Building a Keyhole Garden in Kenya

I have a house in Africa... That house is not a farm, but I would like to grow at least some kitchen supplies. The house is located at the seacoast, where it is hot, often dry and where the soil is basically sand. After deciding that I will build a raised garden for my small project I started looking for designs and I stumbled over so called "African Keyhole Garden". According to Wikipedia, these keyhole gardens were invented in Lesotho and they are perfect for dry areas. They usually consist of a two-meter-wide circular raised garden with a keyhole-shaped indentation on one side. In its middle it has a space that should be filled with kitchen scraps, compost and also grey water, thus giving nutrients and humidity to the garden. Through the mentioned indent, it is easy to reach this central area of the raised garden.

While keyhole gardens can be built of all kind of materials (wood, stones, plastic, lose bricks etc.), I decided to build a solid structure that will also look good in my garden. I selected a place that has some shadow, is near to our water supply and not far from the place where my washing machine is located, so that I can lead the grey water from the washing machine to the garden.

1. Building the basic structure of the garden

I decided to build the garden, using the coral bricks, a common building material at the Kenyan seacoast. Different from what some might think, these bricks are not taken from the sea, but at places where the sea has long gone, sometimes kilometers away from the sea coast.

After a simple concrete foundation was laid, a circular wall was constructed, about 1 meter high.

To make it look nice, we covered the outside with coral pieces. In the middle, we put a round cage, made from aluminum mash and covered at the outside with carton board, to avoid that during the filling of the garden it gets filled with soil as well. This is the place where the garden will be "fed" with compost.

2. Filling in the different layers of compost and soil

We started with filling a layer of old carton-board. I believe the layer can be skipped, if no carton-board is available. Also paper might work.

After that we added a layer of garden scrubs, including relatively large pieces, and also dry palm leaves.

On the top of this, we added a layer of manure and then good soil that we had bought. The garden scrubs will compost over time, feeding the garden over years with nutrients, in addition to what is fed into the keyhole. During the process, the level of soil will go down, therefore it is needed to top up some soil.

3. Letting it settle

Once the garden was filled, we let it settle for a months, watering it regularly. We also provided "food" consisting of organic waste. It is important that this "food" is kept wet as well. During the settling process, the level of soil went down. Thus we added some soil and manure.

4. Planting

After a month or so, we started planting various plants such as tomato, eggplant, pumpkin and capsicum. The selection was rather random, somewhat to "test" the garden.

5. Experiences

So far, experiences are good, all that we planted grew quite well. Naturally, we have to water the garden regularly. We also had the problems everybody with a garden has, various pests and insects and birds trying to get their share of the crops. We refrained however to apply any pesticides or herbicides.

to be continued.....