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Travails of an amateur gardener
I come from a family of gardeners. My father was always planting in our backyard at Tucville. As a boy, he and his siblings raised crops at Vergenoegen, East Bank Essequibo. My mother, too, came from a farming tradition, where the children would earn their own “pocket piece” from selling peppers.
So, when I moved to the East Bank of Demerara, I decided to start my own kitchen garden to supplement my income.
After all, how hard could that be? Like I said, I come from a family of farmers.
Callaloo harvest
So one rainy day, my son and I began clearing a razor-grass covered area near our home.
That was the easy part. Tilling the soil proved to be more of a challenge. I kept unearthing old tyres, bottles, planks, cloth, and almost every conceivable obstacle.
Finally, I had cleared a suitable area.
It became my morning ritual to be up at 05:00 hrs to be in my garden, rain or shine, or to fetch chicken manure in a wheelbarrow.
Eventually, my plants began to thrive.
But I hadn’t catered for the cows, horses and goats. The cows were constantly pushing down the fence I had constructed around the garden.
Sometimes I would come home at night from work to find part of the fence down and a cow or two chewing away contentedly at my plants.
The horses stretched over the fence to reach at my bora vines. The goats slipped through the tiniest holes. I discovered that there appeared to be some truth about the legendary ‘goat bite’ causing trees to be stunted.
Once, some callaloo I had planned to harvest vanished, and I kept guard at nights for a week.
Eventually, I succeeded in getting some fishing seine and blocked out the goats.
But my hard work paid off.
When heavy rains caused massive flooding in early 2009 and the price of green vegetables skyrocketed, I had most of the traditional ‘greens’ at my disposal.
One of the greatest satisfactions of having a kitchen garden is not being at the mercy of the vagaries of the market. You know that your harvest is organically-grown and pesticide-free.
And for some reason, even the vegetables that you don’t normally love somehow become tasty.
Oh, and it’s great exercise.
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