Rainy Season

So right now it is the middle or rainy season in Malawi.

I am kind of amazed by rainy season.

Probably May until Late Oct/early Nov. there was no rain. Toward the end of this period birds start returning to us and what is truly amazing to me, trees that have been sitting around burst into bloom. Jacaranda, flame or flamboyant and the rather skeletal looking frangiapani. It looks like there is no rhyme or reason to this change but then it starts raining first a little and then a bit more and of late quite a lot.

In Oct. 2018 when we arrived here little was cultivated and less planted at that time. Very soon field were being cultivated, by hand and then planted and then it seemed like there were little shoots of maize sprouting every where by mid Nov. This year more land was cultivated and prepared sooner though the actual planting didn’t happen til early Nov when we started getting rains. By mid December the maize was anywhere from ankle to knee high. Now the healthy crops are 6-8 feet tall. The whole landscape has changed near my house.  The above pictures were taken in early Nov. Now the maize has been over my head since mid January.

I walk a lot with my big dog and some of the paths that are very well worn are almost obliterated by new growth. One place where they made and hauled bricks in and out a lot while it was dry had developed into what I call a prairie road, two well worn tracks with some vegetation in the middle. The vegetation has creeped in from the sides now and grown up in the middle In places it’s hard to see the path and the grass on the sides and middle is over 6 feet tall. In rainy season everything grows.

We will see the clouds build and then there will be a downpour. In ND where I am from we have thundershowers where it rains huge amounts very fast. Sometimes even 5 or up to 9 inches. It is very localized. Here it rained from this past Sunday afternoon through Tuesday night. It just rained and rained. Sometimes a drizzle, sometimes a downpour, most times just a steady rain. I don’t think it has been so much to cause real flooding yet, though there has been some. Malawi is basically a Rift valley sort of area and water rises along the rivers and lake when we get much rain.

I really am appreciating the diversity of the seasons here now. The high to low temperature variance year round is probably 60 degrees Fahrenheit, with the common variance being more like 40 degrees but there is a distinct change in the seasons just more subtle then in North Dakota where it is -40 degrees by winter and 100 degrees by summer at times.

An acquaintance told me on my first visit to Africa you could put any sort of stick in the ground and it would grow during rainy season in Ghana. I am not in Ghana and I am guessing that there would have to be some degree of life in the stick but I would grow this time of year. I have 2 freshly planted avocadoes in my yard that are probably a dream more then reality that they will grow enough in our time here to harvest avocados but I still wanted them and they are growing very rapidly.