The Fascinating World of Ornamental Maize Genetics

1 05 2026
A wheelbarrow of ornamental maize – a lot of genetics happened in there!

Rob Jarvis, then the manager of ART farm, gave me some cobs of ornamental maize (sometimes known as Indian corn to the Americans) some years ago. I was fascinated by all the colours and saw photographic potential. I grew a small plot of them in our garden two years ago and got the photos I wanted. The cobs were harvested, seeds sorted by colour and stored in an airtight container. There must have been weevils on the seed because they quickly got stuck into the seed. A spell in the freezer sorted them out and left the seed none the worse for wear and another plot was planted this year. The seeds were planted in rows of the same colour for what is called a “look see” experiment i.e. to see if a properly designed experiment is warranted. I have not the space for an experiment of this magnitude but was curious to see what would transpire.

Initially I was hoping to run a comparative taste test of the immature cobs but I soon realized that this would not be feasible due to the lack of uniformity in their maturity. Sorting them by colour whilst on the plant was also a non-starter. So I settled for harvesting at near full maturity before the rats caused too much damage and seeing what colour patterns I could identify.

I am no geneticist and my semester’s course at university on fundamental genetics was a very long time ago so I will share my observations and musings. After all, Barbara McClintock, who spent a lifetime studying the genetics of maize kernel colours and won numerous awards culminating in a Nobel Prize, ascertained that maize genetics is vastly complicated.

Some nomenclature:
tassel – the male flower on top of the plant that sheds the pollen. Each pollen granule carries a single set of chromosomes that must combine with a single set of chromosomes carried by the ovule which will result in a kernel/seed developing.
silk – the structures in the ear (female) that will collect pollen from the tassel and cause a seed/kernel to develop. There is one per ovule.
cob/ear – the female flower that bears the seeds/kernels
gene – a gene is a section of DNA that contains a specific instruction for an organism. This instruction provides information about it will develop, function or grow.
recessive gene – a recessive gene requires 2 copies to be present in order to be expressed. If a recessive gene is inherited alongside a dominant gene, the recessive gene will be ‘masked’, but if it is inherited with another recessive copy, it will be expressed. e.g. A blue eyed person must have 2 blue genes present (one from each parent).
dominant gene – if a gene is dominant, there only has to be one copy present in the pair for it to be expressed e.g. if a brown eyed human passes on a brown eye gene to a child it will override any blue eye gene present and the child will have brown eyes.
monoecious – only one plant is necessary to set seed/fruit as in maize – a plant carries both male and female flowers. They can self-pollinate or cross-pollinate with another plant.
imperfect flowers – as in maize which has both male and female flowers (separate) that need to pollinate.
perfect flowers – have both male and female reproductive structures in one flower.

Bedtime reading – to understand the biology of maize and some fundamental genomics

Plants usually yield pairs of cobs, one larger than the other. These cobs are all pairs from single plants.

Commercial maize plants are much more uniform in their yields for obvious reasons and inevitably bear two cobs. Sometimes there are three but the third is too small to be significant. In this trial most plants did not even produce two cobs but where they did there were interesting characteristics. Colours from any pair of cobs from a plant were very similar, even so far as distribution on the cob – see the pair of cobs in the bottom right row above that have mainly yellow and white seeds at their tips. This may even have extended to the number of seeds set (top left) but could just mean that the silks that weren’t pollinated due to mistiming with pollen shedding. Most cobs were not reasonably full i.e. had few seeds to the end of the cob. Commercially produced maize looks more like the cobs on the bottom right pair.

To me this suggests that somehow the colours of the cobs on a single plant can be linked. Having searched the internet this is suggested as being indicative of plants self-pollinating i.e. the cob is pollinated by the tassel on the same plant. So far as I have observed silks don’t emerge at the same time so self-pollination is unlikely to be the cause.

Most seed colours sown did not yield cobs of uniform colour. Is this due to the complex nature of maize genetics or something more prosaic such as cross-pollination with plants grown from other coloured seed?
Cobs from white seeds were predominately white and yellow.

Interestingly, commercial maize is either yellow or white. In this part of the world white maize is favoured for human consumption and yellow for livestock. Yellow maize has higher carotenoid content which gives it the yellow colour and higher vitamin A precursor (beta carotene) than white and it causes yellower eggs and poultry skin. I think yellow has more flavour than the white which is often consumed here in the refined form as a staple carbohydrate. Corn on the cob is a popular snack in this part of the world and is sold by the roadside in the early summer. This often comes from illegal plantations in the areas close to streams in the suburbs and vacant plots.

Cobs sown from grey seed yielded predominately grey seed and, with one exception, no red

Does this imply that plants grown from grey seed are more homogenous than others or that they are more likely to self-pollinate or that the grey gene is dominant over other colours? This was also observed in cobs sown from red seed – there were a large number of red kernel cobs which were often entirely shades of red (as in the top right pair in the top picture). To me this suggests that the red gene is dominant.

Other peole have milled the coloured maize and eaten it. While most commented that it was tasty, the thicker seed coat (pericarp) than commercial maize make it a niche crop and it will mostly remain what it is – ornamental.

I have yet to decide what to do with the wheelbarrow of cobs that were harvested. I don’t have the means to mill the kernels and try a few internet recipes. It was an interesting little experiment but that’s about it and they will likely be consigned to the compost heap. Or just maybe I’ll try sowing a single coloured seed, say red, and see what happens…


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The last day of 65

16 11 2025
13 and a bit hours to go

The watch has seen better days – it’s a lot like me in that respect. I don’t usually wear it these days. As a time piece I use my cell phone which is a bit irritating though not as bad as the watch. It swings down to the outside of my arm so I have to use my right hand to rotate it back so that I can see the time. Added to that is the need for my right hand to hold onto my walking stick – it’s easier to use the cellphone. I am wearing the watch today for nostalgic reasons – not to remind me that tomorrow I’ll be 66. I’m not looking forward to it.

