Granny Tshililo Tshivhase farms with vegetables as a pastime, but she is producing enough to feed her whole family and to sell some to the community as well. Photo supplied.
News Date: 17 September 2023
Since 1983, Granny Tshililo Germinah Tshivhase had been an active staff member at the Donald Fraser Hospital, where she served as a laundry assistant. When she retired in 2020, after 37 years of uninterrupted service with the Limpopo Department of Health, she was left in limbo with nothing to do. Faced with the dilemma of now having to sit around most of the day, swimming in boredom, the 68-year-old pensioner from Ngwenani ya Mapholi considered ways to keep herself busy and productive, so she decided to take up farming. Since then, her 25 x 20-metre residential stand has become a productive piece of land where she now produces a variety of vegetables, including okra, chilli and garlic.
“I had a year free of activities in 2021, trying to figure out what I could settle on while enjoying my retirement, but then boredom hit me so hard that I could not cope with it anymore. I would wake up in the morning and sit under the shade with nothing to do. Sometimes I would just wash and go to Thohoyandou, not knowing what I was going to buy. I was becoming disillusioned, no longer having that joy I thought I would have in my retirement. After a lot of contemplating, I remembered how much we used to enjoy going out into the fields to till the land. That is where the farming bug hit me, and the rest is now history.”
Tshivhase says that the transition from a bored pensioner to a farmer has been surprisingly smooth. “I started off by planting chillies and the harvest was huge, but I did not have a ready market. Then, in 2022, I experimented with garlic, but as a first timer, the harvest was not that good. After seeking advice from experienced garlic farmers, I tried again this year, and the results are overwhelming. My garlic is big, and the harvest is bountiful. I sell my produce to the Gauteng markets and locally and have some for my family,” she said proudly.
Her advice to other people is that anyone can produce something from their small piece of land. “Let us all stand up and plant something in our yards to ensure food security. Working on our small plots will also help us keep healthy,” she said.
