Christmas Pinecone

 

A chameleon walked across the street in front of us today.  Jonas and I literally had to stop and wait for him to go past.... and if you have ever seen a chameleon's crazy clamp-toed walk, it is not a fast thing.

While we were waiting, though, and while I tried to think of a witty "Why did the chameleon cross the road?" joke (unsuccessful), we noticed a pine cone that had recently fallen out of a monster sized Dr Suess-like pine tree that we regularly walk past. I walked over to pick it up and got about twenty sharp pokes when I laid my hands on it.  I was not about to put my throbbing fingers around it again, but Jonas was soo enthusiastic that I returned to the stroller and got a towel to wrap around it. (As usual, there were a few amused Shona standing nearby, grinning and wondering what a crazy white lady thought she was going to do with a pine cone in a pink wrap.) I laughed at myself, waved to my on-lookers, and plopped it under the stroller, bringing it home with us like a lost puppy. When we got home, I carried my bulging pink towel into the bathroom much to the confusion of my husband. Ten and a half pounds.  SOME PINECONE!!

 

 Here Jonas checks out the sharp parts.

   

 Indeed, I would argue that many plants here seem to be on steroids.  They are strange versions of flora I used to know back in the States, but always much much bigger!  Here are some other examples, found in our own garden:

 Here our geraniums are over five feet tall, and have taken over a number of bushes.

 Kurt standing in front of what looks like a house plant... but is actually a giant aloe relative.

 

 Here again are geraniums (the scraggley bush) intermingled with a jade plant.  My association with jade plants involves a small pot and a dinner party gift.

Above: Believe it or not, these are poinsettias -the little Christmas plants found in pots!  They grow into large trees here, and have to be trimmed often because of their fast growth.  This picture was taken in August (winter here).  Of course, now that the holidays are upon us, the trees are green and leafy and full of lizards... can't even get a tree in the Christmas spirit here!

Gardening Six: Pomegranate Paradise

Gardening continued...

We have three pomegranate trees in the yard, which we have been watching closely since we arrived.   Pomegranates are expensive in this country, so we feel very lucky to have them.  We have been harvesting the pomegranates for the past three weeks, trying to keep up as best as we can. 

 

 The trees start with beautiful brink pink/peach colored flowers that thicken until they turn into the pomegranate fruit. 

When harvested, you can still see the flower petals sticking out the bottom of the fruit.


 The pomegranates are heavy and burden the tree immensely.

 

We initially pulled half of our green, unripe pomegranates off the trees to unburden them of some weight.

Then we waited for the others to sweeten and turn red in the sun.

Many of the ripening pomegranates have popped open right on the tree.  We have to keep up with these, because a day after popping the fruit will be infested with all sorts of little critters.

One of the fascinating things about having these trees has been the bugs they've attracted.  Giant beetles-big enough to make branches on the trees move when they buzz through-of all shapes and colors love to slip inside the pomegranates that have popped open.  You can hear their loud buzzing when you walk past the trees.

 As a child, I loved to have a pomegranate or two each year.  They were a special tart treat I usually ate alone.  Here our fresh pomegranates are much sweeter, and I put them in everything, from smoothies to salads and dressings. Jonas loves a big pile of seeds on his plate.

Most pomegranates I am piecing apart with Jonas so we can put bag-fulls of seeds into the freezer.  So far we took half initially off the trees for weight issues.  Out of the rest left, we've harvested about half already. We've shared an equal amount with our gardener's family, (surprise- he calls them "apples"!) and we still have three gallon-sized bags full of seeds. Talk about abundant.  We are up to our ears; what a treat!

Gardening Five: Fear and Vegetables

Gardening in Africa, continued:

Our move to Africa has quite unexpectedly become all about overcoming fear.  Moving here was a huge leap of faith, and our comfort zone has been challenged constantly.  At first our fears were based on the safety of things like water and food.  After our serious car accident in August, I had a number of mountains to overcome before I felt brave enough to be in the presence of cars again, let alone walk on the side of a road.  I've gotten much more comfortable living alongside Africa's giant millipedes, its spiders and the lizards called skinks that surround us everywhere, including inside of the house.  I've become acquainted with our alarm system and navigating how to try to be safe at night.  And in my latest adventure last week, I am now patting myself on the back after finally begrudgingly sucking it up and learning how to drive on the left side of the road.  (Never mind that it was inspired by laziness and a strong desire to avoid a terrible downpour!)

For Jonas the challenges of overcoming fear in Africa have everything to do with his shyness.  Giving away vegetables has become a good way to initiate interaction and encourage Jonas to overcome his fears of greeting others. Though I'd ideally like it to be a lesson about giving, our shy guy is much more in need of learning how to say hello and use eye contact.  Every day Jonas and I pick vegetables as part of our morning routine, before I walk him to our gardener's home to deliver a bag of fresh edibles.

It wasn't always this way, though.  We had a few weeks in which all of our vegetables rotted on the vine while I frustratedly pointed out ripe things over and over to the gardener. It was a mystery to me. I pondered and pondered why this specific instruction, "pick the spinach and keep half for your family," was ignored hours before I saw the gardener return to our gate with a newly purchased bunch of spinach in hand.

Only after I spoke to a few locals did I finally get it.  My gardener's fears about taking something that was not his kept him from following instructions. Picking and keeping was not something he culturally felt was his place; so he watched as vegetables went bad and waited for us to pick and distribute the food as we saw fit. It was the way he had seen things done in his culture, and he was afraid of being accused of stealing if he got the directions wrong. Once we finally recognized this fear was just based on different perceptions, Jonas and I began our daily delivery tradition.  It has made the gardener more comfortable, fed two families, and kept Jonas excited about the garden.