Most people in the civilized world retire at the end of 65. Some are forced to, like my old boss who now lives in Australia. He’s lucky in that his wife has a successful psychology business so he’s doing the bookkeeping and is busy. My brother chose to retire at 70 from being a truck driver in the UK. Apparently he’s busier than ever though is vague on what “busy” entails. There seem to be a lot more photos on our family WhatsApp group (they are definitely improving) and we get rainfall figures to nearest 10th of a millimetre thanks to a new weather system he’s installed at his house. I don’t know anyone in Zimbabwe who’s retired at 65. I won’t be.

I took the decision earlier in the week to tell my staff that they were on notice that I would be closing my seedling company at the end of the year. It’s been losing money for quite some time now but it had finally got to the stage where I couldn’t pretend to myself that somehow it would keep going and I could stay in my comfort zone. The bank account is dangerously low, in no small part to an unwise decision to purchase a container of the coir pith that we use as a growing medium, again based on the misguided belief that somehow we could keep going for another year.

When making the announcement to the labour force my senior foreman reminded me that there were only six weeks to the end of the year and I needed to give three months notice. I told the labour that they would get paid everything owed to them but given the precarious state of the company’s finances they would just have to wait until I could sell off the coir pith and get outstanding debtor’s payments in. They were uncomfortable with the idea so I suggested we get the National Employment Council (NEC) representative, who mediates in employment issues, in to discuss the issue.

On Thursday the NEC lady arrived to talk to the labour force at exactly noon. In a previous discussion she’d advised me that she would try to get the staff to agree to a mutual settlement based on the fact that they’d been paid well over the required legal minimum wage and we’d all benefit. Not surprisingly they stuck to their guns and said they wanted the full payout.

Way back in 2005 when a stamp could be worth $100,00…

Laying off staff in Zimbabwe is not a cheap exercise, especially if they’ve been employed for a long time as have mine. Fortunately I’d paid them off in 2004 when the Zimbabwe dollar was in meltdown and they were signed back on as contract workers for a further three years before becoming permanent employees again. This meant that the loss of employment compensation, one month’s salary per year of employment, would “only” be calculated for 18 years. Add the required gratuity, a more complex but less expensive (for me) calculation, and the amount per person would come to over US$3,000.

I told the NEC rep that there was simply no way that I could pay the approximately US$36,000 at the end of the year on top of the required three months salary per person. She emphasized that it was a legal requirement. I explained that even if I could sell off the meagre company assets it would not cover the bill and could anyway not be done in the time frame. We were at an impasse. She said she’d talk to her boss.

The next morning I came to a decision: as I was going to have to pay an extra six weeks wages at the end of the year I might as well close the company at the end of February ’26 and at least get some work out of the labour force. It would also buy me time to sell off the coir import (due to arrive in about two week’s time) and get in outstanding debts. The extra time is unlikely to make any money for the company given the record of the past few years but at least I could breathe a little easier.

So in the time left before I turn 66 I’m going to try and forget the stresses of closing down a business that I’ve run for 26 years, mostly successfully, and do things that I enjoy.

If the weather holds, it’s supposed to rain this afternoon but doesn’t look like it will happen, I’ll go to the local polo grounds to fly my FPV (first person view) drone. I’m not much good but it’s fun flying through the car park surrounded by trees. There will be other model plane fliers there if I need help. Then I’ll head back home for a late tea and a supper of salmon (yes, just about anything is available for a price in Zimbabwe).

Tomorrow morning we’ll be up at 10 to five to go walk the dogs and I will be 66.


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Spring

8 09 2025
A glowing ember sunset – thanks to all the smoke.

What is spring?

Smoke. Everywhere smoke from incessant bush fires started to clear lands or smoke out bees or just plain carelessness. Every year Zimbabwe burns as does the rest of southern Africa – 760,000 sq. km in 2023.

Glowing ember sunsets and reluctant red sunrises. The latter so dull that one can, with binoculars, safely see the sunspots. Lots of photo opportunities to be had.

Dust. Everywhere dust. A patina of dust on my desk every morning. The dashboard of my truck covered in dust. Motes of dust in my home office – drifting lazily down in an afternoon sunbeam.

Wind. September is the month of wind. Driving leaves, bending trees and driving the dust. Leaves and ash swirling on the garage floor. When I sailed we always used to look forward to September for the excitement of the gusty weather. In my paragliding days we’d think of other things to do though the calmer days gave good thermic conditions.

Colours. The blazing colours of the new growth on the musasa (Brachystegia speciformis) trees. If one is lucky and catches a day of relatively little smoke it is possible to photo the spectacle. I never have. One has to drive up to the Eastern Districts to get the best displays.

Our Dendrobium orchid has been particularly impressive this year.

Cool nights and warm days. Yesterday morning on ART farm it was 5°C at 6 o’clock and 29°C by midday. My fleece jacket has been washed and hung up in the cupboard until April. I am still sleeping in the bed but October will just be hot and I’ll sleep on top.

New growth. Our roses are a blaze of colour (admittedly we have been getting professional help). Everything is growing fast in the nursery. A customer for whom we are growing cherry peppers commented that he’d never seen such good seedlings. I’ll take the credit…

Our roses are looking good this spring. Marianne has commented that we need a few more yellow ones.

