fws team blog

Having gotten here only a month ago, (feels like three, at least), I feel like I finally know enough to appreciate the stupendous cleverness of all the environmental systems at Kesho Leo that it is my job to help Farm Manager Eve keep ticking over.
The goats and cows eat the fodder we grow, they poo, the poo is composted to feed the plants we grow, OR combines with human poo in the biogas facility to produce fuel for cooking the plants and fish and meat and milk we grow, AND slurry for growing the plants that feed the the fish, and the nice fishy, manurey water of the fish ponds is used to water the plants that feed the cows and the goats.... and if that sentence seems to have WAY too few full stops, it is because everything is so very interconnected there are no ends-of-the-line to put them at. And that is the idea of permaculture.

Apart from a lot of activities that seem to involve poo, I've been working on my kiswahili a little, and now have a slanted vocabulary involving a very large amount of words such as ''bee', 'worm', 'nutrients' , 'mulch' 'to dig', 'to
harvest', and 'to water'.
The last of which we will hopefully be doing much less of starting yesterday. That's right, the rainy season made it's first appearance last night, making everything seem much shinier, and making it seem like not such a dumb idea afterall to have spent the last month planting endless seedlings, divisions, and seeds to become new components in our windbreaks, living fences, nitrogen fixation plantings, bank stabilization, food forest, and herb and vegie beds.
Hopefully it wasn't a cameo; Tanzania's rainy season has become increasingly unreliable of late (sounds familiar Australia?), and people are bouncing the words climate change around here as much as at home. Fingers crossed, soil mulched.

Annie Raser-Rowland