Greetings fellow Gardeners!
You are welcome to my blog. Again with on @gardenhive monthly prompts, I want to share with you my Creative garden on one of the prompts as we are invited to participate. For my friends who misses out of this great prompts you can check out the link here
My first failure vegetable garden which nearly drove me to poison myself is when I entered into sweet pepper production. In fact it happened to be my first time of growing sweet pepper, even though I was successfully growing other vegetables crops. But due to advice from friends I said let me try this sweet pepper 🫑🌶️ production which is booming at good market price. My conscience was rather good but my approach was very poor and timely out. Well, I think it was good to not stick on one vegetable crop production due to erratic weather conditions which may sometime fail. Another thing is the taste of consumers and the season of production. So, there is many things that go on into gardening. I always say that gardening or farming is a process and timely planning if a Gardener wants to be successful. One needs to be strategically plan well.
As a Novice in Sweet pepper production what do you think I should first and foremost do? Let's consider that I'm naive in driving and I was given a car to drive. I must first of all learn how to drive at home or a park where no pedestrians pass or is free from children and animals crossing. Upon knowing all the techniques, then I can gradually learn how to drive on the road to familiarize with the road signs. Obviously this is one thing that I missed out in my first time of entering into sweet pepper production. We should note that gardening is a business whether we grow to supplement our families or grow for sales for income. Hence the need for appropriate planning in order to be successful. I didn't get proper coaching on the field. Even how the nursery is nurtured, how the various cultural practices are done differently from other vegetables and boom I started straight away!!
My sweet in poor growth; wilting and being attack by diseases
Gardening isn't always about the large sizes that give higher yield, but how you're able to maintain the farm to perfection, in terms of properly carrying out the cultural practices, protecting the vegetables on the field and given proper treatment. But in my case, I prepared a large area, ploughed and harrowed thinking that I was doing it be in order to harvest abundance yield. Large farming means higher cost of inputs: pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals to boost production. At the end I locked up on the way and was not having enough money to carry out other field operations. That even brought my downfall. Because if money was there to continue, I don't think I would had failed woefully.
Timely planting is golden! At the time of tilling the field for cultivation, the natural rain was on the verge of stopping. The place was slightly on gradient when you check the orientation of the land. The river which I over-relied was by then pressurized by other co-farmers who were also working around. So, there was shortage of irrigation supplying to my sweet pepper. The vegetables began to wilt. In the tropics where irrigation system is difficult, the natural rain really support in many ways, especially along side when it even break for a week. If you have little irrigation system put in place to supplement the natural rain it does in many ways. When the flowers began to shoot, the rainfall being to subside. I applied the second of options of laying my pipes to the river and tap it to supply to my Sweet pepper garden. At the fruiting stage, the rain stopped. I began to see the leaves curling and the fruits shrinking. At that point, a lot of diseases invaded on the sweet pepper. I couldn't even harvest one sack of the green pepper. All the money and resources I used as farm inputs got lost in that farm.
My other successful gardening I have shared sometime ago
Well, I took it as part of business risks and uncertainties. In every business we anticipate one thing to happen, success or failure. Failure doesn't mean the whole gardening career has ended, but it rather strengthens us and help us to plan well in our next farming. I needed to go to the drawing board analyse what went wrong and put things in order. Since this great failure, I haven't fail woefully in my gardening career.
I tag @nikv and @owasco to join me.
