Gako Organic Farming Training Centre

Cindy at enclos*ure10 Comments
Soon-to-be Peace Corps volunteers before their swearing-in.

There’s a swearing-in ceremony for new Peace Corps Volunteers taking place in our garden right now, which has caused me to stop moving plants around long enough to write a new post.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend organized an outing to a wonderful place called the Gako Organic Farming Training Centre (GOFTC) — located just on the edge of the Kigali city limits.  Our host and guide there was Richard Munyerango, founder and Managing Director of the center and a tremendous source of knowledge on small farming techniques.

Since 2000, GOFTC has trained over 60,000 farmers from Rwanda, Burundi, and the D.R.Congo, among them demobilized soldiers, disabled persons, women’s groups, and many participants in the Send a Cow and OXFARM programs.

Our first stop of the morning was a small house surrounded by a fenced demonstration garden of about an acre, which Richard had created to show how a small holding could feed a family.


The first thing we noticed as we passed through the gate was the paved trench that directs the street’s rainwater runoff into the property.


The water passes through a series of screens (or would were this not the dry season). . .


and is saved in an underground tank.


To the right of the trench and filters are mounded rows of vegetable crops. (Click any photo to enlarge it. To scroll through all the enlarged images, click on ‘Continue reading’ below and on any thumbnail in the gallery.)


Just beyond the water tank and planting beds is a raised rabbit hutch, looking a bit like a an ark.


Behind the hutch are stalls for a cows or some goats, but neither were in residence when we visited. The center raised chickens until the Avian Flu scare of several years ago. Richard hopes to re-introduce them eventually.

The rabbit cages are raised so that droppings and urine can be captured.


The urine runs into a holding tank and is added to garden’s compost piles to help them break down faster.


The composting area, just beside the hutch, is covered to help retain moisture in the pile on the left. Compost material is collected in the pit on the right.


The compound holds two mushroom houses.


Above, Richard lifts the row cover to reveal mushrooms.


Behind the house are rows of pineapples and Pennisetum grass (animal fodder), as well as a small mango tree.


Behind the kitchen, another trench system reuses grey water.  The surrounding beds are planted with herbs and greens.


At the other side of the house are several mounded gardens. The one above is terraced, using old nylon rice sacks.


The mounded garden above is a “keyhole garden” — so called because of the opening that allows the gardener access to a center hole . . .

to which compost material is continually added.

(To watch a charming video about making a keyhole garden (by the organization Send a Cow), click here.)


There were also several sack towers, this one planted with parsley. The rocks at the top keeps water moving straight down into the dirt.


A variety of trees surround the garden. This one is a Moringa, which provides food for both humans and animals from its leaves.  (More about this highly nutritious tree here.)

In my next post, I’ll continue with our tour of the main GOFTC facility.

Continue reading “Gako Organic Farming Training Centre” →

Garden Bloggers’ Foliage Follow Up: underplanting

Cindy at enclos*ure8 Comments

First, let me give you a very quick, belated GB Bloom Day.  I was too wiped out to post yesterday.  I spend most of the day transplanting some shrubs and a bunch of Gerbera daisies and asters.  They needed dividing, and it was fiddily work pulling apart all the little roots.  And there seemed to be a battalion of ants everywhere I wanted to put them.

In the last month, as we’ve been renovating the garden, we’ve pulled out about 50 of these beach spiderlilies (Hymenocallis littoralis) from under old bushes and moved them to the front of the newly widened planting beds along the front lawn. They started blooming right away, although they’re a bit sad, since we cut off their leaves as we set them out.

Beach spiderlilies are native to southern Mexico, the west coast of Florida, and Central America, but somehow they made it to Rwanda, where they’re a common garden flower.

Now on to foliage:  the little creeping plant below is a real lifesaver here where you can’t buy that nice bagged mulch to cover all the bare dirt in a newly planted area. I don’t know its name, but we had it in Niger as well. It may be a sedum.

It’s very shallow-rooted, so it’s easy to scoop up a handful, tease it apart a little, and then press it into loose soil under taller plants that need some time to fill out.

It’s grow-your-own mulch. It spreads quickly and can actually get out of hand, but I’ll always be tearing off the overflow for another spot. Or just tossing it — grow-your-own compost too.

In Washington, D.C., I had a spreading stonecrop sedum that served much the same purpose.

This month, I’ve also been pulling various begonias out of pots and re-planting them in semi-shade as ground cover.  They won’t spread as fast as the sedum, but they should make a nice tapestry eventually.

I’m not going to try to name these varieties.

I think there as many different types of begonias as daylilies.

Below is great spreading plant for which I don’t yet have a name.  I found it behind the back parking area, hidden by the curb.  I’ve been dividing and planting it everywhere.

It has true blue flowers.

I’m not really a pots person.  In the last couple of months, I’ve mostly been removing the plants from a lot of the old pots that I’ve found all around the house and putting them in the ground. However, I did recently create this rather pitiful arrangement.

The tree — one of those big-leafed Ficus that you see in chic rooms in House Beautiful — was in another pot at the side of the house, baking in full sun. We pulled it out and pruned its roots and top.  Then, we put it in this prettier pot in the bright shade of the terrace, underplanted with the little round-leafed begonia shown above.

I’ve got my fingers crossed that it will eventually put out new leaves. [UPDATE: It recovered beautifully.]

