Another Watermelon Journey
Before we get too busy in this New month
Let me take you back 5 years ago and tell you a story about these👇🏾👇🏾 watermelons 🍉 🍉.
At this time, This was the best in size, bric content and level, yield and everything.
This particular crop was guided by General Samuel Gacheru from land preparation, seed selection, planting, Intergrated Pest Management, fertilizer application etc. This guy can train you when he is very calm and I really appreciate how he taught me to grow watermelons amongst many other crops.
I took care of this crop by even bringing som guys from Rombo to knew watermelons. These guys were really good until they decided to start drinking “Kaluvu.” Story of another day.
We managed to protect this particular crop against all manner of pests and diseases. You know #watermelons can make you cry, literally, you can loose the whole crop in the first one month. If they survive the first month and you are not careful, they can just decide to welcome the melon fly and white flies and all sorts of pests. #Watermelons can make you close your farm and put a notice of: Land for sale.
But this crop was different, we manage to get slightly over 12 tonnes of very big fruits of between 8kgs and 14kgs, which was really good those days.
Then the grade 2 were close to 5tonnes. These are the ones I see on the shelves these days, I don’t know what happened.
My farm, the one I planted these melons is in Kamulu but you can access it from Malaa on Kangundo road but you have to cross the river. So when it rains you have to take a longer route 16kms from Kamulu.
This was the reason I decided to harvest the melons and store them….Weeeeee… this is where I knew how to easy it is to be a brewer😉😉.
This is how it started, it was around 26th November and it was just about to rain heavily so we had to move very fast. So we harvested and started selling in the smaller markets in Joska, Tala, Ruai, Githurai but this was 17tonnes. I had told myself I can’t sell to a broker. So by 5pm the owner of the truck wanted it back. I decided to high a room to store the melons and other crops we had harvested.
We got the room, the saw dust, and did what we thought was the best and safest way of saving our melons. Little did I know that we were now converting watermelons into weapons… first at 11pm the neighbor who has meant to be the caretaker called me and asked me if we locked someone in the room because he was hearing noises… I told him no. Then at 4am he called again and said the noise has increased but the doors are locked.
I opted to start my journey of 70kms to the place… We opened very carefully….. My friends…. What we saw was the pinkest or is the most colorful storage…. The watermelons were bursting at a very fast rate…. We had to start selling at almost a loss…
Ever since…. I plant… I harvest and sell. This thing of storage sitaki tena.
Have a brilliant month.
