In the 36th chapter of Job, it says that those who serve and obey God will spend their days in prosperity and their years in contentment. Contentment is exactly what the new gardeners that come out of the Agricultural Training Center sustainable gardening class have when they learn new methods for gardening and then see the harvest of their efforts. In our sustainable gardening course, we teach the importance of using heavy mulches. The mulch serves many purposes. It protects the garden soil from being baked by the hot sun, keeping soil temperatures lower. It protects it from strong winds and preserves precious moisture which reduces the need for irrigation. It also adds important nutrients to the soil as the mulch decomposes, decreases weeds, and promotes healthy microbes to keep the soil “live.” It is one of the most important things we can teach in our class. Here you see the ATC staff adding mulch to the family gardens at Miracle Village. This will help those families have a good harvest soon, to provide food for themselves, and to have some extra to sell at the marketplace.
When we started our ATC, the great men of Global Compassion Ministries, Joe Perkins, Ron Lusk, and others donated and erected three very important shade houses to benefit the people of Haiti. The shade houses perform many of the same functions of mulch by keeping the hot sun and strong winds from being too intense for the young plants. In the shade houses we can start many different varieties of plants and vegetables. Here are pictures of the staff yesterday tending young plants of chard and bok choy. They harvested mature plants for the kitchens at the Love A Child Children’s Home, the Jesus Healing Center, and the Birthing Center. When donors sponsor poor Haitian students to come to our 3-week class to learn these sustainable methods, they are giving the gift of new knowledge, new skills, new dignity, and self-reliance, and ultimately the gift of contentment. Thank you to those who help support this sustainability project – helping Haitians to help themselves with “food for life” – by marking your gift to “sustainability.”