This week's theme are living things, though I guess as an environmental education volunteer, most projects are probably going to be kind of related to this.
One of the projects that I'm working on is organic fertilizer using worms. I have a box full of worms in my house. I started out with a handful of worms and wet cow poop and with all of my fruit and vegetable waste and worm reproduction, I now have a box full of beautiful dirt and some worm juice that can be used as a fertilizer, and too many worms. So my goal is to get the kids in my eco-club to build a huge worm box at the school for all of the students to throw in their vegetable and fruit scraps. The worms make good feed for chickens or for fishing (a common activity for the boys around here). And throwing vegetable and fruit waste in the worm box prevents disease vectors like flies and rats hanging around the house in search of food.
Living thing #2: home garden. My parents and Carol can vouch for me when I say there is really no space to have a garden at my house. Recently my women's savings group got a couple of trainings on house gardens and now they need to step it up and make the gardens. So I decided that to get the fire going under their butts I needed to do something. So I took this tiny little scrap of land that I have on the cliffside of my house, cleared it of a rotting banana tree and weeds and am prepping it for a small home garden. I need to put up gutters on the roof of my house so the runoff doesn't kill the plants and I need to put up chicken wire to prevent chickens from coming in, but otherwise I'm going to start planting. I've got plenty of fertilizer (thanks to my wormies!), and will hopefully show the women in my group that it can be done, and anywhere. Maybe I'll get some worm boxes going at their houses too!
Living things #3: We're working on getting some trees planted. There is a nursery that gives volunteers a really cheap rate for trees ($0.15 a tree whereas normally it is about $4.00 a plant). The problem is that it is located decently far away. But I worked it out and if I can get help from the community for transportation costs, it would be worth the trip. So I've been going door to door in my community asking if they are interested in buying some trees. I ask for a dollar for transportation and then they just have to pay for the trees, still a really cheap deal. And some of the trees they can buy are fruit trees - the most desirable around here. So, it isn't a reforestation campaign since they aren't really planting trees where they are really needed, but there are still plants being planted. And with my eco-club, each kid is getting two trees (using funds from a grant that we just received!), and they have to adopt them and take really good care of them. And we'll also plant some of the trees that have made it in the nursery that we created.
Living things #4: With the arrival of the rainy season a ton of trees have started producing fruits, a lot of them quite foreign to me. In the last two weeks I have tried: jocote japonés, caspilo, nance, paterna, and manzana rosa. I have yet to try: pepeto, maracuyá, mamey, and sunsa. It has been quite the experience trying these various fruits and trying to describe the flavors. I'm going to start taking a few more photos to give you a better sense of the fruits. The fruit below is called paterna. You eat the white fleshy part covering the green and red seed. It is sweet and tasted a little like Christmas. Here they cook the seed thing to and throw them in beans or eggs. I haven't tried them yet...I'll let you know.
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