Bees. It’s bee swarming season. A swarm has been in one of the catch boxes hanging under the eves of the second garage for a few weeks now. It will be collected by the Mike the bee man (he runs a commercial pollination service) and we’ll be given another jar of honey that we don’t eat. In the meantime they’ll forage in the garden and elsewhere before being taken off to work. We don’t mind being a bit of a bee holiday camp.

The Erythrina lysistemon (coral tree) trees has showy flowers too. This one was dripping nectar – literally!

Dry. Of course it’s dry and it will be desperately dry by the time the rains arrive in November. Our lawn is crisp. The flowers and vegetables get water but there isn’t enough for the lawn so it just has to wait. It will green-up soon enough when the rains start. It will get a little fertilizer help too and then it will need mowing weekly.

Then it will be summer.


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Categories : Environment, flowers, horticulture, nature, photography, weather

To buy or not

17 08 2025
A healthy gum tree seedling

We grow our seedlings in compartmentalized expanded polystyrene trays. The cells are filled with a growing medium, in this case coir pith, and a seed is placed in each cell and grown out to maturity. This can take as little as four weeks in summer for tomato seed or up to four months in the case of gum tree seedlings as seen above. A seedling is deemed mature when it can be pulled from the cell and the roots hold the medium in a plug which will remain intact until it can be planted into the field. It also needs to be tall enough to be planted easily and not so tall that the leaf area will tax the roots ability to take up enough water in what, for the plant, is a stressful transition. There are other criteria that need to be met such as hardness of the leaves but that’s getting boring.

Being made of polystyrene the trays are light and rigid, which makes them easy to handle. It also makes it easy for the plant to grow its roots into the polystyrene which makes the seedling difficult to pull out of the tray. New trays have a smooth surface which is difficult for the roots to penetrate but as the trays age their surface becomes pitted and the plants’ roots can penetrate the polystyrene. To reduce this effect we dip the trays in a solution of copper oxychloride and water soluble glue. This creates a localized toxicity in the tips of the roots which stops them growing into the polystyrene and serves to sterilize the tray. Mostly it’s effective but as the tray ages and the surface becomes rough the roots grow into it anyway. The buildup of copper over many uses of the tray also causes a more general toxicity in the plant which can manifest itself as leaf discolouration and poor growth.

This general toxicity is most evident in gum seedlings as discoloured leaves and poor tip growth though in other seedlings it manifests as a general lack of vigour. I have noticed this for some years and when new trays are bought there was a noticeable “new tray effect” which I couldn’t really nail down to anything specific.

The coir pith we use is a by-product of the coir industry in India and other Asian countries. It’s the cork material that’s left over when the fiber has been extracted for ropes and mats. It has no nutrients in it so all must be added in the form of various chemical fertilizers. Organic we are not. This means that there’s little space for error and small changes in the formula can have major effects. Fortunately most of the work in this type of horticulture has been done long ago, albeit on other media, so it’s not as hit-and-miss as it may sound. Unfortunately I have a tendency to fiddle to try and get just that little bit of extra performance out of the system.

So when the gum seedlings started to become discoloured some years ago I put it down to something I’d done to the fertilizer formula. Thinking that it was a phosphate toxicity I designed a simple experiment. I bought several new trays, made sure they weren’t dipped in copper, then mixed differing quantities of single superphosphate that we normally use into the coir pith and grew out the gum seedlings. They were all good seedlings including those that should have had toxicity symptoms and those that had no single superphosphate added at all. It was that “new tray effect” and I knew it had to be the copper dip.

In Zimbabwe trash recycling is not a vibrant industry. There is a large municipal dump that I drive past on the way to work with a large warehouse building on it with “RECYCLING PLANT” painted on the front. Whether any recycling actually happens there is unknown. It’s part owned by one of the President’s sons but that’s a topic for another blog post. The old polystyrene trays we use end up on this dump site and add to the general pollution. It bothers me but the alternative is to import plastic trays from South Africa and they are very expensive and would likely not be recycled either. So I buy more of the local trays when I have to.

The gum seedling in the above photo is a good one. Though still young it has good root development, good leaf colour and good growth. It’s a product of a new tray – part of a batch that I bought earlier this year to replace older trays that were causing the copper toxicity symptoms. I have been seeing a general malaise in the tomato seedlings we are growing in old trays and should really replace them too. But there’s a problem.

I lease part of a property that supports my landlady’s ornamental nursery, another tenant’s rose nursery and the landlady’s son’s container rental business. The remainder of the property, some 10ha, is not utilized largely because we are in a bad area for sub-surface water and the three boreholes would not support irrigated cropping of any sort.

The 400ha of land on the boundary of “our” land is owned by a politically connected person whom I will call G. She acquired the land some time ago and set about building a wall around it. This is not just any wall – 3m high it has, a reinforced concrete core, a course of bricks on either side, pillars every 4m and topped with cornicing. It’s 9km long (measured on Google Earth) and is estimated to have cost US$500 – US$600 per metre. At a minimum $45 million G has clout and access to capital. So it was not without concern that we waited to see if the wall would include “our” property. It stopped either side.

My landlady’s son decided that the best way to make the property less attractive to acquisition by G and her ilk would be to develop it. Half the property was duly sold to a development company for construction of high density housing on condition that they changed the title deed to “development” rather than “agricultural” which is less attractive to the likes of G.

