It was like a boxing match!

This time in 2021, I should have thrown in the towel. The summer rains of Saul Mkhize village eMkhondo had decimated my freshly planted garden. Everything was washed away by the floods.
My team and I had to start reconstruction on almost 85% of my 0.25ha vegetable garden. Remember this was my first attempt, solo (story for another day) and I’m a complete novice at this point.
Thank God for my young team, all girls I must add, we rebuilt our garden and replanted what seed was left. There was jubilation, we triumphed!

Sad to say the celebration was shortlived. Whoosh! The rain came down hard again on our garden. This time the damage wasn’t as much as we had dug out an area in the garden to redirect the floods.
The very moist ground was a blessing on the one hand and oh not such a blessing on the other.

Most of the vegetables drowned as they were immature only some Swiss chard survived and the glorious carrot grew to maturity! What a wonderful surprise!
So we sold all the spinach and most of the carrots, most because at harvest time we realised that the water from the rain had caused some of the carrots to rot due to water logging.
During this whole time what seized my mind was not the damage and reconstruction but the how to do it better next time plan. And plan I did…
2022 has been good to Moitheki Farms thus far and I plan to keep it that way for a long time.
The blood, sweat and little tears (no time to cry a bucketful of tears when there’s work to be done…) has been worth the lessons learnt.

So next time, allow me to take you through my journey, blow by blow because it has been like a boxing match.