 Here Jonas points excitedly to our first cauliflower.

Tomatoes, tomatoes.  So many tomatoes.  Though they are used often in Shona cooking, our gardener's wife sells many of the tomatoes on a neighborhood corner.

 Jonas washes a batch of potatoes.

  

We have so far pulled over 60 pounds of potatoes out of the ground.

 Here Jonas washes our most abundant crop thus far- chard, otherwise known simply as spinach to the Shona here.  Cheap and plentiful, it is a staple of the Shona diet.

The puppy we often pet-sit is obsessed with rolling in the carrot greens.  Here Jonas tries to reason with her.  Doesn't work.

 

Our garden in its early phases.  We are currently growing eggplant, tomatoes, chard, turnips, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cauliflower, cabbage, sugar cane (here when we arrived), pineapple (an unexpected result of our compost pile), squash, carrots, pumpkins, onions, lettuce, baby spinach, peas, cherry tomatoes, corn, cilantro, basil, cucumbers, watermelons, and green peppers.

Gardening Four: Apples and Bananas

Gardening in Africa, continued...

We are lucky to have a number of fruit trees in our yard: lemon, mango, plum, avocado, pomegranate, a strange African fruit called machange that has yet to ripen, and peach, which our gardener calls "apple." (Last week he told me the mint growing beside our house is a special herb called "apple," and the week before that, the plum tree was a sweet fruit named "apple," so....)   In addition, we have our own mini banana grove near our cottage:

The bananas are a little different than what we find in the US; they have more strings just inside the peel, and are much sweeter- almost too sweet to eat alone!  

They always ripen in one large bunch at the same time. So, though Jonas insists that getting a monkey would help, we have resorted to making large quantities of banana bread.

 

Banana plants are some of the oldest cultivated plants.  They are often mistaken for trees, but really each trunk-like shoot is a pseudo stem of a larger plant.  Each pseudo stem can be 20-25 feet tall and holds one bunch of bananas, which grows above a dangling flower.

 

(Not my picture.) The flowers are beautiful and are eaten (cooked) in Indian cuisine.  After the bunch ripens and is cut off, the pseudo stem dies and is then cut down, to be replaced by new growth.

Here is a banana bunch with a dried flower underneath.  The flowers finished blooming about a month before the bananas were ready to pick. 

Random fact: Bananas are slightly radioactive because of their potassium content!

Gardening, Three: Affordable Labor

Labor is cheap here in Southern Africa.  You can tell, if nothing else, by the type of gardening work you can find people doing here. Work that would be done with tools or machines is simply hired out as labor instead.   Some examples...

  Above are three gardeners (the school employs oodles) that literally trim every path with yard scissors every week or two.  They do it for eight hours a day!

 

Our yard: In places where there would usually be stone borders or decorative rock in America, here the grass just ends and the gardener trims and then re-shovels the dirt into perfect mounds once a week to provide an outline for shrubs.  Talk about high maintenance.

If you look past Jonas and friend Luke, you can see the gardeners in this park in Jo'Berg, South Africa.  In America, I'm pretty sure it would have been one person with a riding mower. We watched for three days as three gardeners literally weed whacked the ENTIRE park for eight hours a day.  Understandably, they were still not finished when we left on the fourth day.

Gardening, Two: Gardener and Garden

 

Gardening in Africa, continued...

In a stroke of good luck absolutely not of our doing, we acquired one of the biggest yards in our capital city, a gorgeous 2 1/2 acre plot. The yard must have been owned by a drunken horticulturist at one time, because it's full of fruit trees, exotic plants, and hundreds of broken alcohol bottles.  The perfect place to rehabilitate with a little TLC.

To clarify before I introduce our gardener... It's an awkward thing- telling people in the US I have a full time gardener. But here in our (purposely unnamed) African country, it is expected.  I feel tacky talking about it, but here it is.  If you can afford to employ someone, even for the minimum wage of 90 dollars a month, you are expected to.  It's a way of supporting a family.  We have been spending $250 a month to support three adults, their four children, and whichever relatives they are most likely supporting.  In return we have received oodles of help, countless hours of assistance, loving friendship, and enthusiastic aid in settling into a new country.

Meet our gardener, Shoman:  Terrible at English, obsessed with over-watering every plant until the borehole dries up, terrific with Jonas, obsessed with over-watering every plant until the borehole dries up, always smiling, obsessed with over-watering every plant until the borehole dries up, prone to re-planting the same plant in twelve different places until it shrivels up and he blames it on a lack of water.  Shoman and his wife live in our cottage behind our house, where they live with their two boys Alista, a bouncy 2 year old nicknamed Lilly (even after five months we still cannot convince Jonas that Lilly is actually a boy), and Shown, who is five.

In preparation for our move, we contacted the school about what outdoor equipment to bring for the gardener. "Oh, he'll have everything he needs," we were told.

Shoman had half a shovel and a machete.

But he was ready to work.  Five months later, we joke with him that he is no longer a gardener; we have turned him into a farmer. With a few additional tools, a few seeds, and an overworked garden hose, Shoman has helped us to slowly rehab an empty, dumped upon half acre in back that has become the perfect location for a large garden.

 

To read more about how we use bamboo in our garden, check out this link:

http://keepingupwiththejonases.blogspot.com/search?q=bamboo

Though Jonas was obsessed with gardening before we moved, in Africa he can't get enough.  Poor Shoman is stalked wherever he goes...