News from Faith Nazarene

It has been a very productive two weeks!

On Saturday we finally constructed our first raised-bed garden and today we finally collected all of the resources we need to start planting and growing!

Getting the Lumber:
Dan and Jay went on an eventful trip to the lumber yard. We were able to get the lumber donated to our project, but unfortunately that meant we would be working with odd scraps of wood that were all different shapes and sizes. They attempted to get the wood home by strapping it to the roof rack on Meg and Jay's rental car. Upon piling the lumber onto the roof rack, it snapped! Luckily, Dan and Jay were able to recruit one of the lumber yard employees to drive the lumber to Faith Nazarene in his truck.

Molly and Julia getting a tour in the buggy from Mick

Constructing the Garden:

Dan nailing down gardening fabric with Myran and Adonias

Once we got the lumber we were ready to build...sort of. When we started construction on Saturday, our spirits were low.  To tell the truth, we were very unsure about our abilities to complete the bed. None of us have very much experience with construction (and by not very I much I mean NO experience). Not only were we inexperienced, but we were unsure that the lumber we had would be efficient for our purposes. We had already decided that our original plan to make two beds was unrealistic given our limited resources. The process started slowly...We were using borrowed tools: two hammers, and one saw so dull you could saw your skin without even nicking yourself. Luckily, Jay went out and bought us a new (sharp) saw and the work really picked up. We slowly started to feel more confident in our abilities and after hours of work and really bad sunburns (despite applying sunscreen) we were finally done! We were astonished by how well our finished product looked.

Finding Soil:


Julia with our brand new transplants!

 Originally, one of the women from the Faith Nazarene PTA, Mrs. Elia, had volunteered to let us dig up soil from her farm. The only catch was we needed a truck. After asking around for weeks if anyone could lend us a truck, we eventually decided that our best option was to carry the soil in bags in the back of Meg and Jay's rental car. When we called Mrs. Elia to come by her farm for the soil, she was unavailable and suggested we use the soil by the river instead (soil from construction projects around San Ignacio gets piled by the river). We took Mrs. Elia's advice and filled up several bags with the dirt from the river. We then brought them up to the school, where some of the kids from class offered to help us fill the garden with it. We laid down a short layer of sand at the bottom to allow for drainage. When we went to put in the soil we had taken from the river and were disheartened to see that our "soil" was really more like clay. That wouldn't do! So we decided to put off our soil issue for a little while.

Green house at Mick's organic garden

Acquiring Transplants:
Mick Fleming is an angel! We were lucky enough to have Mick Flemimg, the owner of Chaa Creek (the resort we stayed at for our first 4 days in Belize), donate some small, already blooming plants to our project. Julia, Molly, and Jay took a trip to Mick's organic garden in order to collect the transplants. Mick gave us a tour of his garden on a little buggy while Landy, his garden manager, boxed up some transplants for us. We got a great variety of plants including basil, mint, chaya, plantains, chocho, and coconut palms. He even gave us bags of his home-made compost (YAY, soil problem fixed!...with the addition of some soil we bought). The day was great and left us feeling ready for transplanting our plants into the garden with our class tomorrow!

-Molly N., Dan D., and Julia S.