By Yero S. Bah
Sitting on a 20-litre empty jerry-can, Madam Arang Kolley leans over the vibrant grafted orange seedlings to cut off the unwanted leaves from the said seedlings.
Sounding like an expert in what she does, the septuagenarian woman gardener in Sifoe Village in West Coast Region, who spoke with this pro-agric online medium in an interview, told the reporter that those leaves were not needed as they make the orange plants spread widely without going straight up.
She is seventy-five (75) years of age but still ambitious and determined to run a vibrant home garden in Sifoe village, which has varieties of plants: oranges, mangoes, bananas, peppers, and other horticultural crops.
Kolley said gardening has numerous benefits, inter alia becoming financially independent, consuming fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as having a chance to help neighbors to access such healthy diets from the garden.
As the Sifoe gardener informed, she is always preoccupied with her gardening activities and not into frivolous chit-chats.
“I don’t involve myself into futile talks because I am always busy in my garden,” she echoed. Despite her age, she is still gardening because, as she stated, it’s from that she gets some source of earning, and also provides the family healthy food for consumption. Her clients comes as far as Niumi and even from Europe to purchase her orange seedlings for export, she told Mansa Banko Online.
Kolley said the price for an orange seedling is just D100 (one hundred dalasis), but she makes it extra-cheap so as to also earn some rewards from Allah.
She continued, “Prices are really cheaper compared to the labor and capital invested into this garden.” The 75-year-old is also engaged in rearing of birds like guinea fowls. She noted that, rearing such birds also complements her business activities, adding it’s also another good adventure to rear birds.
Disclosing the challenges she’s facing, Kolley pointed out that lack of proper water system and its inadequacy in the garden limited her activities. Lamenting that the monkeys around the Sifoe Forest usually invade her garden by destroying some of her crops, namely fruit oranges, bananas, and other horticultural crops, she intimated that “Monkeys are a threat to my crops here.”
Another challenge she referred to, is access to fertilizers, explaining that she usually assigns her young grandchildren to fetch her locally-made fertilizers or sometimes she purchases it at Brikama at a high price.
Therefore, she said relevant people should help in that regard. She indicated that her garden is so vast that a 2000-litre tank cannot adequately supply water to all of it. The elderly gardener went on to argue that bananas and other crops need a lot of water to survive, but she revealed that due to lack of enough water supplies, she had to suspend the planting of bananas during the dry season, until rainy season. Madam Kolley therefore, stressed the need for a proper water supply system for the garden.
She finally thanked her son for erecting the only borehole for her in the garden, and described him as “very helpful” in her entire agricultural activities.
