Wichi school garden update Dec 21, 2011 (part 2)
Author: World Food Garden 12/30/2011 12:47:00 AM  |  View Comments

Meanwhile back at the Wichi School...

building boxes---

Of the 5 raised bed containers we will be building 2 of them are mostly complete now thanks to a MacGyver-esque German named Albie who dropped in on the Wichi scene for a week and helped me construct the structures out of many scraps of multi-length wood we got from Ravi's guesthouse. I sharpened my construction skills working with Albie who taught me how to saw wood without unnecessary struggle, and also to fuse the hole I'd created in the bed's waterproof liner by melting a plastic bottle over the hole, connecting the 2 plastics together, almost like welding but with plastic. It was so A-team. Albie and I completed the 2 raised-bed structures and also planned out 2 different methods for sub-irrigation systems in the boxes to save water.

Albie fitting together the puzzle of boards to build the second box. bags of compost from Amrit Sagar Eco-Center pictured left.

Wichi school garden update Dec 21, 2011 (part 4)
Author: World Food Garden 12/30/2011 12:47:00 AM  |  View Comments

Experimenting with different sub-irrigation ideas for the boxes:

(this idea of Albie's is to build an underground chamber of water separated from the soil by a layer of steel mesh which is supported by bricks. The solid above will wick the water into it and up to the plant roots. Then, when the water gets lower and no longer has contact with the soil above the screen, Albie has invented the water-bottle wicker- 4 inch slices of water bottle open at top and bottom holding a wicking soil inside. see below experiment of water-bottle wicker drawing water up through the compost medium from bottom opening to the top where it would then be in contact with garden soil.)

After some thought and tests it seems the safest bet will be to get ahold of some coco peat to supplement the already 5000 kilos of composted cow manure that we received from Amrit Eco-Project -- the wicking qualities of coco-peat seem to be comparable to that of peat moss which is a medium many use in their garden for its water retaining qualities. Coco Peat is also more sustainable than Peat Moss as Peat Moss is often harvested from bogs at rates faster than the rate that it produces itself. Coco peat seems to be readily available in the south and many companies send it over seas as export products but so far we are unable to find it around here. Ravi will call this week to order it from a southern company. The plants require one more phase of growing- pricking out into separate containers and then growing larger before going into the big garden so we have time to wait for the coco-peat. Tomorrow the kids will each get to transplant a few seedlings from the seed tray into their own separate cups which they will then take responsibility for. Then in a few weeks the kids will be responsible to plant the larger transplants into the garden beds.

Wichi school garden update Dec 21, 2011 (part 3)
Author: World Food Garden 12/30/2011 12:47:00 AM  |  View Comments

Sub-irrigation---After reading much online about Sub-irrigation systems for raised beds I decided that we should take that route at Wichi School garden for 2 reasons. 1) sub-irrigation systems conserve water and it only rains in Varanasi for a couple months a year. 2) we need to protect the roof and sub-irrigation systems provide a built in method for controlling water-runoff. I wanted to re-use a waste product for this so Albie and I spent a morning going around to different guesthouses and restaurants seeking all their left-over water bottles. Our bounty was too large to fit in an auto-rickshaw so we took a bicycle rick on what ended up a very long, but ever exciting journey through the chaotic streets out to the village.

Albie and I loaded down with recycled waterbottles for our nearly 2 hour trip via bicycle rickshaw to the village where Wichi School resides.

Wichi school garden update Dec 21, 2011 ( part 1)
Author: World Food Garden 12/21/2011 2:04:10 AM  |  View Comments

I've decided to stay in Varanasi for awhile and really 'dig' into this Wichi School garden project. My visa required me to step out of India for a bit since the last update so after a lovely month in northern Thailand I am now back in Varanasi and getting things going. In the meantime, the landlord of the school's building recently (and suddenly) needed the school building back which required a sudden change of plans and move to a new building a couple weeks ago. But in the end it works out well because the new building is a solid concrete structure with a strong rooftop for growing.

The new plan is to use 1/2 of the new building's rooftop to grow five 10x4 ft raised bed gardens (200 sq ft) and reserve the other part of the rood for other school stuff like yoga and performances. if the 200 sq ft doesn't seem like enough after awhile we can always ad some vertical garden areas.

seeds-----
After searching through the small selection of hybrid and seeds available in the Varanasi marketplace, we were finally able to procure some organic heritage seeds from an organization in Delhi called Navdanya started by famed seed activist, Vandana Shiva. Nandanya's goal is to preserve seed-saving the open-pollinated heritage seeds in India which are so threatened by the hybrids on the market.

