Breed

Whenever there was sun my father would think of growing seasonal vegetables. Sweet potato was our favourite. He is the kind of person who set about his tasks single mindedly, be it hauling blocks of solid wood or farrowing mounds of copper red earth. He was a tall man, often seen in a whimsical topsy turvy style hat which was sometimes covered in a motley collection of chicken feathers. I loved sitting on our sunny porch watching cattle egrets circling like paper handkerchiefs in search of worms in freshly ploughed field.

The house sat on a hill, an hour north-east of Nairobi. The main artery was Tikka Road. It encompassed an acre and a half devoted to indigenous vegetables, including Cowpea (Vigna Unguiculata), Nightshade (Solanum Scabrum), Amaranth (Amaranthus Blitum), Spiderplant (Cleome Gynandra), Jute Mallow (Corchorus Olitorius), eru (Gnetum Africanum), Bitter Leaf (Vernonia Amygdalina), Sweet potato (Ipomoea Batatas) and lastly but not least Maize, (known in many english speaking countries as Corn). We have one cow and 10 or so chickens.

I lived here with my mother, father, sister, two brothers and our dachshund Jap. At weekends the whole family helped planting, mulching, weeding and repairs. Dusk was the best time when we screamed and played underneath the lilac sky just before a quick bath and supper.

My father hoed the weeds on our beds of greens and gently removed the worms from ears of corn. Weeding is something I saw him and my mother do often. Had my father known about the book 'The One-Straw Revolution' perhaps he would have stopped weeding. Masanobu Fukuoka through three decades developed a system of farming free of weeds, tilling and fertilizing. Fukuoka believed white clover was the best for all natural no-till rotation of crops. But I guess he would have said, "I can experiment on my own farm and not his", he is that kind of a man.

Just before I left for college one morning my brothers found a snake, a common house snake > Lamprophis, a genus of colubrid snakes. My father killed it with a stick and cut off his head and wrapped the body in a cloth. Later the snake was skinned and I often wonder if he ever cured the snake skin with the hope of making it into a belt!

— Rashmi Kaleka, 2012