There were plenty of rainy months in Nyandarua with only a handful of dry ones. Nyandarua has a one season harvest. While in Gikuyu they plant their maize and harvest twice a year, Nyandarua maize crop takes almost one year from planting to harvesting.
Other produce that Nyandarua is famous for are potatoes and vegetables. The farms are fertile and the harvests are plentiful. It was not unusual to find one stalk of maize holding five huge healthy ears of corn. On our farm, we had 5 acres of maize, 3 acres of potatoes, 4 acres mix of cabbage, sukuma, spinach, carrots and peas. All these vegetables were ready for harvest at the same time. Every home you went to, they had excess harvests of the same produce.
There was never a good market for the produce. The local market was filled to capacity with local farmers jostling for space to display their produce. Our towns were so small and the working population with an income was so small they barely put a dent on those mountains of produce the farmers brought to the market. The produce being highly perishable, the farmers gave it away at the end of a disappointing day at the market. Most farmers resulted to using the produce to feed their animals than letting it rot on the farms.
The interior roads were impassable during the rainy season even tractors with their four wheel drive and huge tyres often ended up stuck in ditches. Some few traders from big towns like Nairobi, Thika, Nakuru and Nyeri, came in their big trucks, their tyres in chains (Sheni) and braved the muddy roads to the interior. Farmers were ready to give their produce to anyone who could take it, and those middlemen knew that. They paid low prices for choice potatoes that they filled in bags and extended them outwards by weaving a sisal net to hold an equal amount of potatoes as what was already in the bag. It was laughable to see them count those extended strange looking bags as one, while in all earnesty, each contained potatoes for two bags. The farmers watched helplessly as they got ripped off, but they had zero options.
