a somewhat annoying tendency to split open when you touch them and spill seeds everywhere; however, the sheer volume of seeds makes this a rather small annoyance. After the gunny sack is full, I head home and put it in the sun for one or two days, after which I thresh the seeds. This is a mildly cathartic process of hitting the bags with a stick to break the dry pods open within the bag, spilling the seeds to the bottom. After a few whacks, I extract a few handfuls of now-empty pods and pitch them in the garden; I repeat this until most of the large pieces are gone. Then, I wait for a bit of a breeze and pour the seeds from one large bucket to another; the breeze blows the chaff off to the side. In lieu of a breeze, I use my lungs, though sometimes I get a bit dizzy from the effort (ah ... cheap thrills). Finally, I put the threshed seeds in a small, covered plastic bucket for storage, pitching in some dried tobacco and chilies from the market to deter any pests. In a good afternoon, I can get 4 or 5 kgs (10-12 lbs) of seed, which is probably enough for the next five years unless our project is wildly successful.

Velvet beans are a touch trickier. Unlike leucaena, they don't grow on a convenient tree; they are a climber and around here, they appear to grow on the edges of everything (hedges, field boundaries, etc.) [Brief aside: this leads me to believe no one knows what they are used for, and therefore grow in places where people don't bother removing them.] Anyway, these areas are rife with nettles, blackjack (Spanish needle), thorny bushes, or in the case of the euphorbia hedges, a extruded plant latex that sticks all the hairs on my arms together (and can blind you). The seedpods are tucked in the midst of all this infernal plant life, and are themselves covered with fine hairs (hence the name). One of the few definitive things I can say after seven years in Zambia is that you should never touch any plant with a velvety exterior; as a defense mechanism (or perhaps to aid in propagation, who knows?), they induce a major itch reaction ... so, I wear gloves as I grasp the handfuls of pods and stuff them into gunny sacks. No threshing for those; the easier path (and infinitely less painful with regards to handling) is to stack the pods in a heap and wait for the sun to dry them sufficiently to the point at which they crack open on their own. Also, by that point most of the velvet has shed from the seeds, making them far easier to handle.

I consider it a blessing that the Lozi seem less likely to ask you obvious questions like "What are you doing?" than other groups I've lived with; they seem to figure out that a guy pulling seeds off a tree and stuffing them in a bag is collecting seeds. Another aside: the public nature of my job doesn't allow much time to myself, so I treasure anytime I'm granted any modicum of anonymity. When I do inevitably get queried, I tell them I'm gathering seeds for farmers; if pressed, I explain the basics of why the trees/beans are important (soil conservation, fertility, etc), usually summarizing it as "They put manure [a generalized English word for anything like droppings, fertilizer, compost, etc.] in the soil." Though the former is true, I don't have many illusions about many farmers picking up these techniques in the short or medium-term; in fact, I've likely gathered hundreds of times more seed than anyone might plant.

What I can't explain to people is that I pick the seeds mostly out of a small glimmer of hope that by putting up and laying by, someday, some miracle day when farmers might adopt a few of these species, we have some on hand and won't have to turn them away.

The other, and likely the more influential, reason I can't explain to people is that I get bored out of my skull here and need to keep busy to keep from going crazy.