Welcome to the 10th Anniversary of the Bolivar Garden
Welcome to another year of the Bolivar Garden. We start by recognizing that the garden is celebrating its 10th anniversary: ten years ago I was walking in the space where the garden is with Dr Nagy, proposing a garden being situated there to encourage the use of an outdoor lab, a place where students and the community could come together to learn about the environment. It was also designed so that people from our community could come together and share their knowledge and teach each other.
The sloped area, behind the new Dr Nagy Sports Complex, bounded by cancha dos and the small tranche of the Rio Pance was a blank canvas. The first group of students worked on developing a terrace for the garden. In the second year we sowed the seeds of Don Simón Coffee, planting over 200 trees of which we still have 153, that produce our high quality coffee. The Don Simón Coffee Club is longest running club in the High School, selling its coffee and chocolate products at the school´s Farmer´s Markets, and always having a stand at the Verde 5K Race.
Since those early years the garden has
developed with the addition of a greenhouse structure designed by students
which we use to grow tomatoes, the river beds which we protect with Nacadero
trees, that provide vital nutrients for our compost.
The coffee plantation has been grown using
agroforestry principals and is an example of a multi-strata system. We have
planted cacao trees which are now producing cacao that we transform into Chocolate
de la mesa.
Since its inception a key part of the garden has been to link members of the Bolivar Community through Bolivar Garden Saturdays. Volunteers come to learn about coffee, cacao, compost and to share time
together.
As part of the garden and Agricultural Plant Sciences Class over the last 10 years we have had many field trips including to tea plantations, sweet potato farms, Trebol Panela industrias and Agroforestry Conferences at UniValle. We represented the school at COP 16 when the event was held in Cali.
This year we continue with the garden project. Following a very promising meeting with the school director, Dr Gilway, head of operations, Diana Toro, the school engineer, Eng. Diego Arias and Dr Roberts, head of high school, it was decided that during this year, the 10th Anniversary of the Bolivar Garden, that the school will institutionalize the garden, providing it with a specific budget and setting out new developments for the garden that the school will fund.
This will include a yearly budget for consumables such as organic fertilizers, compost, seedlings, seeds, and equipment, and development projects such as augmenting the shed with extra roofing and fencing to produce an outdoor classroom, re-establishment of the terrace, bridges to cross our tranche of the Rio Pance, a new BBQ area for the community to enjoy, a live fence of fruit trees in front of the Nagy Sports complex and our own dedicated member of the gardening staff – Mr Carlos Castillo – to help with the development of the garden, teaching students basic skills and sharing his vast knowledge of agriculture and gardening.
These projects will be fazed in the upcoming years.
In this 10th year of the Bolivar Garden, we plan to continue to support Chris´s Kitchen with produce from the garden; we are going to set up an irrigation system so we can water our cacao trees, terrace and greenhouse; we have a planned experiment on traditional maize to investigate density of planting, and we wish to upgrade the greenhouse with the continued cabling so we can grow tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and horticultural products there.
We will continue growing and managing coffee and cacao as our staple produce, introducing more vegetables such as maize, beans, squash in our terrace and tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and lettuce in our greenhouse.