Diversifying the farm income, Farming Botswana.

Diversifying the farm income

Making money while farming can have its own challenges, for example imagine if you are a cabbage farmer and a hail storm destroys your crops a month before harvest! How will you pay the bills? And so if you look at successful farmers you will find that they diversify in other words they don't put all their eggs in one basket. So as a farmer you must ask yourself, if my main crop fails will I still be able to pull through. Will I be able to pay the bills?

How to Diversify?

Well lets say you are Cabbage farmer, every month you plant out 2000 cabbages, this is your main source of income, in addition you decide to plant 5000 heads of Garlic, since garlic will take around 90 days or more to harvest and in Botswana you will only be able to get one set in, in a year. Hence your 5000 garlic is just a low maintenance back up. Of course you will still want to diversify even more. Can you get a few Pigs? or maybe some Chickens? At the same time you need to remember that as a farmer you only have so much time and most of your time will be spent on farming your cabbages, so look for things that your farm can do or produce that's not time consuming that will supplement the farm income.

One way many farmers in South Africa do this is by setting up guest accommodations on their farms, I highly recommend that every farmer attempts to do this, it does not have to be fancy accommodation It just has to be clean. Even if you built a traditional mud hut put a nice clean bed in it and built a simple outdoor shower and toilet you can earn an additional income. You may wonder how to market such an investment, well you have to use technology. One of the most common ways of marketing a small guest room or campsite these days is to use an online App called Airbnb you can signup for it here for free: Sign up here, to host your guest room or campsite on Airbnb many people use this app when traveling these days because its affordable and there are many benefit's and perks that come with using it.  Of course if you just want to use the Airbnb app For traveling You Can sign up here,  if you do use my link you will get almost five hundred pula travel credit on your new account, that you can use when you book your next trip. I personally use this app and I absolutely love it.

In todays world as farmers we must diversify in order to be successful farmers, remember you not just a farmer! you are also a business man/woman.

Here are some other ideas.

Farm Watermelons 
Farm Sheep
Make money online in Botswana
Grow Carrots
Grow Cabbages
Grow Green Peppers
Grow Swiss Chard
Farm Garlic

as always thanks for reading please follow share with your friends or leave a comment, or question.

How to grow carrots, vegetable farming Botswana

Winter crop one, carrots


Ok so yesterday i posted a post talking about Our best winter garden, and on what grows best in winter, and one of the vegetable's i mentioned was carrots, so lets talk carrots!!

So carrots are not a difficult crop, they do need a little work especially in the beginning, however once they up and about a month old they really don't need much attention apart from regular watering and weeding.

One of the important things when growing carrots is to remember that at the end of the day a carrot is a root vegetable and the quality of your crop at harvest is going to depend on how good your soil and watering was,

Soil.

When growing carrots you want a nice deep loose stone free soil you also don't want clay. You want your soil to be nice and sandy with a mix of about half sand half compost so that in the end your soil will been nice and soft allowing you to grow nice long and straight carrots and also your soil should be able to drain water nicely if the water sits in puddles with out drainig your carrots may split.

Watering.

Carrot's need good watering otherwise they become bitter of course to much water can make the carrots crack.

Thinning.

In the first four weeks you will need to thin your carrots out to be about 3cm to 4cm apart.

Tip.

If the weather is cold carrots can take up to 3 weeks to germinate so add a few radish seeds in your lines that way you will easily see your lines and as the radishes come up they make it easier for the more delicate carrot's to germinate.

Ok so thats carrots. Thanks for reading. Also one of you readers just dropped me a email with a few questions will get to it soon.

If you liked this please follow and share

The winter garden! Vegetable farming Botswan

The winter garden! Vegetable farming Botswana

From April to about August Botswana gets cold and at times we even get frost, so lets talk about what plants grow best in our cold months,

Generally when planning the winter garden you want to stay away from the more delicate plants such as tomatoes green peppers or for that matter any peppers.

For the most part winter is a time for cleaning the garden and preparing for the warmer weather, however winter is also great for lettuce and other leafy salad vegetables. And of course then there is your root vegetable's such as Carrots  potatos, beetroot all are great winter crops. And then there is also your leeks and onions.

I will be writing more on these winter crops and linking the articles back to this page in the following days so please check back soon and subscribe to the blog if you have not done so!

