Friday, October 13, 2006

About Our Permaculture Workshop (by James)

We recently completed a five day permaculture workshop in Dodoma. We were accompanied by two counterparts from our village who learned alongside us so that when we return we can work together and communicate more easily with our villagers.
The teacher of the workshop focused on biointensive agriculture or gardening near the home for family consumption. The people in our village are very use to farming 10 or more acres each season for profit. Biointensive permaculture is a much smaller scale and its primary goal is to produce healthy vegetables for the family.
The specifics of bioentensive include:
1: preparing very rich compost from dead leaves or grasses, green materials, manure, woodash, and water. All of these materials are easily availabe to most Tanzanian farmers at little or no cost.
2: preparing beds 1 meter or less wide, so that the farmer can strattle it, and at least 5 meters long. The main difference to ordinary gardening is that the beds must be 2 feet deep. We learned an easy, though initially time consuming, method to achieve this with only a hoe. Dont step on your beds ever.
3: Plant the plants in a diagonal and spaced appropriately so that the leaves of one plant just touch the leaves of its neighbor thus creating a canopy. This process keeps the sun off the soil thus retaining moisture, nitrogen and Carbon Dioxide
4: we also discussed companion planting and more specifics to what to plant.

If you are interested chech out "How To Grow More Vegetables" by John Jeavors
It definitely takes a little work but it will produce the best healthiest vegetables you can imagine.

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