This development means that I will lose about a third of my current capacity and access to two boreholes that provide the bulk of my water. Remaining viable in a business that relies on large turnover on low value items/seedlings is going to be a challenge. So do I invest in new trays?

I was initially told that I would have about two years use out of the current two boreholes and that was six months ago. My landlady has had another two drilled on the remaining property but they are not very prolific. Uncertain times but to throw in the towel now on the premise that my business will fail would be defeatist. Tomorrow I will place an order for 2,000 new trays.


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Criminal ethics

30 05 2025

“Boss, come and have a look at this” Mapeno, the gardener exclaimed, clearly excited. He held up two expensive day packs. “Where did you find them?” I responded. “Over here right by the gate” came the reply. “Are you sure they don’t belong to the builders?” I asked. “No, I already checked with them”. I wasn’t surprised, they didn’t look like the sort of day packs a Zimbabwean builder could afford.

I was just about to go to work so he brought them over to my truck and we started to go through them. Diaries with copious notes on what looked like engineering projects, a wallet with South African gun licences, credit cards and no cash. Two South African passports (one full) in one pack in the name of a male and another in the second pack with a woman’s name and photo. This was obviously stolen property but why had it come over the wall into our property? And how was I going to contact the owners?

Fortunately the diaries had contact phone numbers in them albeit different ones. I tried both – one did nothing and the other was unreachable. Maybe I could contact the South African Embassy and give them the passports and then the owners would likely go there and then be able to contact me. I was on the way to work when I realized that WhatsApp works everywhere irrespective of phone number so I entered the unreachable number and called. It was quickly answered. “Is this Mr M and are you missing a couple of day packs?” I said. “Yes we are – did you find any passports?”. I answered that we’d found three and asked what they’d lost. A laptop and US$2,000 was the response. “It was just stuff, the passports are the most important things, at least we can get back home tomorrow” he added.

They had stopped for breakfast at a café at a local shopping centre and left the laptop and day packs on the back seat of the pickup in plain view. As they sat down to breakfast thieves smashed the back window, grabbed the packs and computer and got away in a waiting car.

“While this is not Jo’burg you still have to switch on. Thieves hang out in car parks just waiting for that sort of opportunity” I commented.

“Yes, we know that now” he replied. “Please send me your address so that I can come and pick up our stuff”.

I wasn’t there when they arrived but our maid phoned me to confirm who they were and wrote down the registration number of their pickup truck. I did wonder why the thieves bothered to “return” the day packs and their contents – a distinctly curious form of criminal ethics. If I were they I’d have kept the rather smart packs and dumped the contents into the nearest ditch.

Crime in Cape Town is an altogether different league. One could easily be lulled into a false sense of security by the first world shopping centres, immaculate roads and civilised driving standards (traffic lights are actually respected) contrary to Zimbabwe. Tourism is booming – the driver we used from the airport told us that in December 2024, 1.6 million tourists came through the airport – tourists we met on Table Mountain commented on how cheap Cape Town is. People are positive about their future and investing and developing in agriculture – rare attitudes in Zimbabwe.

Visiting Oaklands Estate near Wellington in the Western Cape was a case in point. David, a friend of my cousin, bought the abandoned racehorse stud in 2009 before occupying it in 2011. The derelict buildings have been renovated into tourist accommodation and the old stables will once again house a stud. Hillsides are being planted to proteas for their flowers for export. Other stables have been converted into a conference centre and come the tourist season the accommodation is full. I asked David if his positive outlook was down to living in the Western Cape. He answered “Pretty much. You can still avoid the corruption bullshit if you want to”. The Western Cape is relatively well run compared with the other provinces in South Africa. It is under the control of the Democratic Alliance with Alan Winde as the premier.

Oaklands Estate close to Wellington in the Western Cape. Who could not be optimistic in this environment?

While Oaklands Estate is far enough out of Cape Town to not be overly attractive to criminals, the township of Guguletu is an epicentre of crime. The taxi driver was quite clear on this: “If you are a person of colour” – he tapped his own light brown skin – “or a white, you stay out of there” – he gestured to the left of the motorway. It was a maze of corrugated iron shacks, broken fencing, goats, rubbish and bizarrely – satellite dishes on nearly every dwelling I could see. We asked him about the white tourist who’d been killed there earlier in the year. “Actually there were two who went in there” he responded “but one survived”. “You see that road up there?” he gestured with his right hand to a road sweeping a curve over the motorway into the township. “There was traffic backed up on the other side of this road so both asked their traffic navigator apps for an alternative and it took them into Guguletu. One guy was robbed of his car and beaten up but got out to a hospital and survived. The other was a doctor and they shot him. Dead. You don’t mess with the gangs in there – they run the place.” I mused that they were probably not the type that would return high quality day packs over a suburban wall in the expectation that they would be returned to their owners.

We arrived at the airport and said goodbye to Mario. It was time to head back to Harare. I got chatting to the porter who was assisting us whilst Marianne filled in forms to get VAT back. I asked him where he lived. “Oh, Guguletu” he replied. When I asked him how he coped with the gangs and crime he shrugged “God looks after me”.


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Economies of scale

8 04 2025
The innards of a cheap clock mechanism. A VERY cheap one!

The clock mechanism above cost about £6 on Amazon UK. I bought several about 4 years ago and it seems that they have come to the end of their design life. That’s in contrast to the one I was given by Trevor some 15 years ago and is still going fine. He did tell me at the time that it was a good Swiss brand and just gave it to me so of course cost doesn’t come into the equation.

