The garden - new and improved

The rainy season has started again and my women's group has taken on the challenge of creating a bigger and better garden than last year.  While Mosiah and I were home I was able to gather a great collection of seeds (vegetables and a wide variety of medicinal plants) as well as some books on gardening and seed collection, thanks to the support of our garden savvy mothers and my grandma!

We're a couple weeks behind for the normal planting time but Guatemala has a very long growing season so we should be ok. We can expect the temperature to stay pretty consistent for the next 5 months and rain every afternoon. We picked a spot on Delila's (the leader of the group-see picture below) property and started clearing the land about 2 weeks ago. With salons (hoes) and wheelbarrows we cleared the trash and weeds from the perspective garden and then churned the soil. This week we covered the garden with cal (lime) to disinfect the soil and tomorrow the women will be putting up our newly purchased chicken wire fence! Then Tuesday we plant!!

Last November I organized a field trip with the women's group to visit a medicinal garden in San Juan la Laguna three hours from Cantel. It was a great experience and inspiration for the group but I know that many of women felt that creating a garden like the one in San Juan was something they could never achieve. Now with hard work and support their goal is becoming more atainable. There is a lot of work yet to be done but we've come so far since last year and we're all excited about the outcome of this new project.



Dalila