A Productive Small Garden in Lusaka

For a small family, this is more than enough for us. At least the whole week, we go from spot A to spot B. By the time we reach the last spot, we don't have a spoon ready. When we shifted here in 2013, I just said, these guys are old enough. They cannot plant the plants. And I made them dig the garden. Your children, right? Yes, my children and husband. So we could allot a portion for a day, we dig, and I bake a cake for them. That was the payment. So every day had to have a different kind of cake. And because they were young, we would do it like today, give them two days to rest, another day, until we made the garden into what it is. Eventually, I have recruited everyone now into plants. My first son loves roses. We have more than 20 colours of roses here. So for him, even when I'm away from home, you find that he's propagated. He's just interested in roses. My second born daughter, she's into almost everything. But if you look at sales, she's the best sales lady. And then the rest, they have a hands-on kind of thing. Because they know shade-loving plants, sun-loving plants, and they are helpful. If we don't have a permanent worker in the garden, we do most of the work ourselves. Except when there's a lot of digging, lifting, here and there is when we employ casual workers. But we basically do the work ourselves as a family. But we have rabbits in there, and the pigeons there. This was my son's project. How old is your son, by the way? He's 23. No, no, no. 24. Let's not disturb him. This was his project when he finished grade 12. I told him, I won't be buying talk time for you. Manage this project. And we're going up to hundreds. Oh, really, the rabbits? When he sells a lot, he even gives me, Mommy, I've bought what I needed. Here's some money for you. Wow, that's nice. My daughters are more creative with their hands. So just get them what they need, and they'll be doing. They'll be doing something. As they are helping, they are getting skills for themselves. Exactly. They say, teach them in the way that you want them to grow. And you have certainly done that. And do they actually enjoy it? They do. Very much. And how do you manage the roster then? Is there a roster, or everyone just knows their area? There isn't really a roster. But everyone here knows that we water on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Now that we have these power challenges, whenever power comes and the garden is thirsty, even if I'm not around, I'll find the garden watered. They'll wake up. Even if it's midnight, they'll wake up to water. It's only the vegetables that we water on a daily basis. Oh, wow. For ornamental plants, we skip a day. So that's really good teamwork. Mm-hmm. Because like these that are here, my husband planted these in 2021 from leaves. So I found a leaf in each plastic. But look at them now. They are very, very full. I was in Lundazi then. These Sansevieria? Yes. All of them here. My husband planted them. They've grown really well. And they are from a leaf. But look at them now. I just need to get pots, dress them up, and off they go. So other than ornamental plants, we are also doing fruits. For these lemons, we do air layering for them. And because they are done from a mature tree which is already fruiting, they fruit in year zero. We did this last year, October, around this time. And now it's flowering. It has lemons. We are going to eat these lemons. But because the tree is still small, we may have to remove some of the fruits because they will be too heavy for the small tree. So the beauty with air layering is that you start eating from them on year zero up to whatever. So these are going to the farm. So it's temporary here. But the next batch we are doing now is the one that we want to sell. Okay. Are these a special type of lemon? No. It's just these common lemons except they start fruiting in year zero. We had planted them from seed and they took seven years. In the seventh year is when we started eating from them. But now that we know the air layering method, this is what we are doing. If you look around the pond, we have tomato plants strategically planted. This is Roma. These are the common tomatoes. So eventually I'll be wind off the market because I also have that patch there for tomatoes. You can never have too many tomatoes. No, no, no. These are the jades we propagated. So the tomatoes you've planted near the fence so that they climb, you use this to hold them up? No. Eventually we'll have to put trees. We'll have to put sticks. I just don't dig. So digging is my husband's baby. So I just told him this nursery is ready for transplanting. Look for where to put it. Then he tells me I've planted. I walk around the garden and there are no tomatoes. But where are my tomatoes? I've put them near the pond. So here they are. But you know the thing is, it's actually nice when you are able to mix your vegetables and your plants together. Visually it actually creates a lot of interest. It does. And when the red tomatoes come, it can actually be quite a nice garden feature. And then now we're going into the fish pond. So this fish pond was designed to cater for 1,500 big fishes. And the kind of fish we have here, it's brings and they multiply. So we don't really harvest, like removing everything from the pond. We just remove what we want to eat or sell. Except we haven't really been selling, we've just been eating. Take a piece. When we pass money in plants, money for relish, when it goes to plants, we just come to the pond. And balance up. So this is parsley. It's a common weed. It has medicinal properties but also very good for fish. So we usually throw it in the pond. I don't know how it found itself here. So this is food for fish. And people can eat that as a vegetable. Apparently you just cook it the way you cook your rape and spinach. Or even in salad. So we like feeding it to the fish because we have a lot of it in the garden. So I like your vegetable patch here. I see you've got a mixture of different things here and here. It's a small family. We sow like this. I got some vegetables from here yesterday. And there were more than enough. Just this half. So I left a handful. This morning I just collected another handful from these same ones and sashillied them. So you don't actually buy green veg at all here? There's no need? Rarely. Unless we don't have that particular vegetable and we want to eat it. Because here there's two types. We can see something slightly there. And then in the corner there I think there's some herbs. And this side we have kalembla. We have katapa. It's only impua that is not here right now. As in having fruits. But we have four different types of impua. I put them in that bed. And they're built with impua. You can have just one tree but it's enough to feed you. And there's something very interesting I noticed in your vegetable garden that you've got like charcoal? Yeah. I was using this place for mixing planting mediums. So there was a lot of charcoal dust here. I just spread it. Okay. And this does this help with the plants as well? Yes. There's carbon in charcoal. So I think for all my plants I plant them with some charcoal dust. Okay. Regardless of the type of plant. It also helps loosen the soil. But the carbon is what I love because it gives the plants that nice green luster. It does. You get very colorful. And I think it's also very important because at this time of the year even moisture retention charcoal helps. And I see you've got so many fruit trees. Granadilla, lemon you've spoken about. Tangerine. Mexican apples. Mexican apples. So the whole year you've got things to eat from your garden. The whole year. And your garden isn't that big. How big is your garden? We are sitting on 30 by 30 meters where there's a house and a fish pond and everything else we've talked about. So space should never be an excuse. No, no, no. It shouldn't. It should never be. Not at all. Even with these bananas. You put them by the water tank. Two types of bananas here. This red one I got it from Lundazi but when digging they disturbed it and it looks like it's drying. I need to find a drum, I chop it. Bananas have a lot of potassium so put it in the flowering plants. But I managed to get three babies. One, two the third one should be somewhere here. It's a red banana. And so even the location under the water tank where you don't have to water it, it just gets and the space It's making the use of that space under the water tank. Perfect. Utilizing every little space that we have. What kind of tree is this? This is Mexican apple. Oh, okay. Whoever taught us to give nice things should be found and dealt with. Why don't we have nice things named after ourselves? music