It’s been a rather quiet week! Nothing died, Mooshoo did not dig up my sweet potatoes and it’s been politely raining.  Very calm. Unusually calm!  Then my borehole stopped working.  I await the arrival of the Technician to tell me what may have gone wrong. 

I’ve often asked people what they believe is the most valuable thing on their land.  I have as many answers as I have people.  Personally, I think it’s the soil!  When I restarted homesteading, it was on my land and not my parents’ land.  My parents place had been a semi functional farm so a lot of work had gone into the health of the soil.  Not so with my place.  But I knew the drill.  I knew how to get my soil healthy and keep it healthy. This is the joy of graduating from the University of Hard Knocks (aka experience).  You always know the drill!

The soil on my homestead is a type of sandy clay soil.  When it is wet, it has the consistency of glue.  When it dries up, it becomes brick hard and unyielding.  This was not soil one could grow food in.  It was too extreme and I needed it to change.  I am not the person to import soil onto my land.  No. Ikinda demands that I work on my soil and change it myself.I started by buying cow manure from my neighbours.  The manure we were getting from the chicken was not enough.  We used the manure on the land to try and get more life into it.  Then I realised the process of using manure was not going to yield the results I wanted as fast as I wanted them, plus manure is not cheap.  I am not a fan of commercial fertilizer, so that was not an option either.

On any homestead, composting is your friend.  You need a compost pit to get organic matter into your soil.  For any composting to happen, you need termites.  I know.  Where I come from, they are the enemies of all timber related progress, but you need them.  Compost everything that was once alive.  All twigs, grass, maize stalks, sunflower stalks, everything! My kitchen scraps go to the chicken, but they too are great for the compost pit. As at last count, I have six composting pits. Dig a composting pit and thank me later. 

The other thing I did, quite by accident, was to get pumice pebbles.  My intent was to use them as paving gravel, until my cousin told me the value of using pumice to plant trees especially with my soil type.  The pumice would act as a moisture storage system, and would keep the soil from hardening into a brick during the dry season, which always led to my tree roots splitting and the trees dying.  We now had compost and pumice to mix into the planting hole for the trees, and we had compost for the garden too.  Progress.  By the way, if you are the kind of person that is always potting plants, use pumice.  Your potted plants will be delirious with joy!

Homesteading is not and can never be a solo journey.  I needed a community of like-minded folks to share “war stories” with.  I found such a community within the local chapter of the Kenya Horticultural Society.  A group of tenacious individuals (ikinda), bound together by their love of soil and all things nature.  I think our motto should be “never say die”. This was a group of people I could gel with.  We were driven by the same values and viewed our land in similar ways, and we were eager to learn.

One of the lessons I picked from a fellow member was how to make manure “tea”.  What’s that you ask? I shall tell you.  Take half a sack of manure – roughly 20 kilos.  We use chicken droppings for this.  Soak the sack of manure in a water storage barrel with roughly two hundred liters of water.  Let it soak for ten days.  It’s a smelly job, but that’s homesteading for you.  After ten days, toss the manure into the composting pit and keep the liquid.  Dilute it to the color of weak black tea, and water your plants.  I have never seen my plants smile like they did with this mixture.

Homesteading can be an expensive affair, so I’ll give you the challenge one of the tenacious group members gave us – Your homestead must either put money in your pocket or keep money in your pocket.  Which is it for you?