I have been looking on Amazon for some replacements and they all seem to be of much the same quality – cheap. In fact if I bought 30 I would pay £24. How can they possibly make them so cheaply ?Economies of scale I guess. If we look around us there are plenty of other examples. The one that immediately comes to mind are the Bic razors.

I admit to using a Bic razor once a week. On Sunday I take a step back from the tyranny of daily shaving and let my beard grow. I hate shaving. Of course as a teenager I couldn’t wait to start shaving and be a man. That all changed the first morning after being inducted into the Rhodesian army in 1978. We were made to stand to attention by our foot lockers the duty sergeant. “Shaved this morning Roberts?”, he demanded, poking his face to within a few centimetres of mine. “No sarge!” I replied. The question was repeated at the next man and the next. After a few more negatives he gave up. “Anyone who has not shaved go and do so now!” he bellowed. Most of the barrack room dashed out to the washroom, shaving kit in hand. Ever since it’s become a daily routine except for Sundays and no, there’s no truth to the common idea that the more one shaves the more one has to. I wish there were – I would apply it to my increasingly sparse head hair!

Bic has of course taken economies of scale to the limit. Razors are designed to work for two shaves, three if you can handle the pulling, then they are consigned to the bin. It would be easy enough to use harder steel that could hold an edge for longer like the old Gillette G2s of my youth but that’s no the point. You must buy more. The same with their ballpoint pens. They are so cheap that it doesn’t matter if you lose one – you’ve bought a box of them anyway. There are six fountain pens in my drawer and they all work. One was my mother’s and another I had at school nearly 50 years ago. But who uses a fountain pen now? Much as I like using them it’s easier to use a smartphone and just dictate the message. So they sit in the drawer, fond relics of an age when my right hand worked well and I won the Headmaster’s Prize for Handwriting (at junior school).

My business works on large numbers of plants, mostly seedlings, sold at a relatively small markup. Last year I sold 8,474,903 seedlings, for US$, which sounds like a lot but only gave me a profit before tax of $20,284 and there’s not a lot one can do with that in Zimbabwe’s economic climate. I have not included those sold for local currency which is too small a number to be of consequence. It doesn’t help that I’m charging the same as I was 10 years ago when we last had the US$ (there has been one local currency in between) and business was much more profitable. Now there’s a lot of competition around with people who probably evade tax and use family members for unpaid labour. So I’ve had to keep my prices down. I haven’t been able to keep the nursery full and costs have risen, labour especially. I need to fill up the nursery and, like in the Bic model, make a small profit per unit but really sell lots of them. Any ideas gratefully accepted.


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Getting it done

16 07 2024

Just part of the paperwork necessary to import the coir pith essential to my business

It’s not something I look forward to but the coir pith on which my nursery depends for growing seedlings is essential for a good product. Yes, another substrate – composted pine bark – is available locally but last time I tried it some 20% of my seedlings died from the disease it carried. So about once a year I just have to grit my teeth and jump through the bureaucratic hoops. To be fair it IS becoming a bit easier as more of the government agencies involved get online and organized.

First off is the Agricultural Marketing Authority. I have no idea what they do but membership is essential and nothing else is achievable without it. Fortunately it’s doable online. Then it was on to the National Biotechnology Authority to get a permit that acknowledged the import was free of GMOs. The Indian supplier had given me a certificate stating as much and though it didn’t look very authoritative to me, it was sufficient and upon receipt of the required payment the local certificate was duly issued.

I have done the Ministry of Agriculture for the importation permits before and found it beyond tedious so sent Fabian, one of my senior staff, down there with some smaller US dollar note and instructions to “do whatever it takes” to get the first certificate. It cost him five dollars to put in the application whilst the official concerned was “on lunch break” and then all I could do was wait.

Fortunately the container was being delayed en route from Sri Lanka. I have no idea why it had to go via Colombo but I guess getting a full cargo of containers to warrant a ship going into the port of Beira in Mozambique takes some organizing. That was just as well as the first permit took two weeks, the date stamp indicated it had been sitting on an office desk for one of those weeks, and the second permit took another 10 days. That also required a sweetener of a few dollars.

By this stage I’d already paid the port and transport fees, all US dollars, and the race was on to get the local documentation to the border post near Mutare in the east of Zimbabwe before the truck from Beira got there. If we were late demurrage would be charged and I’d experienced that to my cost before. Fortunately my local shipping agent seems to know a lot of people and he got the money there just in time.

Then it was just a case of waiting for the truck to arrive and organizing a forklift to offload the pallets. It was three weeks late and in the interim I’d had to buy two pallets from another local supplier who’d marked up his prices 100% (he vehemently denied this even when I told him I new what it cost) but at least it’s over for about another year.

Now that the final accounts are in I can see that the costs were close to last year. The total for 24 tonnes of coir was US$19,650 which works out to 81.8c per kg. For some strange reason my bank needed to pay for the coir in Euros, I have no idea why but I do know that payment had to go through a South African bank. The rest was all payable in US dollars, none of the Zimbabwean kind thank you very much.

Yes, Zimbabwe is still trying to get its own currency up and running. It’s called the ZiG which is not the name of a cartoon character’s best buddy but is short for “Zimbabwe Gold”. It’s apparently linked to gold bullion of which the Reserve Bank is holding. Nobody is actually sure if this is the case but the official rate is around 13.8 to the US dollar.

