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| Beds of okra with and without mulch |
It’s been a long time since I have written any thing lately,
mainly because I have been so busy and also because I took a short wonderful
vacation to Greece a couple months ago, but now is the time to rectify this.
What have I been so busy with? The past two months I have dedicated a large
portion of my time to officially starting the
Dental Bamtaare TooroDemontration Garden that I have mention a couple times before.
In the past few weeks, me and my work partners have cleared
the gardening space and double-dug and amended 22 gardening beds. We have
planted a vegetable nursery with bitter tomato, tomato, egg plant, hot pepper,
and lettuce and directly seeded cucumber, watermelon, okra, turnips, and mint. We
also have a small section of the live fence installed (a fence make of closely
spaced thorny trees to keep out animals).
What I am most excited about is the moringa bed that we
planted and have already been able to harvest!
Moringa
is an extremely nutritious tree that produces leaves that can be eaten raw or
made in to a powder as an additive to the normal food eaten here. It is drought
tolerant and does well in even in this arid climate. The first thing people
notice about the garden is the beautiful, lush moringa as it’s the greenest
thing probably in my whole village. Right now, my moringa is hanging up to dry
before I teach my work partners how to make the powder. You all should really
look up this tree.
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| Moringa bed before harvest |
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| Drying the moringa |
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| Moringa bed after harvest |
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| Turnips with and without compost |
Anyways, because the purpose of the garden is to demonstrate
improved gardening techniques, the garden is designed in a way to clearly show
side-by-side comparisons of a specific technique. For example, in the mulching
demonstration, there are two beds of okra right next to each other, one that is
mulched with grasses and weeds in order to keep in moisture and one that is
not. It is clear from looking as the two beds side-by-side that the mulched bed
retains more water and thus has to be
watered less frequently than the non-mulched bed. All of the beds in the garden
are designed in this fashion to give examples of various techniques including
double-digging and compost, spacing, staking certain vegetables like cucumbers
and tomatoes, etc.
When Ramadan (the Islamic month of fasting) is over and the garden
is looking pretty nice, we will have a large training where all of the
presidents of the women’s gardens in Dental’s 29 partner villages will come to
the garden and learn techniques to take back to their village. After the
training, I will visit each garden to see which techniques the women have
adopted and which techniques they have not in order to gauge how the successful
the training is as well as what techniques are both feasible and culturally
appropriate for time-constrained women.
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| Cute baby because no post should be without |