Tell next time Brown

You can also now read How to grow carrots

Enjoy 

Growing Green Peppers vegetable farming Botswana

Green peppers are really a great crop to grow in Botswana not only is there a very good market for green peppers but they also grow really well in Botswana because green peppers, well really any peppers need good hot weather to grow and thrive and thats basically Botswana weather year round apart from june july, of course peppers do need water especially when they are germinating, but apart from that you will find peppers to be very hardy and disease resistant, the plants can be a bit brittle and hence they do break easily they always benefit by being staked especially when they have fruit on them and the branches can no longer carry the weight

Green pepper

Drip irrigation the best watering method, farming Botswana

Recently i visited a farm where they just introduced drip irrigation, and i have to say i was amazed, the speed the crops grew was almost doubled in comparison to the sprinkler method that they were using before also there was way less water wasted. With a sprinkler method only a very small amount of water reachs the roots of the plant also water go,s all over the leaves of the crops which causes disease and rot, however with the drip method the water is directed right at the roots of the plant, hence using less water and preventing disease. Really if you can afford drip irrigation go for it, it is amazing, you will save water your crops will grow faster and you will have less disease,

Cabbage growing using drip irrigation 

Growing swiss chard vegetable farming

Growing swiss chard vegetable farming

Hello once again,
Today i am going to be laying out a few tips on growing Swiss chard some call it spinach although it is actually very different from real spinach. However before that, first of all i just want to say a big thank you to all of you who have subscribed/followed, really appreciate it, we are slowly growing.

How to growing Swiss chard?

(1) Prepare the soil first

Although Swiss chard are by no means fussy about the type of soil that they will grow in, you will not be disappointed with your results if you spend some quality time on soil preparation first.
The ultimate soil type would be a rich organic filled loose, moisture retaining soil, so add lots of compost, or organic animal waste, See the danger of using chicken manure here

(2) planting depth

Plant the seeds about 1 too 1.5cm deep, use fresh seeds since old seed often gives bad results. You will notice that each seed is often not one seed but rather a small cluster of 2 or 3 seeds. Hence when the seeds sprout you may need to thin out the unwanted extras,  i like to space Swiss chard out in rows of about 15 by 30 cm apart,

(3) Watering

Basically keep the soil moist yet not soggy, you should not see standing water or be able to squeeze water out of the soil,

(4) Harvesting

You can start harvesting as soon as the young leaves are of a size worth eating, lots of people harvest by cutting the tops off with a knife, this is not to be recommended, Swiss chard is harvested leaf by leaf by twisting the leaf at the base and pulling up, the harvester should go from plant to plant removing the biggest three or four leaves from each plant, and allowing the smaller leafs to grow for the next harvest, this way your plants will give a good supply of swiss chard for up to five months

Well thats, that for today thanks for stopping by

Best vegetables to grow in Botswana

Garlic farming Botswana

Well hello dear readers

One of the beautiful things about farming in Botswana is that unlike other country's there is not that much competition in the agricultural field, and hence an entrepreneur minded farmer can do quite well for himself.

Something we dont see much of here in Botswana is garlic farming, now i am not really sure why this is so!? Because garlic is perfectly suited for Botswana. One of the problems garlic farmers often face is....wait for it.... To much water! Yes thats right, for garlic to produce well it needs a short wet season and a long dry season to allow the garlic to mature.
And hence i guess you can already see why garlic farming is perfect for Botswana. Interested? Well what you waiting for check out step one to garlic farming right Here

Make the most of the rains, botswana farming tips

Rain is finally falling across botswana, and lots of you may be runing for your plows in order to start planting. Hopefully most of you have already plowed,although this is not looking like a great year with regards to rain, however there is good news in this for some of you! And that is, if you do get a good crop you should have no problem selling it at a good rate.

So heres a few tips to help you get the most of this years rains.

1. Cultivate, yip loosen up that topsoil so that the rain water will sink down to the roots and this will allow the plant to make the most of the rain that does fall.

2. Remove those weeds. There is only so much water, dont let it go to waste by watering weeds,

3. Dig in compost, however make sure its well broken down compost other wise it will start composting around the plants, and that will cause the plant to even die. Well composted soil will hold water longer. Read Here to find what vegetable's grow well in Botswana

All the best.