It's the first time in a long-anticipated time that I would engage in a #wednesday walk. This is made possible because this week is a free week for me, being a teacher. We are currently observing our mid-term break. What a time to relax and have some fun out of work schedules.
So, today, I am opportune to be among a selected few to inspect a farm project by a non-governmental agency that aims at providing land and other materials for vegetable farms for the teeming number of youths who are not productively engaged. The journey to Odo-awala, a suburb of Lagos metropolis, took a thirty-minute drive from our location.
The organization was able to get that much land here because land is still cheap here. Each plot of land costs about a thousand dollars around here.
We journeyed through the village to the outskirts where there was a large land left uncultivated. The first word I spoke was that the land was a good place to farm.
We set out at about 9:30 WAT (West African Time) through a missionary bus to the farm settlement. A total of five acres of land was purchased for this project and the fencing is currently going on.
There are quite several farm projects going on around this vicinity. But since we were here on an assignment, we headed straight to the land that was purchased to start a vegetable farm.
The farming scheme is designed to give an individual a plot of land, measured 60 by 120 metres.
Currently, we are experiencing a dry season in Nigeria. The rains have seized and the sun is so scourging. During this season, sweet corn doesn't do well except they are planted in areas (swamps) where they can have access to regular water. Here in Odo-away, some farmers are using a pipe irrigation system to breed sweet corn for a ready market.
This is a typical local way to make a corn farm. One would have to first make ridges, where the soil is tilled to turn the topmost soil.
Another place that caught my interest is a greenhouse farm for tomatoes.
Around here, plantain grows on their own as weeds. You know plantains have some very special ways of growing. It hardly dies. Before a plantain trunk is cut down in harvest, it would have started budding more trunks.
Poultry farmers do not have much stress purchasing feed for their birds a a there is already a factory that does that around this location.
An attraction for this trip for me is the presence of a large number of sunflowers around the farms, thereby, housing different species of insects.
This is another species of grasshoppers. With a large number of grasshoppers, you are sure a whole farm can easily be devoured.
We got some mushrooms germinating from a dead log. Mushrooms make some kind of soup delicacies and are very scarce around here. Seeing this during our visit was an opportunity. We got out half a polythene bag filled with mushrooms.