The Longest Season in Zimbabwe

We keep thinking the rainy season will end, but after every sunny week, the clouds settle in for the weekend, the temperature drops, the snails and slugs take their slimy morning strolls, and tennis lessons are cancelled again.

Sometimes it can feel like fall when the sky is bright blue and there's a chill. Fall is my favorite season, but it doesn't really exist here - neither does summer, winter or spring as I know them. Mid-August to mid-October is the hottest time, but temperatures range from the mid-50s to the mid-80s, and it's dry. Can't really call that summer, can you?

Pecan tree in August

That "hot" 8 weeks directly follows winter which is confusing (mid-May to mid-August) when it can drop to freezing at night but get up to 70 in the day. Indoor heating doesn't exist here, so for me, winter is most convincingly winter. We have a fire every night in the fireplace those months - even now - then in June, we'll escape to the heat & humidity of the States in summer.

Pecan tree in March

The rainy season is the longest season, I'm just realizing. It's practically half the year here. The bush grass gets twelve-feet high, and everything grows and grows and grows. The city is transformed into a lush, damp tropics. What would normally be a summer, given the Earth's tilt, is kept cool by the rains. It never reaches 80. You start the day with a fleece robe and furry slippers. By noon, if the sun's out, you're wearing flip-flops and a cotton skirt.

Lush driveway

This is our first entire rainy season. We've been in Zimbabwe for a year now - a year, 3 months, and 2 days to be exact. On the one hand, it doesn't seem so long ago that I welcomed the new green of the rainy season. However, the prospect of having to pull more putse fly larvae out of my 4-year-old daughter's leg has reduced my tolerance of the damp to nil. The rain may now cease.

On antibiotics. Feeling fine. Leg looking better.
Doctor says there may be 9 more to come out. :(
They are currently being smothered to death with an ointment and will be coming to the surface in the next day or so. We'll see.

We will be buying a clothes dryer for those of you reconsidering your trip here based on this latest story of an African nuisance (which lays its eggs in damp clothes drying on the line - thus the need to iron everything). 

Side note: does anyone remember how blond Eliza's hair used to be? I keep telling David that Miles used to be blond when he was a baby, and that upon returning to the States everyone commented on how dark his hair became. (Can someone back me up?)

My New Nikon D90

Winter Garden

The Garden

is beyond the imagination. The avocados are ripening. We have a few avocado trees, the tallest of which is about 50 feet high and produces avocados the size of grapefruit. They are round and the thin green skin easily peels off. We couldn’t eat all the hundred or so avocados that tree produces if we tried.

I made a guacamole this afternoon with cilantro, jalapeños, lemon juice, and a delicious red tomato all from our garden.

The fruit and veg growing in the garden that we can eat now are pecans, lemons, tangerines, avocados, custard apples, oranges, raspberries, carrots, green beans, beet root, turnips, broccoli, lettuce, tomato, small yellow tomatoes, egg plant, green pepper, celery and leeks….plus, all your fresh herbs.

What’s not in season yet but are coming are artichokes, some other kind of berries (young?), strawberries, grapes, pineapples, papayas, bananas, plums, pears, peaches, apples, Jerusalem apples(?), the black skin avocados, mangos, lichis, guavas, cucumber, peas, broad beans, potatoes, onions, and some other things I don’t even know.

When the leeks came in, we had a lot of potato leek soup. When the beans were ready, Miles helped pick them, climbing in among the vines that were tied up and had grown 6 feet high. The beans were as long as my hand and purple but turned green when they were cooked. We put them in everything: stir fries, soups, pastas, even lasagna.

I say we, but Tari is the star cook. Just like Fe, she professed to not know how to cook. I think I must be a real inspiration to these women! We also have great cookbooks, and I dare say Tari is even more proactive than Fe when it comes to finding recipes on her own and trying them out on us. There are so many ingredients all around us to work with here. She made walnut carrot bread the other day.

Oh, and we have three chickens that produce basically one egg a day each which has meant we haven’t had to buy eggs since we moved here. They have a chicken coop and a fenced in little chicken yard that is in a larger fenced in area where we have a compost, a shed with bags of fertilizer (i.e. manure), and a few more beds of lettuce or something. That’s on one corner of the back yard. In the opposite corner are apartments where Herbert, the gardener, lives with his wife and child, Panache, who’s 3, and where Tari lives with her son, Shepard, who’s 5, and Tari’s cousin Fadia who is her helper.


(Side note: Fadia’s name was Vaida until we met her. Eliza kept calling her Fadia, which is more of an Arabic sounding name, and now Vaida goes by Fadia to everyone now because she likes how it sounds. Names here are funny. SOme people have traditional Shona names like Tenday or Tarisai. Other people have English names like Lovemore, Nomore and Nevermore. I'll have to get a comprehensive list together for another blog. You can just imagine those women in labor shouting No More!!!)

Pawpaws (papayas?)

Green Beans

Broccoli
Back garden

Lettuce, celery, tomatoes, berries, herbs (garden by house)