Grace Covenant World Garden
May 12, 2014
Mark, Jenny, Keila, and Annika Bent-Hare: Haiti and the Dominican Republic
We send our greeting to you and your family.
This is an open letter to you and your family and to our Church family to share our experience in growing vegetables.
This
past weekend we started a vegetable tire garden at our church campus
patterned after your Yard Garden work in Haiti. We hope to add other
vegetable growing methods from the Global Community to our “World
Garden” as the growing season progresses. Your blog and YouTube videos
have inspired us and instructed us as we’ve started this
multigenerational venture.
Our gardeners are the children, youth, families, and friends somehow involved with Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church Community.
Our goals—
- To
have hands-on learning about how vegetables are grown by folks from
other places and in turn learn about our neighbors and friends around
the world.
- To create
interest and support for folks working to make the world a better place,
and maybe – just maybe – to further their efforts.
- To
document and share our experience, exploring “appropriate technologies”
that may be useful in small-scale vegetable growing with limited money.
- To
build our knowledge and experience so that we (children and adults) can
form “Road to Life” crews working to help others grow vegetables.
What we did—
- Built two benches for our tire garden.
- Inverted (flipped) twelve tires.
- Made two barrels of alternative char from agricultural waste – corncobs and shucks. This will become Bio Char.
- Mixed soil: 2 parts soil and compost + 1 part coarse soil/sand + 1 scoop Bio Char for the tire planters.
- Filled 6 of the tires and planted tomatoes, Bok Choi, and squash.
- Started
assembling a drip irrigation system for one of the tire benches with 5
gallon buckets, plastic tubing and wood screws – a work in progress.
Our
plan is to post our work and share it with you, your family, and our
own members as one way to become more aware of the work of the larger
church — near and far. Other photos are posted on--
Blessed are those who help to put food on our tables – Amen.
