The debut of Gardening Club

Last semester, Jose Manuel Ceppi, Rafael Grados and I started working on the middle school garden. We found out about the garden through Ms. Jana who is the middle school science teacher in charge of it. We started taking care of what was there by weeding, harvesting and watering. We didn’t find it so interesting at the beginning because we didn`t have any real good ideas of what to do with the garden. Weeks passed and we continued doing the same thing; weeding, harvesting and watering. At one point I started asking myself, what are we doing in this garden picking weed and planting seeds? Is there any use for this?

As if my doubts weren’t enough to discourage me from staying on the gardening activity, snails came every night to eat what we had planted. Plagues of white flies invaded the tomato plants. The soil just didn’t have the right level of humidity and nutrients to sustain a healthy plant growth. Our ignorance in this subject was definitely affecting our outcomes. We felt useless having this lack of experience in gardening.

Fortunately, to encourage us, Ms. Jana and Mr. Ensley the English taught us some practical skills to get the job done more easily. We were introduced to many ways of planting and caring for the plants. We learned how to make the tomatoes grow faster by cutting off its flowers, how to clone basil to produce many more plants and how to germinate seeds. With a few days of gardening every Wednesday, we had gained a lot of knowledge on how to properly manage the garden.

Finally I started feeling we were accomplishing something. If we had already learned all this in just a few weeks, there was definitely much more to learn over the year. I was intrigued by all the strategies we could use to increase production and there were yet many more to try. Research was a fundamental job to keep on progressing now that we needed more specific facts on how to improve the garden. I paid meticulous attention to the basic needs of the plants. Now that I had cleared off most of my doubts and was ready to put more effort I knew there was a great project on the way.

                                     To be continued................

-Mateo Mulder

Go to Part 2: The Rise of the Gardening Club

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