Minha Machamba

Since arriving at site, I've been making a feeble attempt at being a farmer.  I have a small plot of red and dirty land behind my house, half of which is technically mine to make use of.  When I first got to site, it was the middle of the rainy season and ideal time to give it a go.  So I did.  And like most things that you try for the first time, it usually doesn't work out the way you planned. Instead of blister-filled palms and large crop harvests, I kinda just ended up with the former and nothing else. Still though, it's been an awesome experience and I think I'm starting to get the hang of it...or at least get a better idea of how not to kill everything. So, here are some pic's from the Farm.

For my first attempt at farming, I tried copying what the Mozambicans were doing.  I planted corn in nice rows in nice rows in one corner of my backyard next to a line of Mozambican Basil/Bay Leaves (maybe?).  Next, my friend Manuel and I planted beans throughout the property.  Although the corn grew and grew and grew until  was nice and tall and the bean plants turned into lush little bushes of leaves, I was only able to harvest about ten ears in total and didn't get a single pod of beans (I was able to use the leaves for matapa though).  Still, food is food, and you can be damn sure that it tastes even better when you grew it yourself.  The bail/bay leave experiment, while successful, was also a flop, because the leaves aren't nearly as delicious as I was hoping.  So now they are kind of just sit there and look pretty.  In the picture below you can see my stalks of corn and maybe-basil with a bunch of little bean bushes scattered throughout.

Corn Stalks, "Basil" and Beans!

More rows of bean plants lining the side of my house.

Armando, my host-father, was a master of growing bananas, and he grew some pretty damn good bananas.  I really wanted to try and take a [age out of his book, so I spent the first month at site trying to track down a small banana tree I could buy and move to my yard.  They aren't supposed to produce for a while, but I figured if I put it in early, maybe I could harvest a bunch or two before I leave in two years.  I ended up planting it toward the back of my yard next to what was then a really small pumpkin plant.  I pampered each, and both have started to grow pretty well.  The banana tree has grown a ton and the pumpkin plant turned into a patch.  Probably my most successful endeavor, I was able to harvest something like 15 pumpkins from that one plant.  I only ended up using a couple, but the rest made for great gifts for my neighbors!

A Banana tree being engulfed by my pumpkin patch!

I'm not a huge fan of papayas, but apparently they are not only easy to grow, but grow really fast too.  Also, they look really cool too.  My papaya planting experience started when a friend of mine, Chad, gave me a small one to plant.  It has since gotten huge, and I have since planted about 6 others along the wall that lines the side of my house.  Here's one of them:

Papaeira!

 Here's my attempt to be like my American father.  He's always had a thing for growing tomatoes with mixed results, and randomly one day, this little guy started growing in my yard. It's a little tomato plant, and it was doing pretty well until some little kid crushed it and torn it out of the ground.  RIP tomato plant, I'll try you again for real next year.

Mozambique has absolutely enormous avocados.  Granted, most of it is a seed, they are still gigantic in size and delicious as well.  One of my favorite things to do thus far has been to eat them, sometimes in a dish or sometimes alone with salt or sugar (don't knock it til you try it), and then take the seed and try and sprout a tree from it.  To do this, I clean off the extra avocado gunk, stick three toothpicks in it, and then submerse the lower half of the seed in water by resting the toothpicks on the rim of a little bowl I made from the lower half of a 1.5 L water bottle.  After a few weeks, the tap root emerges and a tree starts to grow out of the top.  I've done this a few times, but people keep asking me for them (and subsequently killing them too).  The one I was able to keep has been a phenomenal success and I was able to transfer it to a "pot" (the bottom of a plastic bucket that I found on the ground outside my house) where it's been even bigger ever since.  Take a look at the sequence of photos below.  Next to the avocado tree are some other homemade "pots" where I'm growing American Basil and Cilantro (which my neighbors just killed while I was away).  The small plastic bag's filled with soil in the third picture have sun flowers that I'm trying to sprout.

Avocado Tree, Basil, Cilantro and sunflowers!

With some of the other stuff doing so well, I got a little cocky and decided to take a shot at experimenting with Watermelon. The watermelon they have here kinda sucks (no taste, and some of it isn't even red!), so I was hoping to prove to my neighbors that we had it pretty good back in the states.  I had some seeds I brought from home, so I planted a row of them in y back yard next to the corn and in front of the pumpkin.  At first, it was doing pretty well...

Watermelon plants starting to grow!

Some of the plants then started to even sprout melons.  They were oddly shaped, but they were watermelons none the less! 

Unfortunately, that luck didn't last too much longer.  All the melons that sprouted would grow for a week or two, get me really excited, and then turn black and die.  I couldn't figure out why.  Maybe because they are foreign, maybe because there wasn't anymore water, or maybe because I just wasn't doing something right.  Alas, that experiment failed.  Here's a pic of my neighbors looking at one of the melons when it was alive.  You can also see a dead one too.  It's that black thing.

Ancha is excited about melon.