Jani Farm

As part of my journey in self sufficiency, I am starting to save my own seed.  I'm already saving my own maize and bean seeds.  Now I'm moving on to green vegetables.  Sometimes I buy vegetable seeds from the market that turn out to be nonviable because they are too old.  These are black nightshade fruit that I saved from a few bushes. I don't need a lot of seeds because my garden is small. These are enough and they are ripe.  My kids wanted to eat them but I sent them to the shamba to pick their own. 

 I've been growing maize for four years. This year I started growing open pollinated varieties in different colors, and the results have been good. Someone gave me a blend of white, yellow, red, and purple.  The yellow maize has been the most promising. It has large cobs and even the seeds are big. Of late I have been roasting them and using them for githeri. I still plant the other colors, but the yellow has proven to be the best performer. Some of the cobs are multicolored. The purple maize tends to produce smaller cobs and the seeds look small.  So I will continue planting the colored maize but so far it looks like yellow is the best.  The hybrid maize I used to grow yielded an average of two cobs per plant. With this variety, the yield is not as high. Many of the plants have only one cob, and they are shorter. I've also noticed that the cobbing can occur much lower on the plant closer to the ground compared to hybrid maize.  If I stick to yellow maize, the y...

Of late I've been plagued by a dilemma. I'm torn between keeping improved chickens and pure kienyeji chickens.  Kienyeji's are slow growing. They are ready to butcher in six months, but they also hatch their own eggs and brood them. So they are self propagating. You don't have to buy new stock.  The improved kienyeji are fast growing but they do not hatch their own chicks or brood them. So you have to keep buying new stock.  I now have a barnyard mix of one kienyeji hen, two improved hens, and one improved rooster. I thought this would be an ideal solution because the two improved hens supply us with eggs continuously and the kienyeji one can be the mother.  The problem is that the improved jogoo gets too big for the kienyeji hen. She has no feathers on her back from the big rooster stepping on her constantly. The last rooster I had grew all the way to 3.2kg and I butchered it because it was too big and still growing.  Since I got rid of the offending rooster, I...