ambercasey - Jardin Del Puente

The Garden At El Puente.

r the last 2 months we have been throwing around ideas about how to start a community garden here in Granada, at El Puente. And today we actually started work on the garden.

Each garden plot will have different types of vegetables, fruit or herbs in it. And we are hoping also to have one of the 6x10 garden plots to use as a model garden to teach the Nicaraguans.

Also today, we put in the underground watering system, consisting of PVC pipe running along the length of each garden plot with turn off valves. The turnoff valves are then connected to hoses running inside of the garden plot. The hoses have holes in them. This is hooked up to the water system at El Puente, and we can just go out and turn on the water. The water will go into the PVC pipe and out the holes in the hose- watering the plants effectively. This helps especially since there is no rain during this season in Nicaragua.

The lasagna garden is an idea from Patricia Lanza, who wrote a book called The Lasagna Gardener, about how to make a no till, no weeding garden. Its useful in places where its hard to plow, has terrible dirt, or you just don't want to do any work. (haha). In this case, the place where we are planting a garden is full of trash (barbed wire, glass, plastic, etc) and the dirt here is TERRIBLE to plant on. So we build on top of the ground. It involves layering organic material on top of each other.

This is our watering sytem. Once the garden layers are on, the hoses will be attached to the PVC pipe and put into the garden plots.

The garden will be a 30x40 ft plot with 8 rectangular garden plots inside of it (6x10ft little garden plots) with 3 ft paths all around it.

This is Marcel. He is one of the workers here at Puent He helped us dig the trenches for the PVC pipe.

This is the garden plot. In the background behind the tree you can see our compost pile. Every organic waste matter we have (from food, paper products, etc) is composted in the blue tubs and then will be put on the garden as one of the layers.