Pa Francis is tarrying a while and at Hope Sakuma's weekly team meet gets to know the Hope Sakuma farmers, hears of their experiences, shows them an experiment to test for bad seed before capturing what the farmers have learnt. Fatmatu tells Francis she grew pepper on her own farm - three bushel but there was too much rain and she got very upset that she had to root them up and sell spoiled crops to pay her children’s school fees.
Pa Francis shows everyone an experiment to test seed viability using cucumber seeds where not all are good and some are light. Yussef explains his agriculture understanding from the week how to select good and bad seed using the experiment and the bad seed floats. And tells of how to plant rice seed and the importance of the essential time to transplant in the cropping cycle. Issa tells how he’s learnt how to nurse rice seed and by soaking the seed and pulling the bad means more good seed and a shorter germination period and we can use the same method for testing pepper seed. Rounding off the meet a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday to Pa Francis!
After the team meet our Ladies and gentlemen put the theory learnt with Pa Francis into practice planting 1022 cucumber seeds into carefully prepared holes brimful with our Azolla bokashi on Hope Sakuma's newly constructed precision vegetable beds. As well as harvesting early, the waste from these 40-day cucumbers is rich in phosphorous and even richer in potassium and will be a great addition to our #Azolla biochar bokashi fertilizer.
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