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.

Watermelon farming, vegetable farming Botswana

When you think about growing watermelons in a hot climate like Botswana, your first thought will probably be "this is not going to work!" however when you research the origins of watermelons many a scientist will point out that watermelons come from the dry kalahari Desert! Even to this day one is still able to find many types of wild watermelons growing in the wilderness of Botswana.
Hence it should be no surprise that watermelons are a great crop to cultivate in Botswana and in most parts of south Africa,

Watermelons need a few things to grow

1. Watermelons need water, as there name suggests, you can't get a good sweet watermelon without proper watering, however that said, the rainy season in Botswana often provides plenty of water to grow beautiful sweet watermelons,

2. To grow good quality watermelons you need good quality soil, so add lots of cow manure and compost to your watermelon field you could also add some chicken manure but first read about the dangers of using chicken manure Here

3. Watermelons need warm weather, so the best time to plant them is late August to early September, remember that November and December there are plenty of watermelons on the market so to try and get into the market early, you need to plant as early as possible!

As always thanks for reading! If you found this information useful please share it with your friends on Facebook or wherever you want!! Or just follow this blog!

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.

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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