Gardening III - Dirt

Today I decided to get to work on putting my seeds in my pots.

The only trouble is that, like pots, good soil is also hard to come by. Remember that it's dry season, too, so the topsoil is mostly just dust. I mentioned the issue to David, and he said to leave it to him. David is what he calls a bakauye, a villager. His mother farms in the village, and David grew up raising pigeons. So he knows about growing things--plant and animal alike. And he's not afraid of hard work and getting dirty!

We got the wheelbarrow and a shovel, and I followed him over to our neighbours' house. These neighbours--a senior resident and his family--are the keepers of Chickenville. David asked the only person home (the doctor's in-law) if we could have some of their chicken droppings for our garden. Sure, the man said. So David and I crossed the yard and entered Chickenville. While David shoveled up some droppings into the wheelbarrow, Timothy and I peeked into the chicken coops made of tin sheets and chickenwire. There were three different coops. One had a light bulb, and that was full of little chicklings--not actual tiny baby chicks, but definitely young chickens. The second coop had brown and white chickens together, and the third divided the white chickens from the brown ones. I have no idea why, not being a chicken expert myself. But we said hello to the birds, causing quite a ruckus. It smelled bad, too. Whooee! That's the smell that sometimes wafts into our bedroom at night. Lovely aroma. When David had gotten enough droppings, we headed back to our house. David dug a hole in the yard and shoveled the droppings into it to keep them from scattering.

The next step was finding soil good enough for planting. As I said, all the topsoil is dust, so David had to use a hoe and dig deeper to find better dirt. It took a lot of work, since the ground is so firm and dry, but eventually, he got enough for all four pots. In two, he put sand on the bottom, but the other two just had soil all the way down to the bottom. On the top of all four, he shoveled some chicken droppings.

"Now how do I plant the seeds?" I asked him. He said to wait, to put water on the dirt tonight, and then to plant tomorrow. So I doused the dirt in the pots with water. I tried to saturate the soil, but who knows if I succeeded? (I was a little nervous about dipping my hands into chicken droppings to check the moisture.) So the pots are sitting outside, full of [wet, I hope] dirt. And tomorrow we plant!