Project Update: Dental Bamtaare Tooro Demo Garden Underway!

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.

Moringa bed before harvest

Drying the moringa

Moringa bed after harvest

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.  

Cute baby because no post should be without

Project Update: Dental Bamtaare Tooro Demo Garden

I am in the process of starting a demonstration garden at the office space of my counterpart Kadiata Ba. She is the president of an organization called Dental Bamtaare Tooro which if Pulaar for Group for the Development of the Tooro (a region of northern Senegal where Taredji is located). Dental’s activities focus on the development of the Toroor region by focusing on women. They primarily operate a milk processing business (see more types of milk) but also host trainings in their 29 partner villages on Pulaar alphabetization, democracy and citizenship, animal husbandry, and now agriculture. With the help of Peace Corps/Senegal, we are building a garden to train women in the 29 villages Dental works with to do small-scale gardening.

So far, I have written a grant to get tools and fencing for the space, designed the garden space, and am now waiting on the money to arrive. In the mean time, I have started a tree nursery at my family’s compound. My host dad Ousman Ba also works at Dental and has a small section of fencing around a TV satellite for a TV that is broken in a house that has electricity that can only support one small light bulb. Because the trees have a very limited time frame for being seeded before the rainy season starts, it was important that we did not wait for the fencing to arrive before getting the trees going.

A majority of the trees will be used for a live fence: a fence made out of trees that is more reliable than “dead” fencing and cheaper if more labor-intensive. With the help of Peace Corps and Dental, I have chosen three different thorny species that can be pruned into a thorny hedge to keep out animals and children (both of which are my worst enemies when it comes to gardening).

In addition to the live fence, I am also including some small fruit trees and nitrogen-fixing trees for alley cropping, a practice of integrating trees between rows of planting in order to act as windbreaks, diversify your space, provide additional income, and/or improve the soil. For fruit trees, we are using papaya, guava, and pomegranate because they don’t take up very much space and start producing fruit quickly.

In total, we have about 300 trees that will be used for a 59x26 meter space. I have just seeded the nursery and will keep you updated on the progress of the garden. 

Project Update: Podor Hospital Garden

One of the projects I am working on is a hospital garden in the city of Podor (see more pictures of Podor), which is about 20 to 25 km from Taredji depending on who you ask and is right on the Senegal-Mauritania border. Podor is a much more metropolitan city than Taredji; there are fancy hotels, internet cafes, a small amount of mainly French tourists, paved sidewalks, restaurants and bars, an old colonial fort, and a big hospital. (Side note: If you ever want to check out the weather in my area, Podor is the only place nearby that you can find online)

The garden was started by another volunteer who used to live in Podor and has now completed his service. There are two full-time gardeners who run the project; I am only there for technical assistance and come out to the garden once a week to check things out. The vegetables that are grown here supplement the hospital food bill that is quite large due to the number of overnight patients. The garden is watered by hand from a water basin that is filled everyday by a motor pump from the river.

Right now is the end of the cold, dry season, which is the prime veggie-growing season in Senegal. By the end of March or so, we should have carrots, eggplant, tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, bitter tomato, melons, and squash. I have been trying to work with the gardeners on better spacing techniques, the importance of weeding, composting, and planning for hot season gardening. Hot season gardening is something that not many people in my area do in my area because temperatures can get up to 140°F, but we are going to try to find crops that can withstand the heat including heat-tolerant lettuce varieties, tomatoes, hot pepper, and radish. We are also trying to incorporate more fruit trees into the space like papaya, guava, and pomegranate.

In the more distant future, we plan on potentially having some training sessions at the garden for interested gardeners in Podor as well as for some young men from the military compound nearby that want to start a garden of their own. Besides that, I hang around the garden, help out with weeding or other garden activities, play with our garden cat, and watch the comings and goings of the hospital. 

Bitter Tomato 

Some shabby looking moringa trees. The leaves are packed full of vitamins.