When the ZiG was first introduced the obvious happened; currency traders spotted a good thing and the rate soon began to run. The government got tough and threatened a US$10,000 fine for any company or person not using the official rate – by law you have to accept either the ZiG or the US dollar if that’s how a customer wants to pay, the one exception being fuel traders who are not obliged to accept ZiG. Fortunately for my business most customers are uninterested in using local currency and choose to pay in US dollars, usually using cash. The local currency received has been entirely electronic – I’m not sure if this is by design – and I have yet to see any local notes. It is certainly not difficult to get US dollar notes out of my local bank and even small denominations are often brand new and in their 100 notes wrappers.

The country’s roads are in a disastrous state at the moment, bearing witness to years of neglect, but there’s a regional conference of the SADC (Southern African Development Community) in August so there’s been an orgy of road repair in Harare during the last few months. Construction teams have been called back to Harare from the outlying projects to concentrate on the local roads. Chaos has ensued as roads are closed and heavy traffic routed through the suburbs.

Some actions are unsurprising, others beggar belief. People living along the main route to the new Chinese-built parliament house where it’s all going to happen have been offered free water, delivered by tanker, to help make their gardens look pretty for visiting dignitaries.

The new dual carriageway to the parliament is being lined with kerb stones that make sure that there is nowhere to pull off the road if one has a breakdown. A local farmer, who lives on the route, pointed this out to one of the construction teams and was assured that it was a temporary arrangement and all the kerb stones would be removed after the conference. We’ll see.

A new bridge has gone in over a small river. They haven’t finished casting all the concrete and I’m told it takes a month to cure but the conference is in less than a month. Interesting.

An obvious question is where has the government suddenly found all the money? Are the construction companies actually being paid and what currency are they using? A friend is heavily involved in the landscaping of the new parliament and Marianne tells me she is being paid in US dollars and is doing quite well from it but rumours abound as to whether the others involved have been paid. I have heard that one company was owed some US$200 million which seems a bit much but many years ago I was told that a normal road costs US$ 1 million per kilometer to construct so perhaps it’s possible. Whatever the truth is you can bet the government will do whatever it takes to get the roads done and put up a paper-thin facade for the visiting dignitaries.

The nations hospitals would certainly like a bit of money themselves; currently several of the bigger ones are owed in excess of ZiG11 billion – a lot of money in any currency.


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Hazel

7 02 2024
Hazel

“If you come back this way, please come and stay” were Hazel’s parting words as we got into the pickup. She was clearly lonely.

Hazel has been farming by herself for the last 14 years since her husband died. It’s a dairy farm some five km south of the small farming town of Chipinge in the south-east of Zimbabwe and the warm, wet climate is ideal for growing horticultural crops such as macadamia nuts and avocados. We had driven the six hours from Harare, stopping overnight in Mutare, so that I could take part in an avocado field day on a large horticultural estate organized by my business partner. Once the field day was over, I drove back through the town to where I’d left Marianne at Hazel’s farm where we’d booked in overnight.

Hazel’s garden reflecting the lush climate

After a delicious dinner we poured more wine and got down to serious chatting. Hazel and her husband had moved onto the farm in the mid 1970s, newly married and not much to their name. They braved out the Rhodesian (as Zimbabwe was known then) bush war, surviving a rocket attack on the farmhouse. A rocket burst in the room where Hazel was sheltering and the shrapnel peppered everything around her but left her unscathed. Gradually the house grew with a young family. Hazel’s husband, “Duff”, insisted that his children learn the local Ndau language and encouraged his son to explore the local bush with his black friend Johan, who is now Hazel’s senior foreman. “They were given free reign” Hazel said “with the express understanding that whatever they shot they had to eat”.

“Duff never really told me what he did during the war years” Hazel said, “just that they made use of his knowledge of local customs and the language”. Duff had known that they were on a list of targets though, and after independence in 1980 he got a call from the local police station and was informed that they’d arrested someone who had admitted being behind the attack on Duff and Hazel’s house. Duff spoke to the captive and asked him why they were attacked and the reply was just “Hey, it was war, let’s go and have a beer together sometime”.

I asked Hazel if dairy farming was profitable. “No, not really” she replied. The area where she farms does not have a lot of surface water so irrigated pastures are not feasible which requires her to supplement grazing with stock feed which is expensive. The milk she produces goes to a nearby factory as industrial milk. The factory also tests for fat content on which the price is based and she was more than a little suspicious of price manipulation as a result.

Hazel’s farm location

Noticing that Hazel’s farm was close to a safari area and the Mozambique border I asked if she saw much game. “Yes, we are on a migration route” she replied. “Just two weeks ago a local woman was gored by a buffalo. I don’t know if she survived”. Just prior to that two lions were seen, and fearing they’d start preying on local livestock the National Parks authorities decided to have them shot. Hazel asked why they couldn’t be darted and taken back to the Save Conservancy. She was told that unfortunately once they’d learnt a route they’d continue to use it. “It was so sad, they were beautiful young males with just a beginning of a mane” she said.

The next day we left after breakfast. The town of Chipinge has little to recommend it – there are three traffic lights of which only one works and that is mostly ignored, but it did have a fuel station with a brand name we recognized so took the opportunity to fill up with diesel. Then it was onto the winding road on the escarpment that joins up with the road to Chimanimani – a village to the north – and back on the busy road to Harare. We hope Hazel will look us up on her occasional visits to Harare.

The view from the Skyline road junction on the way to Chimanimani

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The spiders are just fine – thanks

1 04 2020

The spiders are thriving – not a great photo though

The spiders are thriving in the nursery. It’s a long time since I’ve seen that many that fat. Well, I should qualify that last statement; the females are that fat, the males are as skinny as usual – probably all that escaping being eaten by the females that keeps them slender.

