Mt. Kilimanjaro, TZ – BMM Family Garden – 20 Dec 2013

The BMM Family is proud of their home improvement.

The BMM Family happy about their garden.

Although they started out skeptical, the BMM family has become very excited about their garden.

The BMM family recently began to maintain a truly beautiful and productive garden. They also started to make other improvements in their life and they are excited about the potential to improve the lives of their twelve children.

Initially, the family was slow to buy into the organic vegetable garden method of gardening. The method requires more work than traditional local gardening methods, and the family was skeptical about whether the increased investment of time and energy would pay off. Like most poor families around the world, the family’s greatest asset is their time and energy. Thus, they are very prudent about how the allocate these resources.

Once they began to see the payoffs of the new garden method they decided to invest as much time and energy as was necessary to maintain the best garden possible. Since then, they have been closely following the advice of the Lishe Bora Garden Shop team. The family makes sure to water the garden adequately every day, they inter-crop vegetables from their previous garden into their new garden, maintain clean path ways, transplant lemon grass and other insect repellent plants from other parts of their property into their garden, and make sure that the whole family participate in garden maintenance so that it is not too much work for any one person.

The family has also worked to improve their lives in other ways. They have a small collection of livestock, two cows, two goats, and some chickens, that provide some income and food, while requiring only an investment of time and energy for feeding. The family also works a plot of land to grow corn, which they grind into flour for porridge.

Recently, the family has begun working on small home improvements. These modest efforts are done using materials that can be found on their land or traded for other resources they produce. In the picture below, the family has replaced missing boards on their home and also put a cover over their window for security while the family is sleeping or out of the house during the day.

The family is lucky to own a large plot of land and the family members are being very resourceful about using it as effectively and efficiently as possible. There is no part of the family’s land that goes unused and this productivity will be a key for them as they work to further improve their lives.