Zimbabwe Absurdity

We used to find these cape gooseberries (Physalis peruviana) growing all over the forest where I grew up. They don’t orginate here but seem to grow very well just about anywhere. I used to hate the gooseberry jam we got at bording school, it was always very runny and messy! This fruit was from a bush at the corner of the house. It is unusual to find an intact fruit inside the “cage” of the sepals that have partially disintigrated though they do have a very long shelf life.

Mr M has been a good customer over the years – not a very big one but reliable on ordering, payment and collection. This year he has stumbled badly though and we eventually had to throw away his order of 12,000 cabbage seedlings. They had been in the nursery more than 2 months after the due collection and I’d lost any profit on them and they were hopelessly over-mature. True to form he said he was always coming “this week” to collect but he never came.

Yesterday he arrived to see if he could get us to sow another order. He told me that the rains had been so heavy that he could not get into his lands to plant. I told him that when he paid for the non-collected order I’d sow his next one. He asked me if I could not halve the charge to him! I commented that I was not responsible for the rains and we’d upheld our side of the contract. Perhaps he was thinking that I would be happier to get something for my loss rather than nothing and I would be very unlikely to call in the debt collectors. He was right on the latter – I have way to many bad debtors on my books! I should explain that we do tend to try and keep our customers as we are in a competitive market and there is certainly no queue of prospective clients at the gate! He certainly piled on the pressure about how hard things were but I reminded him that when things were good no farmer ever offered to share his good fortune with me – farming is a high risk business with proportional rewards and potential loss. I am in a more low risk business – we don’t charge according to the market forces but I don’t make or hopefully lose as much as he could either.

He went away disappointed that I would not budge. I did tell the senior foreman later that if he phoned to ask if we’d sowed his next order to say that when he gave us a deposit we’d do so but nothing would leave the nursery until his account was up to date. He was right up to a point, I did want to get SOMETHING for the lost seedlings!

Gail remarked that she’d just been caught by the traffic cops speeding in a 60km/h zone but as it was a spot fine and she didn’t have any money smaller than $50 and the cops didn’t have change she was let off. She was lucky; they could have told her to go and pay at the local police station. My senior foreman commented that the traffic police had been told that they had to take in $3000 a day in fines.

They certainly are out in force but they do tend to hang out in the same spots every time. I wonder what they will do if the general public become wise enough that they no longer take in the required amount?

The power went off in a storm last night. It was probably a tree falling on the lines. Getting to work this morning the foreman told me that the backup diesel engine was not starting from 2 weeks ago. Apparently nobody had told him until today. We have another smaller backup diesel pump and that was pressed into service whilst I tackled the bigger one. It appears to be a fuel problem but I could not solve it so went off to find some 110mm PVC piping to replace another section of pipe that is perpetually splitting, probably due to the excessively high pressure from the over-sized electric pump. We did have a pressure reducer but I can no longer find a reducer to give us the 2 bars necessary to run the various sprinklers. I can find one that reduces to 1.1 bars but that is insufficient. Amazingly I found the pipes and fittings at an outlet in Borrowdale that curiously advertises itself with a pneumatic chested young lass in a very small bikini “For the best after sales service and much more!”. I guess sex sells. I am almost certain I could have sourced the pipes and fittings for far less in the industrial sites but that was a good hour round trip so I paid over the top. The power was still not on when I got back to the nursery and as filling the emergency tanks was a priority, fixing the leaking pipe will have to wait until tomorrow.

I had an American guest recently. When I told her how much my staff were paid I detected a faintly accusing air of exploitation. I explained that our productivity was nothing like that in the USA but it was only earlier this week that I could quantify it.

On Wednesday we started packing sweet potato cuttings that we’d taken into boxes of 200 cuttings each for an NGO. The total requirement was 227,000 which I knew would take 2 days. At the end of Wednesday only 84,000 had been packed. So yesterday I told the foreman supervising this that the women could go when they’d finished and they would still be paid a full day’s wage. The balance of 143,000 cuttings was packed by 14h30!

I was in my local service provider’s outlet at the Borrowdale Village shopping complex yesterday to register my cell phone lines. I didn’t really want to do it but I’d been threatened with closure if I didn’t do it by the end of February. It also meant that I could have the dubious priveledge of being able to access the GPRS facility and use the phone to browse the web.

A women ahead of me had asked the obvious question; why do we have to do this? The sales lady trotted out the standard answer – mainly security and various other reasons that I did not catch. When I pointed out that when I went to the UK last year I bought a SIM card at Gatwick airport from a vending machine without producing any form of identification and that if anywhere should have security issues with cell phones it should be the UK she didn’t have an answer. So I just have to wonder who would be interested in my personal details (ID number, residential address, full name) and what phone numbers I own.

This apparently a la Nina year which should mean at least average rainfall for us. As I speak we are at less than half of where we should be for an average year and heading for even less rain than last year which was very dry. I took this photo early this morning. Development like this usually indicates a big storm later. We shall see.