By George Munene

On a 40*100 piece of land you can har­vest up to 300 kilo­grams of man­agu every week selling at Sh30 per kilo­gram; this can earn you a cool Sh9000 in a week.

Hav­ing grown man­agus on a trial basis for home con­sump­tion at her back garden in Limuru, Mary Ikigu star­ted com­mer­cialy farm­ing the ve­get­able com­mer­cially at the be­gin­ning of the year on some 100 dis­used mush­room grow­ing bags. This she at­trib­utes to hav­ing found the crop highly mar­ket­able, par­tic­u­larly given Kenyan’s new­found love for mboga za kienyeji and it being a re­source-ef­fi­cient crop in its pro­duc­tion; does not need to be grown in spe­cial­ized con­di­tions, i.e. green­houses, a 5000-liter water tank that en­sures ac­cess to ir­rig­a­tion water is all Mary re­com­mends. A farmer will also need to cost for ma­nure and part-time em­ploy­ees to help with land pre­par­a­tion, weed­ing, har­vest­ing and wa­ter­ing de­pend­ing on the size of their farm.

With what is con­sidered lim­ited farm­ing space; half an acre to 50*100 sized plots; man­agu farm­ing can be a money minter given ac­cess to the right mar­ket link­ages. The lar­ger your farm size the more its har­vest and profit po­ten­tial. The nu­tri­ent-rich ve­get­able can as well be grown in ver­tical grow­ing bags.  A farmer she says can stra­tegic­ally divvy up their land into plots to make sure they have con­stant har­vests.

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“Man­agu is sold in mar­kets in a bunch; a hand­ful for about Sh10 or per kilo, with a kilo­gram, usu­ally fetch­ing Sh30-40. They are also packed and sold in sacks. As with most other crops, it is a num­bers game; the more har­vests you have the more you are able to sell,” Ikigu ex­plains.

Man­agu prices in Kenya are usu­ally dic­tated by rain pat­terns: they grow faster and are read­ily avail­able in mar­kets dur­ing rainy sea­sons; their prices are there­fore lower. “You’ll sell man­agu for Sh2000 a sack dur­ing the dry sea­son, over the Janu­ary to March months the mar­ket has thus far been great, but the price can crater to as low as Sh500-300 when rains hit be­cause most farm­ers de­pend on rain­fed ag­ri­cul­ture and are able to grow it as well,” the bud­ding farmer says.

The main mar­kets for man­agu in Kenya are open-air mar­kets. These in­clude Mu­thurwa, Kawang­ware, Kangemi where she takes her pro­duce or has buy­ers come from to pick the leafy ve­get­able from her farm. Oth­ers are City Park in Nairobi where most buy­ers, some of whom are Chinese na­tion­als, prefer im­proved rather than Kienyeji man­agu which is less bit­ter. Mary points out that Farm­ers can also tar­get more struc­tured mar­kets such as learn­ing in­sti­tu­tions, res­taur­ants, hos­pit­als and mama mbo­gas within their loc­al­ity. 

African Night­shade should be har­ves­ted early in the morn­ing or late in the even­ing. The crop’s leaves de­teri­or­ate eas­ily when picked when it is sunny this makes them less ap­peal­ing to buy­ers de­pre­ci­at­ing their value.

A crop can be con­tinu­ously picked for two months, but the har­vest­ing period can be in­creased by adding ma­nure every two weeks after weed­ing. Ra­toon­ing; cut­ting off of the main stalk up to 15-20 cen­ti­meters also al­lows for the plant to de­velop new shoots ex­tend­ing the har­vest­ing time. This Mary says will however also lead to re­duced yield thus she opts to re­place her ex­ist­ing crop.

From Mary’s ex­per­i­ence, the pests af­fect­ing man­agu are often aph­ids and mealybugs. Given her crops are or­gan­ic­ally grown she tackles them using neem oil. “If your crop has suffered a pest at­tack you should spray them once a week. To pre­vent such at­tacks, I keep to a re­gi­ment of pro-act­ively spray­ing my ve­gies every two weeks,” she says. This also in­volves spray­ing them for fungal at­tacks; Man­agu are of the So­lanaceae fam­ily thus are eas­ily af­flic­ted by late and light blight; using Re­gain a bio­lo­gical fun­gi­cide man­u­fac­tured by Real IPM. 

For her plant­ing ma­ter­ial, she sows seeds picked off her shrubs or buys them from Sim­law or Kenya seed. Man­agu takes 45 days to grow in her nurs­ery and one to two and a half months be­fore the ve­get­able’s first har­vest de­pend­ing on the level of ag­ro­nomic man­age­ment. Seed­lings are trans­planted when they are 15cm long/ after 30-45 days or when they have five true leaves. The plant dis­tance should ideally be 30*30cm. On her ver­tical farm bags, Mary fits two seed­lings into every bag

Ma­nure is es­sen­tial in provid­ing the ve­get­able with Ni­tro­gen, Phos­phorus, Po­tassium and mi­cronu­tri­ents; man­agu will often nat­ur­ally grow in areas that are heav­ily fer­til­ised such as cow­sheds. For her bags, Mary uses two buck­ets of chicken ma­nure and 8 buck­et­fuls of cow dung.

