During the past year the Bolivar Garden and the associated agricultural science elective have gone from strength to strength.
Last year we had our first produce, some cobs of corn, that we passed onto the school workers cafeteria.
The Bolivar garden weekends, run each month, have been attended by parents and relatives of our students, students at the school, and those involved with the school´s Social Service education requirement, that is run by the counselling department. During the Bolivar Garden weekends, we have planted coffee, maintained it, dug terraces, cleaned the garden of weeds, planted seeds, worked organic matter into our beds and had a lot of fun in the outdoors.
Over 115 coffee plants were grown from seed, see Santiago Negret’s blog about that here, and planted in the garden. In order to provide them with shade we planted plantain between the coffee plants. Students learnt how to cut a sucker from an existing plantain plant and plant it.
This season we have been recuperating and maintaining the first terrace that was built, see Nicolas Uribe’s blog about this, and have planted maize (corn) and continue to plant maize in the terrace – Pablo Florez has written an interesting article about this.
Javier Covarrubius and Felipe Olano have written an article about how we have been trying to grow beans at the garden, and Mariana Zornosa and Tomas Rosales have detailed how we are preparing to grow and plant more coffee and build some new structures in the garden.
Asopadres kindly donated a new cage for the purpose of composting the schools organic waste. We have started to use this and students in the 8th grade have been particularly active about how we can use the organic waste to produce compost for the garden.
Last October we had a successful field trip to Agricola Himalaya’s tea plantations in Chicoral, and visited their processing factory to see how the tea we enjoy, Te Hindu, is produced. Students had a great visit and learnt a lot about practical agriculture in Valle del Cauca. Tom Rosales has written about this visit.
We are maintaining the local environment, and managing plants to produce organic produce whilst learning about agriculture. Juan Jose Gomez details how we are reducing the potential effect of coffee borer on our new coffee plants.
We are also planning for the future: students from the 8th grade are proposing the use of ram-pumps to move water from the stream next to the garden to the water tanks that are above the garden. These tanks usually collect run-off water from the school, however, during the drier parts of the year we need to fill the tanks with water so that we can irrigate the garden. Additionally, we wish to plant more fruit trees, increase the number of coffee trees that we are planting, plant more vegetables, recuperate the second terrace, and build capacity amongst our students regarding some basic gardening and agricultural practices.
We invite all people to come and visit the garden during our Bolivar Garden Sessions. There is always something to do, and we welcome advice and donations in terms of time, knowledge, and gifts.
