The long-awaited Rains have come! A few showers a few weeks ahead of time began to soften up the parched, baked soil. Then the rains started in earnest! Interestingly, and very thankfully, most of the heavy rain often happens at night! Rarely is it raining at 7 AM when I head to school! Here's a photo I took one day as I walked to church. Not only was it slow-going due to the muddy "sidewalk", but whenever a motorbike came along, using the sidewalk because it was less muddy than the road, protocol demanded I get off the sidewalk, stepping into deeper mud, to allow him to pass!I was grateful it was easy to wash the mud off my Chacos sandals!
By early April, my Grade 5 students had finished preparing the soil of our garden. We'd hauled in some well-composted soil for our "nursery bed". Under the supervision of SEEK head gardener, we dug trenches, and then added nutrients by layering kitchen vegetable scraps, then manure, then ash, and finally leguminous clippings (to enrich the soil with nitrogen), before replacing the 'top' soil. Here we are working (and playing!) hard to prepare the soil of our garden, and... aren't these kids SO cute!!!
On the first day of the 2-week break between trimesters, most of my Grade 5 class were real troopers!! They showed up at the garden for planting our garden!! We'd worked so hard to prepare for planting, making raised beds, which had started out as trenches the students eagerly dug, taking turns with heavy, sharply-pointed picks and spades! [For this job it helped that I had 20 preadolescent boys showing off their strength!] On Planting Day different groups of students were in charge of planting different seeds. In our special 'nursery bed', full of well-composted soil, we planted tomatoes & kale. Then beets, bush beans, cabbage, spinach and cilantro went into the raised beds. One student had brought in some watermelon seeds, so he and his buddies quickly prepared more beds for those seeds. As we left on our 'holiday', we trusted God to do the real work of turning those seeds into plants. How wonderful it was to return 2 weeks later to see that everything (except the beets) had germinated well and was beautifully growing!
Then, how disappointing this week, to find that the goats had managed to burrow under the fence... their favorite food must have been the tender tomato leaves; all they left of the tomato plants were the stems! We got those holes fixed, and then discovered smaller holes after the chickens apparently squeezed through... to munch on the new cabbage leaves; I hope I barricaded those holes well-enough to last the weekend. Meanwhile, we've been needing to work hard carrying water to these seedlings, especially the kale we just transplanted. This week in science class we've been gathering data on weather... including using a home-made rain gauge & wind sock. Only one day was there any measurable rain, and that was less than 1 cm, so we are, indeed, ready for more rain to fall!!!
