Nako mason

I've had many questions from friends and family back home along the lines of: “How is your garden growing?” And the answer is: “A ka wusa” (literally: It's better). And, it truly is better than last year. I've nearly tripled the amount of produce from my garden last year, and have not needed to buy vegetables from the market in quite some time!

Through the rainy season last year, I grew peanuts, beans, squash, cucumbers, eggplants, corn, hibiscus and tomatoes...most of which were failures. I didn't realize it, since I hadn't been in that spot during the rainy season the year before, but my garden turns into a mud cesspool during the rainy season. Rice would be much better suited to the spot during the rains. I did have a  bountiful peanut crop, which made me very happy because I considered it my first real success in the garden. In addition to the mud, I had been previously unaware of the invasiveness of grass during the rainy season. I would completely clear an area of grass to plant a peppiniere, only to find that new grass seedlings would outgrow my seedlings in a short time.

Lessons learned last year have helped me to grow a much more productive garden this season. I am currently growing “big” onions (called Tubab onions here) and smaller shallots (called African onions), eggplants, lettuce, tomatoes, green beans, green peppers, basil, cilantro, carrots, 2 beets, moringa trees, etc. etc. I tried growing cabbage but grasshoppers devoured all of my seedlings. A second species of grasshopper (black and white with neon stripes) is now attempting to destroy my eggplants and freshly transplanted green peppers. I'm reluctant to buy pesticide and haven't found a natural solution as of yet.

Since pictures speak better than words, here is my garden.  First, a couple pictures of hibiscus: the flower being pollinated and a fruit.  We brew the fruit into a delicious tea:

I grew "kusa" during the rainy season, a strange mix of cucumber and squash.  I had some early successes with the fruits, but everything rotted once my garden turned to a mud cesspool. 

And, here's my overall garden these days (well, back in February or March):

Here are the small "African" onions.  Almost every woman in the garden grows this variety of onion during the gardening season.  There are very few pest problems associated with it, the onions store well, and women can sell them for a large profit in the market.  The leaves are also dried to be used later in the year.  I have a whole bunch of these onions sitting in my house right now.  As soon as my "big" onions are used up (they don't store as well in the heat), I will use them in my cooking.

This is the star of my garden.  I received seeds for this variety of eggplant from my boss at Peace Corps last year and planted a peppiniere in the rainy season.  I have 7 of these plants in my garden, which have produced over 300 fruits since December!  The other women in the garden have been excited about this variety, though a little wary because it looks so different from their own, local variety.  I gave out a lot of the fruits and several women saved the seeds to plant in their own gardens.  Needless to say, I have been eating a lot of small, orange eggplants over the last few months. 

I tried growing green beans last year, but nematodes destroyed them before they produced any fruit.  This year, I had a 3 week run on green beans!  Unfortunately, most women in my village have no idea what these beans are or that you can eat them whole.  I tried to explain their preparation to the women who came by my garden, but I'm not sure I got any converts to grow green beans in their own gardens...

As with last year, the main thing I have planted in my garden is tomatoes.  I buy tomatoes every day in the market, so it makes sense to just grow my own.  And, I haven't had to buy tomatoes for over a month now!  Tomatoes are hard to grow in Mali without using pesticides...they get attacked by moth worms, root diseases, and viruses.  A virus has infected many of my plants, and the tomato plants in other women's gardens.  Still harvested a lot of fruit though!

I ran a couple of informal trainings in the garden about how to make a compost pile and how to plant peppinieres (nurseries for seedling development).  Here are four women at the composting formation, in the middle of building the compost pile: