Farm Small Small

My Farm Small Small
I keep a small garden, which is quickly becoming an obsession.
It started in February, when I decided that I wanted to grow some fresh vegetables. February is the middle of hot season, and nothing grows. I knew this, but I have learned that things require time in Ghana. Better to start early.
I knew that a fence would be necessary to keep out the roaming sheep and goats. I asked how to make a fence. “Don’t worry. You will see everything in full measure.”
March and April came and went, with no sign of a fence. I started asking again. I was told “you don’t worry. It is in order.”
The rain started coming, so I started nursing some moringa trees and tomatoes. I filled used plastic bags with water and dirt and manure, and watched as the seeds turned into small plants. Still no fence.
Sometime in June, JHS students started showing up at my house with sticks. My fence is coming! I thought happily. The moringa I had nursed desperately needed planting, roots pushed against the edges of the bags.
The sticks remained in a pile in front of my house for several more weeks. I decided to improvise and make my own fence.
When I went outside with a shovel and started moving sticks around, students were immediately pulled out of school to come and build the fence for me. They didn’t do it very well, and I ended up re-building it anyway.
My grandmother was delighted when I told her I was building a fence for a garden. “Do you have it goat-proofed yet?” she asked. “I think so,” I said. I didn’t realize that goat-proofed fences are a myth. No matter how close together the sticks in the fence are, the goats work their goat juju and get inside. I know it has to be juju because the goats are unable to get back outside of the fence unless you make a hole for them. Juju is the only explanation.
Once the fence was in place, students helped me dig ridges for the plants. My counterpart promptly re-dug them. “These are not correct,” he muttered. He dug two rows in the time it took me to do a quarter of a row.
While he was building more correct ridges, I went to turn my compost pile. As I took out a shovelful of rotting vegetables crawling with insects, I caught myself thinking about how beautiful it would be in a few weeks. My first clue that my garden had crossed into an obsession.
The second clue that I had crossed the line was when some of my friends started addressing me as Farmer Kim.
No one in my village calls me Farmer Kim. The people in my village look concerned when they see me working in my garden, and anxiously ask if they should send their children over to help me.
I tried joking with my counterpart that I would be a farmer when I finished my service. There was an awkward pause as he tried to figure out how to tell me that I should definitely not be a farmer without hurting my feelings.
I left my site for a couple of weeks for the Girl’s Leadership Camp (you can read about it on my projects page). When I came back, the whole garden was overgrown with weeds and my pumpkins were being attacked by a plague of locusts. OK, I don’t know what a locust is, but there were a lot of yellowish beetles happily chomping away. I pretended like I didn’t want any pumpkins anyway, but all my friends knew I was lying. Someone offered to help me apply pesticides. I’m not comfortable with pesticides, but I’m less comfortable with an absence of pumpkins. I accepted. Then I found out that they were applying kerosene to the pumpkins, because they felt that chemicals are dangerous.
Normally I hand pull my weeds, but two weeks of growth made it impossible to do it that way this time. I dug out the hoe that people here use to weed their farms. After 30 minutes I noticed my breath was coming quickly and my biceps were burning. I could feel all those small, conveniently forgotten muscles around my rib cage. Irritated, I reminded myself that weeding is the chore given to the smallest children because it’s the easiest. A blister formed on my palm. I thought about green mamba snakes hiding in the grass. The thought made me finish weeding the section. I started the next section. A second blister formed next to the first; something bit the top of my foot. Not a snake, but it still hurt like hell. I put away the hoe, admitted that small children can do a better job than me. How do people do this for ten hours a day all season?
So far, I have moringa trees, sunflower, pumpkin, tomato, carrots, onion, maize, sweet potato, basil, and something that I think might be lettuce. Or cabbage. Or something else entirely. I was rather sloppy with my labeling, and I’ve never grown it before, so I’m not sure.