Life lessons learnt from gardening

Mar 16, 2020 News

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By Michael Jordan

I come from a family of gardeners. My father was always planting in our backyards at Suddie, Essequibo or 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 Diamond, East Bank of Demerara, I decided to start my own kitchen garden to supplement my income.
Where to find land, was the problem. I got into the habit of walking around the community looking for a suitable plot of land.
One day, I went over to Grove, East Bank Demerara. I spoke to a man who was slicing near to a dam that I thought would be an ideal area.
I broached my farming idea. He seemed to think it was a marvelous one, and called in one of his neighbours. We made lofty plans to meet on Sundays to clear the area.
But then Sunday came, and another , and my fellow farmers always seemed to have some reason not to start. After a third Sunday, I realised I was on my own.
Help came in the form of a young man who had farmland in Craig, East Bank Demerara.
He listened to me and said: “Why not plant on the reserve in front your home?”
I like the idea. The reserve was not only close to my home, but also near to a canal, from which I could access water for my plants.
So one rainy day, my son and I began clearing a razor-grass covered area near our home.
A few minutes into our clearing, a gentleman on a motorcycle rode up. He looked at us in our ragged clothing, seemed to conclude we were up to no good, and demanded to know what we were doing.

“Clearing this area for gardening,”
“Well, you can’t plant here,” he said, before going on to notify us that he was from the Grove/Diamond Neighbourhood Democratic Council (NDC).
He then rode away.
Why, I wondered, was it apparently alright for residents to dump refuse (including a container) on that same reserve, but it was not okay for me to clear it for planting?
One thing I have learned about myself is that I have a high level of stubbornness, and when someone says I can’t do something, I become even more determined to show that I can.
I looked at my son and said: “We are going to plant right here.”
We continued to clear the reserve. 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 look for areas where residents had dumped chicken manure and fetch to my plot.
Once, I made two one-mile trips with manure piled in a push cart.
Strangers that saw me toiling away offered agricultural advice. One showed me how the position my drains to avoid by beds becoming water logged,
Another advised me to extend my garden to areas where the soil was more loamy.
A woman offered me some plants from her kitchen garden.

Meanwhile I wrote to the NDC and eventually received clearance to utilize the area.
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.
One day, I managed to corner a goat in the garden. I lassoed the goat, and me, the goat and the furious female owner, went to the Golden Grove Police Station.
The woman was cautioned about having her goats wandering in the community. We met again on more friendly terms a few months later, when a stray cow butted her as she was passing my home.
Eventually, I succeeded in getting a large portion of fishing seine, which I used to block out the goats.
I had one incident of theft. Once, some callaloo I had planned to harvest vanished, and I kept guard at nights for a week.
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.
I began selling to some neighbours.
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.
But perhaps the greatest lesson I learned was that something almost magical happens when you refuse to be deterred by adversity.
It seems that God puts positive people in your way, who don’t see your race, creed or colour, and just reach out to help you.

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