In planning for the upcoming Bolivar Garden I went to the garden to see the progress of the remaining beans only to find that a massive trunk of a Chiminango tree had broken and smashed into the terrace, destroying the roofing, plastic posts and fencing, plus beans and plants. The destruction was huge, not only […]
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 […]
With our newly established Terrace my students and I set about the task of making the terrace ready to grow the three sisters, maize, beans and pumpkins, an indigenous method to grow crops together. Firstly, we had to calculate how many mounds we would put in the terrace. At a spacing of 0.5m from the […]
The very first thing that was done in the garden, almost 10 years ago now, was to build our two level terrace. We did this by levelling a piece of land and enclosing it with rocks. Since its inception we have grown maize, sweetcorn, beans and casava on the terrace, but we have always been […]
With the main structure now finished all that is left to do is to add netting to the sides and to the roof, cement the netting in, so that animals cannot get into the terrace and add a door. The school´s gardeners helped with putting up the netting and adding cement to the […]
Once posts were in place and checked, Gustavo Ledesma, myself and a couple of BGVs set about the task of putting up our roof, made of PVC! This was completed in one Saturday morning. Placing of the netting took quite a bit more time.
With the posts in place and the majority of the terrace levelled, Diego Arias and Carlos Castillo checked that all was going well. When all posts were securely put in place, a friend of the garden, Gustavo Ledesma and I, along with the help of some BGVs, helped put up the roof structure. […]
We are now ready to level the terrace and begin the process of putting posts into place. We are planning on using 18 plastic posts, digging holes and securing them with cement. This process was helped by a number of mingas with the school gardeners helping our students move the project forward. Digging holes was […]
In order to re-build the terrace we first had to breakdown what we already had. That meant dismantling the existing rock wall, weeding by digging weeds into the earth and levelling the terrace. This work took lots of weeks, lots of class time, was hard but incredibly rewarding. Phase one – complete! […]
Our terrace has been fallow for a year during the time we have been working on our cacao plantation. Now we plan to enlarge, improve and enclose the terrace. The first steps were to mark out the terrace and determine its new size. With students and volunteers we delimited the boundaries of the new […]
