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