Harvesting the Fish Pond

By Anthony:

I always am able to catch tilapia, but I was worried that there were too many catfish in my pond eating most of the small tilapia which thankfully reproduce regularly. The catfish weren't reproducing so I knew there were about 28 left (I started with 33, and with 200 tilapia). All other methods including hooks and traps to catch the catfish were not working. Some of them were getting huge. So I recruited a bunch of friends to help me use a wide net, moving with it across the whole pond.

To start though, we first had to remove all of the pond plants (we put them back in when we were done). We also pumped out a lot of water to the plants around the yard to make the pond less deep so that we could stand up without the water going up to our heads.

The first day we used our own net, and it completely failed. We fished with it from 8am to 1pm and only caught tilapia. We didn't catch a single catfish. I gave everyone some tilapia to take home but it was really disappointing. There were a lot of exclamations about Jesus' disciples saying "we fished the whole night and caught nothing!"

I planned another day to try again. We fixed all the holes the catfish had punched in our net. We made it like 5 nets thick. We did major renovations on the net to try to make it much less likely for catfish to sneak around the sides of it, or under the bottom of the net. We used a hosepipe filled with sand along the bottom of the net to weigh it down. We were really optimistic and did a lot of work! Only to find out it still completely failed to catch any catfish.

That same day, we had to call our guard's friend, who has a really good large net, with a long pouch in it. We rented it for the rest of the day. The fish look at the opening in the middle of the net (the pouch), and think it's a way to escape, so they go into it, only to find it has a dead end. Then they are stuck.

We seriously muddied up the yard and even killed small tilapia in the mud. We also accidentally netted huge logs that I had in the water. That made the net really heavy when it had a 3 foot log in it!

However, we were much more successful this time! We managed to get 10 catfish. Catfish have to be some of the sneakiest and smartest fish. Because we dragged this net so many times trying to leave no space for them to escape, using all of our efforts, and still most of them never got caught.

Here is the biggest catfish we got. It was very strong.

We threw back in the small tilapia, but kept about 15 or so. We all got dirty. I took the longest shower I've had in the last few years. It was a fun and interesting experience to do with friends here and we will remember it! It's been a few months already that have passed by the time of this post and the tilapia have multiplied greatly with thousands of fingerlings.

Reverend Moses Farm Tour

By Sara:

Another farm tour happened in March.  The latest farmer group to complete their lessons got to travel to Abwanget, where a friend of ours, Rev. Moses Opus lives (in the straw hat in the picture below).  Moses is a very creative farmer and has (more than a little bit) of almost everything on his farm.  Fruit trees, vegetables, staple foods, bees, goats, and chickens, among other things.  I love the way he uses what he has, to do amazing farming.  Any enterprising farmer who is willing to work hard can copy what he has done, without any expensive inputs.

We all admired this huge jackfruit tree:

Everyone also loved how beautiful this new grass thatched hut is in his home: 

Moses is growing passion fruit in a small, fenced area, and is utilizing their shade as a nursery for starting seedlings.  His family intends to plant 100 lemon trees this year, so he is starting them under the passion fruit.  He also uses old water bottles for his seedlings instead of buying potting bags, which helps him save money and reuse waste.

Moses was on the trip to Uwepo and one of the plants he came back with was a grape vine.  Everyone was amazed to see it since they had all read about grapes in the Bible but had no idea what a grape plant looked like:

Another great innovation Moses uses is planting a certain local plant densely around his tree seedlings when they are small.  This protects the seedling from getting eaten by goats or cows.  Since he puts a lot of mulch on the ground around the trees, chickens also aren't able to squeeze inside and scratch it up. 

Uwepo Farm Tour

By Sara:

Thanks to a generous gift from one of our supporting churches, I have been able to take groups of farmers on learning visits to different places.  In early March, I led another such visit.  I brought the Magoro farmer group to Uwepo, an organization and teaching farm in Jinja.  The farmers in Magoro have shown their enthusiasm for learning and willingness to contribute to further educational opportunities, so it was a great opportunity for them to get exposure to more new ideas.

Since Jinja is very far from Magoro, the group traveled by bus part of the way on the day before the tour.  They spent the night at a church.  The next morning, they left at 5:30am in order to get to the Uwepo farm before 9am!  The Uwepo staff were so impressed by the group's timeliness.  

I really appreciate the work that Uwepo is doing in educating farmers and in propagating unique varieties of plants.  We ate breakfast at the farm and one of the items in our breakfast was breadfruit chips.  Breadfruit is a tropical tree which produces starchy fruits that can be eaten like cassava or potato.  One tree can live 80 years and can give up to 250 kilos of fruit in a year!  This is a great investment since it allows the farmer to passively get a lot of food, without a lot of intensive labor.

Although it poured while we were eating breakfast, the rain stopped in time for the tour to proceed.  There were lessons on grafting:

We got to see examples of vegetable growing, mixed with trees:

Everyone got to do some hands-on activities with preparing food for black soldier flies and learning how to raise them (even me):

We saw how the farm is raising chickens and learned about new things to feed them: 

At the end of the tour, we went to the nursery where Uwepo sells many varieties of plants.  The group found lots of trees they wanted to take home to their gardens.  Even the driver of the bus bought a seedling for himself!  And although the breadfruit seedlings are expensive, compared to other tree seedlings (due to the difficulties in propagating it), five people bought seedlings and were excited to go plant them at their homes. 

Video Interview of Sara and Jane

By Sara:

Here is another video produced by the Resonate communications team when they visited Soroti: