Farm Friday! (and Christmas Greetings!)

Merry Christmas from Lifesong Farms Zambia!! It's hard for us mid-westerners to realize it's Christmas without the environmental clues of cold and snow. I never thought I would miss having my nose freeze when I stepped outside. :) 

The rains are in full swing here. We lose electricity often now, usually at least once a day sometimes 3-4 times a day. It does help the kids and I to feel a bit of the Christmas spirit to read our Advent devotional by candlelight while we sip hot chocolate.

After a long wait, the sea container from the States finally arrived. It was quite the occurrence and hopefully I can post more in detail about it this weekend. (Lots of pictures are needed to explain unloading a sea container from a truck without a crane!!) Many thanks to the guys at Caterpillar that helped us to get the shipping arranged. It was and is a huge blessing. Some of the things the farm was most anxious to receive included galvanized steel tubing for greenhouse tunnels, 2 rolls of plastic weighing about 2000 pounds each and boxes and boxes of hardware. When we got it all unloaded, Erik and the Zambian guys looked at it in confusion. We had no assembly instructions. At all. After calls and emails to the States an instuction manual was found. But alas, the tools needed were not readily available. Enter improvisation. Erik spent days trying to figure out the best ways to bend the tubes into the correct shape. Trips into town and searching stores dilligently finally proved fruitful. A pipe bender was purchased and things began to move quicker. We now have up the tubing and are ready to put the plastic on. Woohoo!

 We will hopefully be extending the growing season of our strawberries and blackberries by doing this. Next week, Erik will be driving to the airport in Lusaka (6 hours from here) to pick up 12,000 new strawberry plants and 6,000 blackberry plants. Dodging the rains to get the fields prepped for the berries has been quite the exciting game! Erik has mentioned many times that his grandpa would give him quite the lecture for trying to disc and plow when the ground is so wet! But we simply have no choice. We must get the berries in the ground within one week of receiving them. Today we had some dry weather to quickly get some discing done and form beds. Everything must be grown in raised beds to avoid being drowned by the rains. Everywhere this time of year, Zambians are forming beds with hoes and planting. Groundnuts (peanuts), maize, rape, okra, you name it, all along the roadsides impromptu gardens are being formed. Thankfully we have a bed former we can pull behind our tractor.

Sheila and I working hard to measure out and stake the rows for the tractor

finished beds!

As you can see from the pictures above, we didn't quite finish before we were hit with another downpour!

The fruit trees don't need any attention now other than weed control. Their job right now is to soak in the rains and grow, grow, grow! Maize has been planted between the rows of fruit trees. This will supply organic matter to the soil and give us a secondary crop for income.

Gooseberries are being transplanted, fertilized and trellised.

Gift and David stringing up wire supports for the gooseberries.

As far as production and sales go, we are not moving much produce at this time. Strawberries are finished with the rains. We do have raspberries, but since this is their first year they are slightly lacking in flavor. 

All our work at the new acreage has ceased while we prep for the plants coming next week. We did drain the reservoir and refill it to see if the water would come in clear. There are concerns with using the water to irrigate when it is full of sediment. It would clog all our pipes! When we pumped it out we discovered it held 300,000 liters! Sufficient to meet all our irrigation needs. And, the water filled back in clear and a beautiful blue color. If you are interested you can see a video of Erik talking about the new acreage here: http://vimeo.com/78933603

As our children eagerly anticipate the arrival of Christmas Day, all my thoughts go winging to anticipating our Deliverer's Second Coming! What eager anticipation! We also anticipate the arrival of the new baby of our quality manager Pelijah. (check out her story! http://vimeo.com/79409650)