New Season, Minimal Gardening Activities.

The new season has been on for a couple of months now, around March specifically. That was about 3 months ago and it is expected to last till around November/December this year, depending on which colour the climate decides to show us.

As much as I would have loved to farm this season, my health condition has been constituting a significant hindrance. Anyone who suffers from a stomach ulcer will tell you how bad the pain can be, and engaging in intense physical activities worsens it. Even though I have taken treatments and all necessary precautions in terms of what to consume, I don't wish it to aggravate as a result of physical activities.

As the saying goes, "Where there is a will, there is a way." I simply could not ignore the rainy season and allow all these luscious green to pass me by without cultivating the ground, especially in this period when foods are super expensive. Hence, a couple of weeks ago, I managed to plant a few corn stands. I did this in front of the house, which ordinarily I would have to keep weeding with or without planting anything on it. After all, I cannot allow weeds to keep growing indefinitely around the house. The result of the few corn stands is in the image below:

Even if I want to engage in relatively comprehensive gardening activities, I will be limited by space. The backyard that I normally use is already filled with plantain plants with very little to no space left for cultivation. I couldn't also use all the available space in the front yard because not all the space is cultivateable due to bad soils.

Then, I decided to put some creativity into play. Since I have some worn-out car tires in my store, I placed them in the front yard, looked for good topsoil to fill them with and use them as planting stands. This method solves a problem - it makes the rubber tires eco-useful instead of them creating a nuisance in the environment, since rubber tires are biodegradable.

After filling the tires with topsoil, I was at a crossroads on what to plant into them. From my experience, sweet potatoes will do well in the soil, and so also are other crops such as maize, okro, and even jute mallow. At the end of the day, I settled for maize:

The maize seeds I obtained (shown in the image above) earlier this year is a fungicide-treated maize seeds. These seeds have a higher chance of surviving without being preyed on by predators such as rats and birds.

Why did I settle for maize? Maize has the shortest life span of all the options available. Although jute mallow and okro require almost the same duration as maize, okro doesn't fruit all at once and jute mallow is planted for its leaves which takes time to regenerate when plucked. The harvest of sweet potatoes will also be disruptive to the soil in the tires.

After harvesting the maize in the next 3 months, I will use the soil in the tire to plant something else as a form of crop rotation technique.

What do you think?