This week our new terrace got a severe beating from a minor landslide which deposited a lot of rocks and soil debris onto the terrace. Not only was material pushed through the terrace, the result were at least five plastic posts that had been cemented in blocks completely fractured, the door to the terrace broken […]
On Saturday the 23rd November, Dr Sonia Ospina and her 20 agroforestry students from UniValle, sede Palmira, came to visit Colegio Bolivar to learn about the two agroforestry systems we have in place and to visit a functioning composting area run by our very own Carlos Castillo – second right hand man to the garden, […]
The Colegio Bolivar Sustainability leader, Jessica Gomez, a long-time friend and supporter of the Bolivar Garden approached me at the start of the year asking if the Agricultural Plant Science class and Bolivar Garden would represent the school at the COP 16 international conference on biodiversity held in Cali during the outreach presentations to the […]
Following the heartbreaking discovery that we have been attacked by broca, Hypothenemus hampei, we decided to quantify the extent of the damage and use it as a great learning opportunity. Students were asked to collect coffee and take samples of 100 beans and count the number that were affected by Broca. A startlingly high percentage […]
Data has been collected by students during many sessions of the class. It has been pleasing to see how students have taken to this task, taking responsibility to complete it and ensure the map is up to date with accurate and correct data. First results indicate that we have over 100 different types of tree […]
One of the founding purposes of the Bolivar Garden was to build community and break down barriers in our school, through vocational learning – learning from others through a hands-on approach. Since the first ideas of a Bolivar Garden started in 2015 it has been imperative that we have never lost site of this goal. […]
It has been a full academic year and we have still not completely finished the greenhouse project – but we are very very close. The greenhouse almost completed. The netting was pretty much in place and only some small areas needed to be fixed! With the structure up and some beds in the greenhouse, we […]
After a year of laying the terrace fallow, we were welcomed back to a vegetated terrace, with lots of grass binding the ground, a compacted soil structure, and a patch of overgrown citronella. The students were duly assigned to specific jobs: digging the terrace, sifting stones, breaking up the soil structure and removing the citronella […]
In the past few months, the garden has been shaping up nicely, having coffee, garlic, ornamental tomatoes, carrots, citronella, papaya, plantain, and other plants that this class has planted. However, there was an extreme need for shade along all of the garden, where plants were receiving constant sun. For this reason, the class previously incorporated […]
We want to protect our stream banks and also capture nutrients that either pass through the soil or pass over the soil, due to run-off, before nutrients go into the stream. This stops eutrophication, the addition of nutrients to streams, rivers, waterways that can lead to an increase in algae forming. Whilst we do not […]
![[:en]COP 16: an opportunity to spread the word of the Bolivar Garden and Don Simón Coffee[:]](https://www.colegiobolivar.edu.co/garden2025/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/IMG_20241028_182115785_HDR-scaled-1.jpg)