I am genuinely pleased to see all these spiders. It means there’s plenty for them to eat and that means our policy of using softer chemicals in the nursery is working. There have  been years in the past when the spiders never appeared (they are common golden orb spiders and harmless) which I put down to poor rains and a lack of prey. Curiously our rains have again been poor but the spiders haven’t noticed that, yet. Maybe there’s a lag phase but we’ll have to wait for this time next year to find that one out.

We are also going to have to wait a while to see how the covid-19 virus impacts us as a nation. Officially we are on a 21 day shutdown to reduce the transmission rate. It’s not likely to be that effective. On my way to work I didn’t notice much evidence of reduced activity and no police road blocks enforcing travel restrictions. It’s not a busy route at the best of times but there was still a long queue at the filling station and the usual amount of traffic up the short 4 km road past the rubbish tip which was quiet but still accepting waste removal vehicles. I was traveling legally as we are considered an essential enterprise and I needed to check up on our skeleton staff who are keeping the plants alive whilst there are no customers around.

The government did come up with a comprehensive legal document to enforce the lock-down remarkably quickly – I suspect it was largely copied from the South Africans who are enforcing their own lock-down. There’s nothing wrong with that and we do share the same type of law. Their other responses have been less well thought out.

The Zimbabwe public healthcare system is in a mess (see previous post A state of health ) with 7 known ventilators available to treat a population of some 11 million. So far as we know there’s been one fatality due to covid-19, a high profile local radio/TV presenter from a wealthy family. Relatively young at 30, Zororo Makamba was admitted to the local Wilkins infectious diseases hospital where facilities proved woefully inadequate. By the time the family had sourced their own ventilator from South Africa it was too late. Apparently he had contracted the virus on a recent trip to the USA and also had underlying health issues.

Testing kits are also inadequate. As of writing there have been 165 tests performed which accounts for the low apparent infection rate; just 5 positive so far. Strive Masiyiwa, local media mogul and sometime philanthropist, apparently took out newspaper adverts saying that his company would buy or lease ventilators from people who might have them on hand. Right, let me just go and dust off the one in the garden shed that I bought some years ago and stored for just this scenario.

While the direct health impact is still some time away the financial impact has already hit. Flower exporters have had to dump tonnes of flowers that cannot be exported due to airline shutdowns and are unlikely to be sold even if they could get them to Europe. Local vendors who rely on daily sales of produce have also been shut down. They must already be feeling hungry. We’ve had a large order of avocado trees cancelled, no doubt because the customer, who sells other fresh produce, cannot move the stock they have and cannot pay for the order. The financial cost to the country is going to be staggering. That the economy is already staggering under a burden of government incompetence and corruption will make it all the more difficult to endure.

The governor of a province to the north-west of Harare has taken matters into her own hands and is at least preparing in a way for the virus crisis. She sent out an email to local farmers for any medical supplies that included, among other things, boots, gloves, masks, body bags and quick lime. Why farmers would have body bags I cannot imagine or why they would feel any need to donate anything to a government that has done nothing to make their lives easier astounds me. I know this because a friend who farms in the area has become a de facto information hub and I’m on his emailing list. He’s also had a torrid time trying to stay on his farm and be productive whilst various fat cats try to evict him under the aegis of the previous government’s land reform programme.

While the covid-19 storm gathers the government has take the opportunity to ditch the ill fated Zimbabwe dollar. We can now legally trade in any currency we like (usually US dollars), again. The reason they gave was to mitigate the effect of the covid-19 on the economy. I think it was convenient to ditch the non-performing currency before it’s devaluation became, once again, a world recognised standard. They have stipulated that the exchange rate is fixed at 25 local dollars to the US but nobody is taking much notice of that when the parallel rate is 43:1.

On driving out of the nursery to come home I had to wait for a minibus to pass. It wasn’t supposed to be on the road during the lock-down,  that privilege belongs to the government owned ZUPCO buses which are apparently enforcing stricter hygiene standards.  I’m not sure what these standards are – it certainly won’t include social distancing given the seating arrangement. The seating philosophy on that minibus and others is pack them in, as many as possible. This has meant that I’ve decided to reduce work hours so that the majority of the labour who live within walking distance can avoid this virus highway and walk or cycle. It also means that they don’t get the transport allowance but hopefully we can do a bit to reduce the disease impact on my business.

Will we make it through the coming storm? I think so, we are semi-essential as witnessed by the rush on vegetable seedlings in the days prior to commencement of the lock-down. It is uncharted territory for us. The spiders of course will come and go as spiders do, influenced by the weather and factors other than covid-19. But for the moment they are doing just fine, thanks.

 


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Categories : Agriculture, corona virus, Economics, horticulture, News & Various

Cruise control and other stories

1 03 2019

Just plain hot

My business is in trouble. Commercial seedlings are no longer a specialized business thanks to the Tobacco Research Board. Some years ago they imported a large, new machine to mold expanded polystyrene into seedling trays. This was mainly for the tobacco industry that had to wean itself off methyl bromide that was traditionally used to sterilize seedbeds for growing tobacco seedlings.

The deadline was 2015 after which methyl bromide could only be used for very specific purposes under the Montreal Protocol. The idea behind the trays was to grow the tobacco seedlings in a medium such as composted pine bark and float the trays on shallow ponds of water with fertilizer mixed in. This is not new technology – I was involved in a project of this nature in 2000 – 2001 in Malawi. It works well and results in a much more even crop than the traditional seedbeds which can also be cleaned of weeds with another volatile chemical, ethylene dibromide or EDB.

