It's moringa flowering season, and that means… more oil

Moringa flowers in bloom at Raintree Farms in Uganda

These days, it is hard to predict what climate change is going to do next. Over the last few years, it's been difficult predicting and planning our seasonal activities because of wide swings of when seasons are supposed to change. We used to allow variances of a week or two to the beginning and end of a season. Now, seasonal transitions are commonly months early or months late. Fortunately, because we're tropical, it's a variance between dry and wet as opposed to having to deal with spring and fall seasons which shoulder hard winters.

That being said, we love both our seasons for very different reasons. We love rain season for obvious reasons: rain = growth and rejuvenation of our fields and crops. But we also love our long dry season for one particularly important reason: flowering season.

The moringa tree is a hearty drylands tree that blooms with the on-set of dry season. As soon as November/December rolls around and the long wet season starts coming to an end, the flowers kick into high gear. The dryer and hotter it gets, the more flowers there are. And the more flowers there are, the more seeds we expect from the trees. And more seeds equals to more oil - which is a very important ingredient to our products here at Qwezi Beauty.

Actually major ingredients benefit from our blooming trees: honey and oil. We have 18 traditional beehives that are fed by our annual December - March bloom. We harvest the honey every March - June and the seed harvest happens between June and September.

Last year, we lost the entire harvest because Mother Nature decided to have a tantrum and gift us with torrential rain and heavy winds that blew off ALL the flowers from the trees. The few that managed to fruit resulted in stunted, rotten seed pods. 2020 spared no one. Not even trees.

So, we're crossing our fingers in the hopes that the season will hold (even though we've already experienced a couple of heavy rains) and that our June harvest will be bountiful.

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