We are in so much a hurry to bring home our harvest because once people notice that work has begun on a particular space, they will continue to stalk the place and steal from the farm. About two rows of the nuts were pulled up by thieves when we left the place on Monday. As of yesterday, we did all we could just to harvest what was left but still couldn't complete it. Most people here are always feeling lazy to do this type of hard work, but whenever it gets to harvest time, you will always find them on the Frontline stealing from people's farms to feed themselves.
There is still land available here for farming, but nobody wants to engage in such hard labor.
Away from that and upon reaching the farm, I headed straight to the garden to harvest some veggies for soup and noticed what had happened to my tomatoes.
Remember that I have been waiting for these to get ripe so that I can start harvesting them; that never happened, and while I have hoped that I could dig into the internet and source for articles/resources that may be helpful for me to use on my tomatoes for them to get ripe on time, time was never on my side as we are busy with the larger farm work.
Deciding to harvest the unripe tomatoes and use them like that, there was nothing to harvest. Everything has been damaged. For the little time I have been at home consistently, a neighbor has bought some chickens when she wants to rear them, and allowing them to move freely in the compound, they have damaged most of the plants in my garden.
The chickens have pecked on the tomatoes, eating most of them. They have equally uprooted all my growing spring onions, rendering everything here useless. The few tomatoes that tried to ripen up was been eating by ants, seems like everything around here is hungry
You will notice that I haven't planted any spinach for a while now. This is because of the flood water that has been stagnant here during the course of the heaviest rains that started in September. I cannot plant any vegetables as they will be flushed away. I have had to hold on with some of the activities here, including the planting of new species of veggies.
Eventually I had no choice but to purchase some tomatoes from the nearest market. And then fetch some veggies from the garden for dinner. Our fluted pumpkin grows above the ground, and hence it is not affected by flood water. Besides, I have planted it's root in a sack placed on stones to raise it far above the level of the groundwater here.
The same applies to the bitterleaves tree here. I love our local "ogbono soup with bitterleaves and fluted pumpkins; thank goodness I had some of the items I needed from the garden and needed to purchase only tomatoes.
I wonder when I will be able to grow as much tomatoes like the ones sold at the market here and in the same manner that I grow other crops in large quantity
Hopefully I will be able to grow some tomatoes and vegetables again soon as the rains come to an end, and with close monitoring I can keep away the chickens rather than fight a neighbor over this. Such is usually the situation when you don't live on your own property that you can manage alone. Things like this happen when you live with neighbors who want to follow a different activity from yours. I have a garden, and they keep some animals that love to destroy my garden veggies. Even though it's not fair to me, I just have to make things work for myself. My onions and tomatoes are all gone, and I have to go over the process of seeking more seeds to replant them since I totally enjoy the pleasure of getting these veggies from the garden for food, especially the spring onions.