Unfortunately most tobacco farmers found the lesser performing traditional seedbeds easier to cope with and the large machine was churning out seedling trays that had only a small market. So the TRB started promoting growing vegetable seedlings in the trays and supplied all the know-how to boot. Now there are numerous small nurseries around Harare and the market has been saturated. The quality is likely poor but the prices are low and that’s all that seems to count around Zimbabwe at the moment.

Grafted avocado seedlings are being sold at a premium in South Africa at the moment and there’s growing interest in Zimbabwe in producing anything for export. Both macadamias and avocados fit the bill and are very profitable so I had the idea last year of growing, grafting, and selling avocado seedlings which I can hopefully sell for real US dollars. Seed was duly sourced and sown and took rather a long time to germinate, likely due to the long and unseasonably cold spring (as low as 11°C in mid October which is just about unheard of). By Valentine’s Day some 2000 seedlings were big enough to graft so I decided to take the trip myself to an estate just south of the small agricultural town of Chipinge in the south-east of the country to collect the graft (scion) wood.

I left on the Saturday just after midday and got onto an unusually quiet road to the eastern city of Mutare, and engaged the cruise control. Since I bought the vehicle just over 2 years ago I have only ever used it for curiosity purposes – Zimbabwe traffic is just too erratic normally but since a fuel increase of 165% the roads have become much quieter. On the entire 2¾ hour trip I probably passed no more than 20 other vehicles. It was positively boring.

The fuel price increase was followed by street violence and protests, the army shot and beat people at random, the world tut-tutted, called for restraint and after a few weeks calm returned as the government knew it would. Now about a month later fuel is still short, the government has finally admitted that the local currency is not equal to a US dollar and has pegged it at 2.5 to the US dollar. It still cannot be bought in the banks and the street rate is 4:1.

Monday morning and the road to Chipinge from Mutare where I’d been staying with Gary and June was also very quiet. Gary told me it was largely due to the appalling state of the road further south and the weight restriction on Birchenough Bridge over the Save River. Once again it was cruise control time.

I haven’t been to Chipinge for perhaps 20 years so I was keen to see how much I remembered. The region is fertile, frost free and normally quite wet. Horticulture was certainly in evidence with large plantations of macadamias, avocados and bananas in evidence. It was all very dry and by the time I got to the estate just south of the town (though maybe it was small enough for village status) the drought was very evident.

By the time I’d got the cuttings packed in the cooler boxes it was after midday and hot. I drove back into the Save Valley and watched the temperature gauge climb. A few times it peaked at 40°C but not for long enough to get a photo.

I remember the heat of the Save Valley well from my days in the Rhodesian army in the bush war in the late 1970s. Patrols became centred around when one could take another drink and how long the water in the bottles would last. For a while we were based at a small irrigation scheme at a place called Nyanyadzi. There’s nothing to mark the spot now – it was only ever a temporary camp but on the other side of the road some 2km distant is a small group of hills that I remember vividly for the second most unpleasant event of my military stint (the most unpleasant was getting shot). I stopped, opened the driver’s window to the oven-like heat and took a photo.

There’s a story in those hills

We walked out one evening under the cover of darkness, two “sticks” of four troops, lightly armed with rifles and two machine guns and climbed onto the hill in the right of the picture. We passed the day quietly and then again, after supper of tinned rations, moved out when it was dark. Our stick descended into the valley behind where the other stick set up an ambush on a path and we climbed the hill behind to set up an observation post (O.P. in military terminology) overlooking an inhabited area. We each found somewhere we could sleep, unpacked our sleeping bags and sat around talking quietly.  Fireflies started to appear and after a short while there the most anyone had seen.

Suddenly there was a muffled “kerchooonk” explosion.

“What’s that?” I hissed to the dark shapes around me.

“That’s a mortar!” replied Dos who’d been a soldier in the Mozambican army and knew exactly what a mortar sounded like from his service in the civil war there.

“Take cover” hissed corporal Nico rather unnecessarily.

There was no cover to take – the surface was hard and stony but still we tried, scraping away the best we could, hearts pounding and counting the 20 seconds or so before the mortar bomb exploded. Mortar bombs are bad news on hard surfaces  where a half sphere of shrapnel is created (they are not very effective on soft surfaces where the explosion is directed upward) and very bad news if they hit a tree branch. A sphere of shrapnel is created and is particularly lethal. We were in dense woodland.

The mortar bomb exploded in the vicinity of where we’d spent the day. Another came out the tube, and another. We counted the seconds after each launch and flattened ourselves into the ground as best we could, desperately hoping that the bombs would fall elsewhere. Finally after it became evident that we were no longer on the top of that hill the enemy put down searching fire to draw a response from us. At one point there was a huge explosion as a recoil-less rifle was fired and then a prolonged burst of machine gun fire. Then all was quiet. Some half an hour later we heard voices as the enemy walked along a path not far from where we lay. The next day, obviously compromised, we scoured the bush for souvenirs of the attack (on top of the hill to the left in the photo) and then walked back to base. It seemed likely that the guerillas had assembled their heavy weaponry to attack our base but then chanced on an easier target – us.

I rolled up the window, put the air-conditioning on high and continued back to Mutare. To this day I can never watch a firefly without remembering that terrifying hour on a nondescript cluster of hills in the Save Valley.

Note: It is standard practice in counter insurgency (COIN) warfare never to sleep near where you’ve had your last meal for just the reason described in the story above – you may have been spotted. You always move out after last light and settle elsewhere, often in a place which you may have seen earlier which can be in an ambush position on your own trail in case you are being followed.

 


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Categories : horticulture, military, photography