Tendayi Grows Things

My pumpkins are dying. Two months in, the leaves are yellow around the edges, one would think it was the heat, putting some strain on the poor babies. From the looks of one of the 11 pumpkins I planted, in a few weeks, the other ten like that one, may not make it. To be fair, in my reading up on 'how to grow pumpkins from seed', I saw something about pests that follow when a plant germinates from the ground. The pests like me, are looking for food from the plant that's at the early stage of its life. The difference between us though, is that I get to consume the fruit much later on in the cycle - if it makes it.  Bugs, ants, flies that can inhibit the pumpkin plant's growth, never mind that, I was more interested in the seeing the green shoot out from beneath the soil. I wanted to see the transition from seed, to seedling, to plant, to fruit. I neglected to put as much study into the need to protect the plant from other things that want something from it. It rem...

It tastes good, I promise I'm confused. Like proper total perplex-ion (perplexity is the correct word, but perplex-ion expresses my total aghast-ness, oh making up words is fun). The Beginning I've always been that ninja chick, against type gal. I think that came from being sandwiched between two brothers as a middle child (I have two sisters as well, but I'm between the boys).  My closest play mates were dudes and I was a tom boy. A tom boy that loved to cook. Yeah, I would climb trees, play soccer (which I was lousy at), punch boys and make meat pies for my siblings and friends right after. The Middle Then I hit "Oh my gosh she has boobs-hood" a.k.a the awakening a.k.a adolescence. Boys weren't brothers any more, they were...interesting... at least some of them. Cooking for my siblings and friends around that age reduced because I went off to boarding school. But I do remember at the age of 14 I fell in like. I'd just mastered how to cook pap/...

Does Success Have a Gender? I had an interesting conversation with some fellaz last night and a statement stuck and really disturbed me. One of the gents chimed "the woman of today is her own man!" What?  Yeah, well here is how we got to that. When talking about the reasons the millennial woman marry, I proposed that now more than ever, this woman that includes myself, no longer feels the need to marry for economic reasons. She will most likely marry for love, companionship, to bare children, a myriad of reasons, with economic upliftment ranked lower in the motivations. Essentially she will marry because she wants to. Yes, extended family (and immediate) may put pressure, yes gold diggers exist (and hey that's a strategy in itself), but I'm talking about the self motivated, self assured woman - she will decide for herself, who she will marry and why, because she can. In the gentleman responsible for the comment's view, she is able to do the above because ...

Pumpkin or Butternut, I've forgotten...hopeless! Growing up, some points during the year, my parents would take my siblings and I to the villages they grew up in to visit our grandparents. "Kumusha" we call it, a break from suburban life, or more like a way for the folks to remind us that we came from somewhere. I have memories of weeding in the fields, back breaking work, but there was something uniting about it. The process included aunts, cousins, neighbours... With our bare hands, sometimes on all fours in the blaring heat of the day. We moaned, we sang, we dripped in sweat, but at the end of a season, that corn, those pumpkins, vegetables, beans, ground nuts, were harvest and sustained us thorough out the year. And there was always seed put aside for the next round. I come from a family of makers, embroiders, sowers, dress makers, builders, painters, helpers, planters, herdsman, weavers, mbira designers, writers, singers, healers, bakers, cookers (not a word I kn...