Hi…. My name is Kyaw Win. I come from H.S.T.K school and now I am studying at Grace Garden  with BGET. We studied about agroforestry. We learned from Kara and Liping, they are two of our teachers at Grace Garden. We learned how to plant. We planted roselle, chili, tomato and pigeon pea. In Grace Garden we studied half the time and we planted half the time.

We also studied about planting guilds, in planting guilds there are many types: sunflower guild, tomato guild, roselle guild, and chili pepper guild. So we planted every guild in our planting beds. We also studied about planting and how to plant. When we plant, we mix sand, compost, humous, soil and coconut husk together and we plant in this. Also we have to know about the plants because some plant want full sun but some plants do not need sun light so much. So we have to choose the plants that we can grow in Thailand, The plants that need more sunlight. We also planted flowers. We planted sun flowers, marigold and petunias.

We also made our planting beds. We have two groups, girls and boys, each with our own planting beds.  Usually when we make our planting beds we make them meter wide and 3 meter long because if we make them too big and too long we can not pick all the food at one time. We have to be able to go around all the way so me make them that size.

We also studied about food forests, also called forest gardens. In a food forest you can plant so many kinds of trees, and they also plant the small things like carrots, beans, okra, eggplant and many other small things and big things. Why do they call it a food forest? Because they don’t plant in lines and with many kinds of trees. It will look kind of like a regular forest.

We have tomato that is starting to fruit and we have a lot of marigold near our teacher’s house. Some of tomato is almost ready to eat. Some plants we plant from seeds but some we plant as small trees and some plant we plant in a stem. The plants that we planted with a stem are mango, moringa and some other plants. The plants that we planted from seed are roselle, pigeon pea, and chili. We also plant some trees so that we can eat the fruit.

We have a lot of plants in Grace Garden and many trees but we cannot eat their fruit yet, because they are small. Now we can eat papaya, banana and roselle. Our teacher taught us to make roselle and banana jam.  We ate it with pancakes, I liked that a lot because I like to eat pancakes and I will eat more again next week.

I liked the class, we learned how to plant and then we planted. It’s better to learn in the class first and then go to work. In my future I will go back to my school or to my village and I will grow food and I will make a food forest in the garden. It’s been fun. Thanks for reading!

This post was written by Kyaw Win.