The earth laughs in flowers (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
My green thumb has almost always been a black thumb of death, so when I decided to join the gardening after school activity in school I was hoping I would be able to learn how not to kill every plant that crosses my path.
The first few classes we were mostly peeling seeds in order to make a natural insecticide, it left our hands smelling sour. The actual seed smells spicy with a touch of almond and maybe even cinnamon, a very special smell indeed. The idea is to make it into an oil and then dissolve it so that we can spay it onto the plants, but it is not so easy to get oil out of seeds. Then we imagined that it would work if we used another oil and 'infused' it with the grounded seeds. We haven't tried it yet as soon after we began to plant seeds.
The first seeds we planted didn't survive, most of them did not even sprout. But the second batch managed great and they are growing strong and beautiful.
Picture credits to my friend Sara who is also in gardening.
These plants are not going directly to the earth, actually it's most likely they will never be planted on earth. My former biology teacher has a hydroponics greenhouse were we will be letting the plants grow. Hydroponics is a fairly simple system to understand. You have a tube that is connected to a water tank and a pump. The pump will make the water flow across the tube and back into the tank. The plants will be placed in small racks in hole on the tube. And special salts with nutrients for the plants are dissolved in the water. Simple, right? Here is a diagram for you to understand better, it is slightly different to what I have described but it is the same principle.
The water tank is supposed to last a long time, but i believe we will be refilling it every one or two months. The only problem is that each one of us had a tray of plants (around 7 people with at least 30 plants each) and there is not enough space in the hydroponics to put them all, so we are cleaning some of the plant beds in the garden to plant them and see if they survive.
This is my friends instagram. Credits go to Sebastian Fleming, Co-Editor (because he insisted on not being cast sole Editor) in Chief of our school newspaper,The Roar, and Maria Fernanda Zaldívar for the Instagram page.
The plants im growing are lettuces similar to the roman lettuce, but i was not able to find the proper translation, so I will post a picture with my next reflection and the grown lettuces.
So another one of the main reasons I joined this activity is my concern on the food supply of the world. I'm not vegan or vegetarian, and I'm not planning on being, but I do feel there is a social responsibility of finding resourceful ways of feeding oneself and others. After watching Interstellar, the new almost apocalyptical movie with Matthew McConaughey, this became an even more urgent thought on my mind. I feel humans (by this is mean those who are privileged enough to have food on their table every day) are not conscious of how much we rely on food and that eventually, maybe not for my generation, there will be no food left to feed the billions of people on the planet. This is why a simple structure like a hydroponic constructions that produce so much with little effort sound like the ideal solution that is possible now.
engaged with issues of global importance
C: 13/50, A: 13/50, S: 5/50, T: 31