Man­agu re­quires a mois­tur­ized en­vir­on­ment to thrive with their quant­it­ies fall­ing in Kenyan mar­kets over drier months when they fetch a premium price. Wa­ter­ing should also be done at trans­plant­ing to im­prove the sur­vival chances of the plant­lets.

“The land pre­pared in read­i­ness for pant­ing should be finely tilled en­sur­ing the soil is fine enough to hold the plant’s seed­lings which are very tiny. The seed­lings are en­cumbered in their ger­min­a­tion by com­pacted soil, tak­ing longer to grow in soils with hard­pans,” she says.

Man­agu does best in soils with a PH of 5.5-6.8 but can grow in vari­ous soil types given proper ag­ro­nomic prac­tices are con­duc­ted, i.e, ma­nur­ing, wa­ter­ing and fre­quent weed­ing.

Given the crop’s early suc­cess, Mary is plan­ning on ex­pand­ing her space under man­agu and cul­tiv­ate the ve­get­able not just in her ver­tical garden. Be­sides man­agu, she also com­mer­cially grows straw­ber­ries, cel­ery, spring onions, pars­ley, am­ar­anth and kunde. 

You can check out her jour­ney, and point­ers on how you too can tap into this luc­rat­ive ag­ribusi­ness here: Mary Ikigu_The­farm­girlke

By George Munene

On an 8 x 6 slice of land ad­ja­cent to her home in Embu, Maur­een Mwaniki, a 22-year-old stu­dent at the Nyandarua In­sti­tute of Sci­ence and Tech­no­logy has set up her own kit­chen garden stocked with ve­get­ables— from sukuma wiki, man­agu, ter­ere and cab­bages. She also grows onions and to­ma­toes and has even worked out how to propag­ate herbs such as gar­lic and ginger.

The dis­tance to mar­kets and scarcity caused by the sea­son­al­ity of every­day es­sen­tials she says gave her the im­petus to start the pro­ject. Being in school, she did not have the time to prop­erly tend to the farm but the stop­page in learn­ing oc­ca­sioned by the Corona virus has given her time to cul­tiv­ate into her back­yard garden.

Her garden is fenced off with a worn-out mos­quito net which acts as a shade net that keeps off in­vas­ive in­sects such as white­flies. This has in turn sig­ni­fic­antly re­duced her need to use pesti­cides.

Re­lated News: In­nov­ator: farmer fills ce­ment bags to cre­ate a moun­tain of food

Stud­ies also show that crop yield in shade nets is up to six times more than those grown in an open field and that they save farm­ers up to 30 per cent of har­vestable yield losses. Nets also trap heat for the crops which sub­stan­tially re­duces their ma­tur­ity period.

She grows her crops in ce­ment bags and de­crepit buck­ets, basins and plates which she fills with sifted out top­soil and ma­nure. “Farm­ers mix in sand into bags to help in water pen­et­ra­tion, however, be­sides being nu­tri­tious to the soil, ma­nure also in­creases its ca­pa­city for water ab­sorp­tion and pen­et­ra­tion as well as the soil’s wa­ter-hold­ing ca­pa­city,” says Maur­een. Con­crete bags used for grow­ing should be well per­for­ated to allow for air cir­cu­la­tion and avoid build-up of ex­cess water which rots ve­get­at­ive ma­ter­ial.

Whilst the idea of grow­ing ve­get­ables in bags is no longer a nov­elty, Maur­een also propag­ates gar­lic. She grows four cloves in one bag, this she says en­sures they have ad­equate grow­ing room; each clove will sprout into its own bulb and if they are too many in one bag they will have too much com­pet­i­tion for re­sources and will grow-out too small. She meas­ures the depth of plant­ing by sink­ing her thumb into the soil whilst the dis­tance from each clove is. She then cov­ers the bulbs with ma­nured soil and wa­ters. The neck serves as a shoot, while the base of the gar­lic will form the root­ing sys­tem. Big­ger cloves make sim­il­arly big­ger and health­ier bulbs. On the per­for­ated side of bags used to grow gar­lic, you can also grow other ve­get­ables like suku­mawiki.

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Gar­lics usu­ally come in two vari­et­ies; hard­necked—char­ac­ter­ised by a stiff neck and soft­necked. Soft­neck gar­lic does well in hot areas while the hard­necked gar­lic does bet­ter in colder cli­mates. Hard­neck vari­et­ies also do not store as well. They usu­ally start to shrivel and de­teri­or­ate post-har­vest after four to six months while soft­necks keep for nine to twelve months under ideal stor­age con­di­tions.

While the pro­duce from her farm is meant for sub­sist­ence con­sump­tion, she usu­ally has ex­cess Suku­mawiki which she sells or gives out for free to neigh­bours and vis­it­ors.

Maur­een has even set up her own You­tube chan­nel which she hopes to use to en­cour­age more people to get into back­yard farm­ing: “I would like to em­power other people and have them learn that they do not need to buy every food item. If you could keep that 10 or 20 bob you use every day to buy sukuma or onions, over the course of a year that is a lot of money saved.”