Second week pics!

need to keep hydrated!

coach ahead of us

tarantula in mulch pile

photos from Victoria Falls

raised bed seed rows after double-digging with protective mulch on sun side.  Started out cool about 75d f. By 2 pm it was 90 or so.  A little lower humidity today thank goodness!

planting a mango tree in a likely spot!

photos from working on the base demonstration garden today

boys fishing as we have lunch

karen and Shaina weeding the demo garden

village hut

view from the ze plane

petrol lines

jetlag selfie

the people are full of smiles

amazed at what we are seeing the women carrying

boys in the road near the team house

part of the market

Well its our third full day in Africa and quite a lot has happened.  We bought a small SUV, a Toyota rav4 that a friend,Lena, knew was for sale.  We test-drove and thought all was OK except for the alignment needed adjusting, we talked the lady down only 100$ from her pretty exorbitant price.  Then Cosmas, a Zambian who works for Lena is being hired to get all the legal paperwork, which apparently is a huge hassle.  In checking the vehicle he found it has a defective drive shaft that makes noise sometimes.  We will wait on that and see how bad it gets. The vehicle is definitely in drive able shape.
Well we have been several times to wonderbake, a bakery
 Cafe serving good coffee and baked goods. It has a 1\2 hour free WiFi which is handy!
Today happens to be my 50th birthday so Karen is buying a pastry to go with our coffee this morning!  Woke up this morning to no water.  All else is fine and quite the adventure.  Walked a couple miles to a great dinner at the team house last night and got a ride back because some nice person waited in longggg lines for petrol!  More soon,

Well, not much to write about since we are still here in Portland, Oregon.  Before even getting to the airport yesterday, Seattle office of Emirate Air called and said our flight from Seattle to Dubai was cancelled due to bad weather.  We still went to the airport and with Shaina's help got all 4 big bags and assorted other stuff piled down near the Alaska air desk.  Karen called Emirate and talked through our options; the best being the same flight the next day.  So after re-booking that we left the airport in search of lunch.  By the way, the Trivago site helped me to quickly find a reasonable hotel close by with a free breakfast and shuttle.  Shaina dropped us at the hotel to get back to Corvallis by about 6 yesterday, apparently the traffic getting out of the city was horrible.
 So, we have had a good night's sleep and don't feel it's been too bad a set-back. We have a shuttle scheduled for 11 am to PDX to hopefully go catch our first flight in this long journey!
More later!

Getting literally hundreds of packets and thousands of seeds ready for the trip to Zambia is easier than it sounds.  Seeds have always been exciting to me.  The potential; the future.  They are small and they don't take up much room, but they hold so much promise.  They are definitely worth bringing!  Then there is a drip irrigation kit, enough for 4 rows with 100 foot of drip tape and all the connectors and filter.  If this works we can always expand in the future. White plastic mulch has a place.  Not exactly "appropriate technology" but there should be some availability in Livingstone if the gardeners see it hold promise (trapping moisture, cooling the soil, limiting weed competition and possibly discouraging other pests) of better yields.

On this blog I will attempt to document each facet of our "try's" as we look at the situation in place and think about how to make improvements.
Then we have grafting supplies so that we can graft mangoes and maybe some other fruit trees.  Dan has a vison for flourishing fruit trees on the Love's Door property in the village.  We have got to find some fruit types that work well here!  Our minds are too full of last minute things at the moment, I'll post more later!