Practical Class Projects

By Sara:

Here are pictures of some of the things I've done with the students in my practical class at the college.

We built a clay oven, using the materials available to us here (for example, this one used really big stones for the base whereas the ones built in Uganda used small bricks).  We haven't used it yet; we're waiting for the clay to dry before we take the rocks and the sand out from inside.

I did a class about making compost and how it is helpful, so we built a compost pile.  Next term, we'll use the compost in a kitchen garden.

Then, we have our demonstration garden where we're comparing conservation agriculture with the conventional way of growing potatoes.  We have potatoes planted with mulch around them, which look the best:

Here are the conventionally planted potatoes. You can see how they are not as big as the ones planted in mulch:

And then, we intercropped some potatoes with peas to try out another way of doing conservation agriculture.  Unfortunately, after I took this picture, it seems that the college sheep got into our garden and ate all the pea plants, so it looks like we're not going to see how that system would work.

Even though we haven't harvested yet, the students were impressed at how well the potatoes were doing with the mulch and some said they wanted to go home and try it out in their own garden.