I started some tomatoes, spinach (palak), and cucumbers a few weeks ago in the windowsill of my guesthouse.

seed tray= recycled plastic water bottles cut in 1/2 with holes poked in bottom for irrigation, filled with vermin-compost.

soil-----
Ravi and I found a few small 2 kilo bags of vermi-compost which were appropriate for starting seeds early on but weren't available in enough quantity to fill our garden beds so I went on a search for an organic farm to get compost from. The organic scene here is very new if not totally nonexistent and it was a difficult task to find an organic farm nearby. Asking around at the few restaurants that advertise organic food on their menu, it seemed that most of the actual organic stuff was the rice, grains, peanut butter, and stuff like that which comes from far away. I've yet to find actual organic produce available for the public as most of the farmers around here seemed to be hooked on chemical agriculture. But then I found an article online that mentioned an early-stage eco-project in Ramnagar, across the Ganges from Varanasi, so Ravi and I rode the motorcycle across the loosly boarded patchwork bridge to Ramnagar check it out. Low and behold it is an awesome sustainability-oriented project sponsored by the Aghori foundation in Sonoma, California, and they had piles and piles of beautifully composted cow manure available to deliver to the Wichi school project. The project, called Amrit Sagar Eco-Center seems to be well-funded and will serve as a learning center for villages, schools and visitors of all kinds. I look forward to watching what they pull off here in this very NOT-green city that sits alonside the polluted Ganges. A man named Girish gave us a tour of the project. Here are a couple of other things going on there:

Largest Solar Powered oven I've ever seen

Organic Dairy:



Bio-digester/ worm bim:

(this pool of murky liquid is the runoff from the dairy area and consists of cow manure and water. It is hosed into the tank which you can see just under the corragated tin in the picture. Then, in the methane gas naturally seperates from the sludge and rises through the pipe in the top that is run through the house and connected directly to the kitchen stove. Though different in structure it is the same bio-digester concept as the plastic tube method seen on my visit to EARTH University in CR. The brick structure to the left (above) contains muddy looking substance, possiblly post-gas-harvest sludge, and is a worm farm.)

Bee farm:

Girish and the bee man at the bee farm. Girish said they would be happy to help us start a bee farm at the school also...
And here is a pic of one of the bee boxes close up:

Thank you Amrit Sagar Eco-Center for the tour of your project! It is so nice to have a green ally in across the river!


Meanwhile back at the Wichi School...(continued next blog)

Wichi School garden, (Sept 2011), planning part 2
Author: World Food Garden 9/19/2011 12:40:35 AM  |  View Comments

Just because the walls at the school don't get enough sunlight doesn't mean we cant grow vertically!

So after figuring out that we would need 13 tons of soil to fill the boxes on the roof garden in order to grow the majority of the Whichi schools weekly diet, and factoring the weight of these boxes at the average weight of 80 pounds per cubic foot and we realized that this is too heavy for the building to handle since there are already complaints about cracks in the roof. So Ravi and I decided it would be best to build a smaller garden in the front courtway with the intention of it being more of a demonstration/ school project garden and less about trying to account for most of the school diet. The walls don't get enough sunlight so I was envisioning something simple like this:

(pic of Whichi entryway with photoshopped typical Square Foot Garden (garden image taken from an interesting garden blog here) 

But earlier today while leisurely thumbing through the copy of Despommier's  "The Vertical Farm, Feeding the World in the 21st Century" that my dad sent me , I came across a picture of a freestanding vertical hydroponics system and then remembered the peri-Urban hanging growbags I had seen at Earth University years ago and remembered that vertical gardening doesn't have to be up a wall.

Creating some sort of hanging growbag system like this should be able to really utilize the courtyard space and optimize production:

This is of course just a rough sketch of 2 different depth bags that could hang on top of each other. If we made them modular we could make a whole bunch and hang them in any number of combinations as well as move them around and up and down vertically to arrange for the optimum amount of sunlight to hit each bag according the light location. Since Jute is a super cheap readily available product here in India I will start my hunt tomorrow for the perfect Jute growbag (or perfect Jute growbag maker) to create the prototype. The school basement doubles as an skill training center for the mostly jobless women of the village so maybe if the prototype works out we can give the women additional work! (also envisioning an income for the WorldFoodGarden project, a so far income-less project...)