It's Been a Little Dry

We have planted the crop and now here comes the rainy season....  rainy season?  This month of October  has only yielded less than 3/4" of rain.  Hardly enough to sustain a crop and it's beginning to show.

In many fields the wheat has gone into self preservation mode and is shooting out its head early and at a very short height in order to produce at least some seed to grow another day.

The timing of the last we planted into virgin ground proved to be poor with little moisture left in the soil to adequately sprout and sustain the crop.   

 The ground is just as brown as the day it was planted three weeks ago

 The seed sprouted and found little moisture to keep growing and withered and died

Fortunately not all the fields are as bad

Below is Nahom working it for the camera as we were out inspecting the crop

What would we do without Nahom?

BTW - Happy birthday Nahom!

A sad thing about our project here is the necessity of displacing families from their small villages.  They receive compensation to gather their things and move to an out lying area to build their new home.

 This is now an abandoned village which housed about 30 people

Inside this hut is where a family of 5 or 6 would sleep with a few of their animals in the side room.  They have a small fireplace inside where they cook and keep warm .  This helps explain why the local people usually have a strong aroma of camp fire smell and there are so many children who come to the clinic with burns.

A corn crib to store corn

This village had to travel three hours by foot  to get needed water

 A small reminder of what was here

Now moving to the garden area and its crew

I'm trying to tell them about uncovering the bulb part of the onion to make it grow larger.  It goes against their logic to uncover much of the onion so we will do it on some and experiment to see.

They are so anxious to pick the tomatoes that a vine ripened tomato is hard to come by, bummer..

The view back to the houses

Here's a small crew trying to plant Bermuda grass for our future lawn, one of the few grasses that grows natural here.  Next best thing to laying down sod.

Shelley took off last week to Addis Ababa for needed time away from the farm and to get to know the capital and what it has to provide.  She has also been able to spend time with Alyssa's sister Kate and the children Wes and Alyssa are trying to adopt.  Kate has been a good sport in taking care of the responsibilities of these children since Wes' incedent.  Wes' last surgery went well and Alyssa is looking at returning in the next two weeks to be with the children.  What a change of events that family has had to endure.  We wish them well.

Until next time,

Alan