How to make people grow their own plants - garden initiative from Curanipe, Chile || #club5050

Hello, it's very nice to meet you all. It's my very first post in this community so let me quickly introduce myself.

I'm @papi.mati - a Polish guy living in Argentina. I truly love permaculture, food production, gardens and I am making the permaculture lessons in the Steem Skillshare community. Here, in Steemit-Garden I am willing to write at least once in a week presenting you the beauty of nature from around the world (I'm traveling a lot, so I have plenty of photos and interesting stories about plants from different countries). As every good member of the community should do, I delegated some SP to the curation account. For now, it's only 50 SP, because I just joined, but it is possible that this amount will grow with time.

Okay, to not make it too long, now let me focus on the article I was going to write today :)

While traveling around the world, we stopped for a month in a lovely town next to the Chilean coast - Curanipe. We were working there in a Workaway, participating in Huertas a Deo project.

_{photo by @papi.mati}

What is the "Huertas a Deo" project, you will ask?

Thanks for the great question! :) Let me answer shortly because it's truly interesting. Huertas a Deo was created by a few guys who arrived at this region from Santiago de Chile and it was supposed to help locals to grow their own plants in their gardens. A long time ago Curanipe was full of vegetable gardens and basically self-sufficient in food production. Unfortunately with time big companies bought most of the land in this area and started their monocultures. Food production in the small gardens next to the houses was almost forgotten.

_{photos by @papi.mati}

"Huertas a Deo" helps in many ways:

• they make the workshops and lessons teaching how to grow vegetables in the garden
• they have their own seeds school - everyone can donate the seeds there and after a few months receive the small plant that can be planted directly in the garden
• they produce humus and donate it to the locals. Humus is made from the food scratches received from the local restaurants
• they help in selling the vegetables, create the website, and offer free delivery of the local products to the capital city. Also, they started the partnership program with many local stores so now only the vegetables from the Curanipian are sold there.

_{Compost making, seeds school and preparing local veggies for sale. Photos by @papi.mati}

We spent one month learning many valuable things there, observing plants to grow, experiencing nature in the best possible way. We discovered how to make the humus in two different styles, what can be added to it and what is not recommended, we planted the seeds, built the chicken coop, met many amazing people.

_{Teaching locals how to grow plants effectively. Photo by @papi.mati}

The village is fantastic because it's very small, so after a few weeks, you already know all the people. It might not be too many attractions in the area, but the coast and the ocean with the opportunity to surf (for swimming was a bit too cold) is totally enough. What's a great attraction for the people, is not the best for the plants though. Close to the Ocean, the soil and the air are full of salt - a product not so recommended when we want to grow any plants (maybe besides watergrass). We heard the stories that after the big Tsunami, which happened here in 2015, the soil was totally destructed and it took years to restore it again.

<sub>charming plant that grew just in front of our tent where we were living while volunteering. Photo by @papi.mati


Last element of preparing humus - separating rich soil from the non-composted food scraps. Photo by @papi.mati</sub>

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Thank you for reading,
@papi.mati