On the 5th of November, we began our garden bed project. The project entailed us building garden beds to grow food for our canteen to use. In addition to this, the project will serve as a learning experience where students from elementary to grade six will grow their own produce and learn to cultivate produce. Creating the garden beds in our own school, is a smaller vision of a bigger picture where we aim to use it as a example to encourage other schools to follow our lead. For the future we plan to build these garden beds in our local partner school Vidyaloka Vidyalaya, in encouraging them to also plant their own produce.
Mixing sand and cement to make concrete
The first day we focused on the secondary school garden bed. The process took as around 2 hours to build two layers of brick, which was slightly under the required amount of six brick layers. Overall we learned a lot of interesting building techniques and the art to brick laying.We learned the different ratio’s which goes into making the concrete for the foundation in addition to the motor for in between the bricks. It was quite relaxing and therapeutic to do the entire process, and the speed in which we did everything increased fairly quickly.Unexpectedly, there was a lot of physical activity to the entire process as we had to carry a lot of the materials and mix everything.
Primary school garden bed
On the 12th of November we began the second garden bed in primary side of school. The beds were slightly smaller in height, needing to be 4 layers to accommodate to the shorter children. Compared to the previous week, our speed in completing the garden beds was significantly quicker. We had a small group and this time collaborated and assigned different people to different roles which we found increased efficiency. Within the two ours given we finished the entire garden beds, with the exception of a final layer of plaster on the top. With this said it was interesting to see how just from one lesson prior, we took the knowledge we learned and applied it to the latest building.
Nearly finished garden bed