By
Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 3 September 2019)
Six months
ago Chu Owen and Susan Murabana moved into what might have been their ‘dream
home’. ‘We love the place,” says Susan referring to their new multi-leveled
home and garden in Westlands. ‘But we would have liked to buy rather than rent.
And when we moved in, the backyard hadn’t been maintained well, so it was
practically a jungle,” she adds.
Chu (short
for Tudor) chimes in. “I grew up loving to wander in overgrown jungles. Nonetheless,
we still had to uproot lots of plants, trees and shrubs in order to create our
vegetable garden.’
They also
had to create space for the geodesic dome that they are in the process of building
out of the bamboo that grows right there in their backyard.
“The bamboo
has already grown back since we cut it,” Chu says, noting that the dome will be
six meters tall and nine meters wide (at the diameter) when completed. ‘We
would have liked to assemble it using all organic materials [such as sisal].
But if we did, the bugs would go for them and we would have to redo everything every
few months. So we had to work with rope which is nylon.”
Chu, who’s a
big astronomy enthusiast, says that once the dome is done, they are going to open
Kenya’s first and only Planetarium. “We’ll be able to accommodate 50 adults
comfortably in the dome and 100 kids uncomfortably,” he adds.
“We’ll have
a [sky-like] projection in the dome that will be powered with software that
assimilates views of both night and day skies,” says Susan who has a master’s
degree in astronomy from James Cook University in Australia.
But even as
they are busy building the dome, Chu and Susan are also tending their quarter-acre
vegetable garden. Both are clearly proud of the garden, especially as their
company, ‘The Traveling Telescope’ also teaches ‘sustainability’ when they go
to schools with their telescope and tell children as well as adult about the
stars and planet earth’s relationship to the universe.
“We want to
point to our garden when people come to the planetarium and show them by
example that we practice what we preach when we talk about sustainability,” Chu
says.
Already,
Susan and Chu and their three boys eat virtually all of their fresh fruits and
vegetables straight from their garden. They never use chemical pesticides or
fertilizers. And for now, they only fertilize with goat manure, “although we
hope once our compost patch matures, we will be able to use only organic
fertilizer,” says Susan, who like Chu, is passionate about sustainability as
well as astronomy.
She is especially fond of smoothies made with spinach,
celery, passion fruit and pineapple, all of which (apart from the pineapple)
comes from the garden.
Meanwhile,
Chu is a fan of tree tomato juice. “I had never seen a tree tomato before I
came to Kenya,” he says, having been born and raised in the UK. But he was
concerned about sustainability even before he came here in 2013 to see the
total eclipse which was passing directly over Turkana, which is where he and
Susan met.
“She’s the
one with the academic background in Astronomy while I have just been studying
it on my own for the past 15 years,” says Chu, who practices gardening as
enthusiastically as he does astronomy. Nonetheless, his background is actually
in Filmmaking, although he’s humble about the years he worked with Al Jazeera as
well as other media houses over the years.
Walking me down
and all around the garden, Chu points and shows me how they are already growing
everything from rhubarb, kale, spinach, cabbage, celery, lettuce, and broccoli,
as well as carrots, tree tomatoes, (regular) tomatoes, beet root, peppers, zucchini,
mint, parsley, coriander and cow peas.
We stop to
taste one delicate three-leafed green that they only know as ‘yumyumbuzi’.
Chu takes a leaf and happily chews it while passing me another stem of three to
me.
“They taste
lemony, don’t they!” he volunteers, and I agree. They are also slightly sweet
and I suggest they might be good in tea. But Susan says that the family only
eats them when they comes down to the garden to pluck and chew the yumyumbuzi
green just as she did when she was growing up.
“We also have
avocado, guava, neem (or ‘marubaini’) and jacaranda trees,” she adds, admitting
she’s looking forward to October when the Jacaranda’s beautiful purple blossoms
will come into bloom.
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