Fight Malnutrition in Rural Guatemala

In November until January the students are  on holidays, so nobody here to nibble around  the garden, but all our veggie beds are full of vegetables. 

Do you know why we’ve been planting so many to harvest in this period?

Because our goal with these veggies, will be to save seeds !

By saving seeds we aims to be more self-sufficient, and also to work with nature by selecting the seeds that could work best in our environment.

Vandana Shiva, philosopher and physicist, explains “[saving seeds] is a convergence of human intelligence and nature’s intelligence.” Humans have been selecting seeds for thousands of years, to choose that would fit best and their needs (productivity, taste, appearance, etc.) and their environment (cliimate, soil, tolerance to pest, disease, drought, floods, etc.). To make it short and a tiny philosophical: “The seed in its essence is all of the past evolution of the Earth, the evolution of human history, and the potential for future evolution. The seed is the embodiment of culture because culture shaped the seed with careful selection—women picked the best, diversified. So from one grass you get 200,000 rices.” (Vandana Shiva).

This is why we are basically waiting for all these perfectly beautiful and ready vegetables, to grow too big, loose their potential taste, make flowers, then produce seeds that we will harvest, dry and keep in our seed bank.

One seed we are very excited about is a slow to bolt cilantro seed. Cilantro is a difficult plant to harvest as it often goes to seed before you can eat it. We are trying this slow to bolt cilantro seed in the Guatemalan highlands to see if it will grow well here. It has been amazing. The cilantro plants have not bolted for several weeks and are so tall. Ironically, we are now waiting for it to go to seed. We are planning on using this plant and it seeds to help generate a cash crop to keep this project sustainable.

January is here and the students are  back to helping, tasting and learning in the garden.

We have started hands on workshops with different elementary school grades.

The grade 3 students are planting 3 different types of bush beans. We are experimenting to see which one germinates first, which variety produces the most beans and how quickly each one produces beans. The class is broken into 3 groups and each group is germinating seeds in a petri dish so they can observe the whole germination process.

The grade 5 students are also working with legumes. They started by making little pots using toilet rolls.We then added the wonderful bokashi compost soil made in our biofactory.The class is divided into 5 groups, each group is sewing a different type of legumes. We are experimenting with organic, non GMO seeds. We want to see which seeds grow best in the highlands as well as add some biodiversity. The students will be collecting seeds from their plants enabling this project to be sustainable. Of course, they will also get to eat their yummy beans.

 We also are teaching about the importance of organic gardens and companion planting. We  had 2 of our sponsored students collecting marigold seeds. We are planting marigolds in our garden to attract beneficial insects and repel harmful ones, especially around tomato plants.

Our future goal is to produce enough wonderful soil and seeds so that the children can start home gardens.