Day 10 Building a Raised Bed and Incorporating Terra Preta

For me building the raised bed is always the most enjoyable pat of learning to intensify the use of the soil: grow more plants in a much smaller area.                              

Particularly if I"m working with a larger group. It seems like it's a lot of work until the group realizes its a process and they all start working together. Then the work really moves along. The site chosen was in a weeded area behind the Cooperative Extension office. it did have plenty of sun, the right orientation, and it was enclosed to keep out the goats. The CNFA staff had previously purchased a 50 Kg sack of charcoal and our charcoal reduction crew commenced to making terra preta.

Angolan camponez can do more with a hoe than a surgeon with a scapel. They were fascinated when I out my foot on the little shovel they brought and applying my weight I easily cut into the soil. They use the shovels like big spoons. Then one camponez says, "Well, he's wearing boots" the other says, "Look how much he weighs". Apparently, they had never seen a shovel used in that fashion.

On the other hand there very little that they can't do with a good axada or hoe. So once they heard the cadence: double dig, move it back, add terra preta, manure (until there's sufficient compost) and lime, level it off and repeat. Things really moved along.

These camponez not only know how to use a hoe, they work together well also. In less than 90 minutes, we had completed the double digging and added our soil amendments and raked, chopped and contoured our raised bed and, I must say, they were as proud of their achievement as I was of them. We agreed that we'd give the soil amendments a couple of days to start to work and them we'd planyt some green manure seeds that I had brought with me, a kilo of Buckwheat, to crowd ourt the weeds and to eventually permit a massive amount of carbon matter to be turned under the soil.