26 October 2014: Keyhole Gardens

Today we made a keyhole garden. What is a keyhole garden, you ask? Well, it’s a raised garden with a notch in it (this is supposed to be the keyhole, I suppose) in which you can stand and more easily tend to your precious crops or whatever. It looks more like a pacman. When I build my garden, I will dub it the pacman garden. Almost all Basotho have pacman gardens in their yards. Anyway, the way you build it is that you get a butt ton of rocks and arrange them in said pacman shape. The gardens are normally about fiveish feet in diameter. After you have made several stacked layers of your outer rock wall, you start filling the inside of your garden. The first layer is bones and tin cans. Don’t ask me where one would find enough bones (like animal bones…or people bones I suppose. It’d be a great place to hide a body…anyway…) to make a layer at the bottom of this garden. Maybe I should start a bone collection now. Not like that looks creepy or anything. Moving on. After the bones and cans is a layer of soil, then, maure, then ash, then hacked up aloe leaves. By this point, you probably want to make your rock walls a bit higher. Basotho are experts at Tetris-ing rocks together so that your pacman garden won’t collapse on you. Now, you probably also want to start arranging for a compost bag in the middle of the garden. You get three or four sticks, plant them firmly in a small triangle or square near what would be the pointy back of the pacman’s mouth. Then you get a sturdy, yet porous bag like one for maize meal or something, and use the sticks to hold it open. In here, you might put some dirt, manure, food scraps, extra thatch or leaves, or whatever. The compostey nutrients are supposed to leech out and make the soil more nutrient-rich. Then you continue with the layers of soil, manure, ash, and aloe, ending with a mixed soil/manure layer on top, until you have reached your desired garden height. Plants are normally planted in lines coming from the compost bag and radiating outward, but you can do whatever you want. You can plant seedlings or plain old seeds, and sometimes marigolds are put at the edges to keep bugs and animals away. To keep chickens from hopping up into the garden and gnawing on your plants, sometimes people drape plastic meshy stuff over the top. This is also to prevent damage when (not if) it hails. It’s pretty labor intensive, but there you have it: the pacman/keyhole garden!

My ‘me’s keyhole garden right outside my front door (at my permanent site). She also has another one down the hill.