The Garden

According to the people in the community we planted our garden too late. Thankfully, they didn’t look at how we seeded! Jake cleared the land with the machete and I hauled the largest trees away and pulled up the majority of the vines. The rest of the material we left and planted the seeds among the rotting leaves and weeds.

They, on the other hand, have very clean garden without many weeds since they burn everything. Theirs does look neater and cleaner but…..

In 3 months we had a wonderful garden fed by the decomposing plants and all the kitchen waste. We planted everything much closer than they would and we had great growth and production.

We received our seeds from ECHO and planted Malibar Spinach, lettuce, and lablab beans. Unlike our neighbours we leave the lettuce in the ground and only harvest the leaves. They take everything out by the root when it is ready so we hope to teach them that the length of production can be lengthened just by harvesting only the leaves. The lablab beans, used for eating and for green manure, are a great topic of converstion.

Our tomatoes are producing enough fresh tomatoes for the two of us. The are getting ripe after all the rest in the community and again we will experiment next year with succession planting. The men who work for us are amazed that the corn was planted 3 or 4 inches apart in the row and still produced wonderful ears. They plant their corn at 1 meter spacing in the row with the rows 1 meter apart. The variety we planted is an open pollinated corn from ECHO and is quite tasty. Next time we hope to plant some good American sweet corn. When we ate the first corn the men were amazed that yellow corn was so sweet!

There will be great demand for the amaranth seed since Jake has been making that for breakfast laced with butter and brown sugar. The guys love it!

So we are very pleased with our first garden and people are coming to look at it. That is exactly what we want so we hope and pray that some of our ideas for producing food throughout the year will work.