To see what’s blooming in other garden bloggers’ gardens, check out May Dreams Gardens, and thanks to Pam at Digging for hosting Garden Bloggers’ Foliage Follow Up the 16th of every month.

Vintage landscape: 1890s Paris in photochroms

Cindy at enclos*ure18 Comments

Among the many treasures of the Library of Congress’s online catalogue are several thousand digital images of antique photochrom prints.

The prints were colored images made from black-and-white photographic negatives transferred onto lithographic printing plates.  The process was invented at a Swiss printing company in the 1880s.  By the mid 1890s, it had been licensed it to many other companies, including the American Detroit Publishing Company, which had exclusive rights in the U.S.

A ferris wheel (la grande roue) in Paris, near the Eiffel Tower, ca. 1890-1900.

In 1898, Congress passed an act allowing private publishers to print postcards that could be mailed for only a penny each — half the rate of a letter.  Millions of photochrom postcards were purchased — and often collected in albums or framed — in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.

Wikipedia describes the process:

A tablet of lithographic limestone, known as a “litho stone,” is coated with a light-sensitive coating, comprising a thin layer of purified bitumen dissolved in benzene. A reversed half-tone negative is then pressed against the coating and exposed to daylight for a period of 10 to 30 minutes in summer, up to several hours in winter. The image on the negative allows varying amounts of light to fall on different areas of the coating, causing the bitumen to harden and become resistant to normal solvents in proportion to the amount of light that falls on it. The coating is then washed in turpentine solutions to remove the unhardened bitumen and retouched in the tonal scale of the chosen color to strengthen or soften the tones as required. Each tint is applied using a separate stone bearing the appropriate retouched image. The finished print is produced using at least six, but more commonly from 10 to 15, tint stones.

The Luxembourg Garden.

Often the printer was provided with notes about realistic colors, but sometimes he had to work from his imagination alone.  However, Detroit Publishing’s catalog said that its photochrom prints joined “the truthfulness of a photograph with the color and richness of an oil painting or the delicate tinting of the most exquisite water color.”

In these images of Belle Epoque Paris, the printer used ivory, pink, and apricot for the buildings and ground, quiet blues and greens for water and sky, and put a buttery light at the horizons.  The tints soften and still the monumental spaces on this walk from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe at L’Etoile.

A panorama of the seven bridges over the Seine River. The Eiffel Tower in the distance was built in 1889.

(All photos were taken by the Detroit Publishing Company, ca. 1890-1900; all via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. To scroll through the images in full size, click on ‘Continue reading’ below and then on any of the thumbnails in the gallery.)

The Louvre.

The Carrousel. This arch was built in 1805 to celebrate Napoleon’s victories.

Rue de Rivoli. The arcades and shops along the street were built between the early 18th century and the 1850s.

The Tuileries Garden.  Its name came from the tile makers (tuileries) who were removed  from the site on Catherine de Medicis’s orders so that she could build a (later-destroyed) palace and grounds.   The palace garden was redesigned in the 17th century by André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV.

The Tuileries Garden.

Place de la Concorde.  During the revolution, the guillotine was placed here and took over a thousand lives. Later, the space was named la Concorde in a gesture of reconciliation. Since 1833, its central feature has been the 3,200-year-old obelisk from Luxor, Egypt.

Place de la Concorde and Pont (bridge) de la Concorde.

Rue Royale and Place de la Madeleine. This church is dedicated to Mary Magdalene. Its construction began in 1764, but it was not consecrated until 1845.

Ave. Napoleon III (now Ave. Winston Churchill) and the Grand Palais (left) and Petit Palais (right). The two display halls were built between 1896 and 1900 for the Universal Exhibition of 1900.

The Arc de Triomphe. The first stone of the arch was laid in 1806, but it was only completed in 1836 and dedicated to the French army.

Avenue Champs Elysees, looking back toward the Tuileries Garden and the Louvre. The tree-lined boulevard was originally designed about 1667 by André Le Nôtre to extend the view from the Tuileries.

 

Vintage landscape: take water, add children

Cindy at enclos*ure6 Comments

Before air conditioning, water was the best remedy for hot summer weather.

The children in the photos just above and below were enjoying a public fountain in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1912.

The fountain is the Peace Monument on the U.S. Capitol grounds.

Below are children in a public pool in Washington, D.C., also in 1912.

All of the above four photos were taken by Harris & Ewing.

The three photos below of bathers in Rock Creek Park were taken by the National Photo Company between 1920 and 1932.

The photo label for the above picture is “Women and children find some relief by wading in the creek on one of the hottest days in the history of the Capital. Snapped in Rock Creek Park today.”

The highest temperature recorded for Washington, D.C., was 106°F, in 1918 and 1930. The city just missed matching the old record yesterday, only reaching 105°F.

Below are children playing in an “old swimming hole” in the Washington, D.C., area. The photo was taken by Theodor Horydczak between 1920 and 1950.

The photo below shows a group of proper young ladies at the free public baths, Harriet Island, St. Paul, Minnesota.  It was taken by the Detroit Publishing Co. around 1905.

How hard to be so dressed up at the lake!

Below are children playing with a rope at a beach, possibly at Atlantic City, New Jersey.  The photo was taken between 1890 and 1910 by the Detroit Publishing Co.

The lure of water in a fountain during hot weather is universal. Below are children in Japan or Korea in 1908. The photo was taken by Arnold Genthe.

All images via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.  Click on any photo to enlarge it.