Thanks to many people joining together and donating to our Cents For Seedlings campaign we are excited to now see our coffee project taking off at Suubi Secondary School.
Our vision was to create a project that would provide an opportunity for our students to learn valuable skills that they can put in to use, now and in the future. This will enable them to earn an income, which will help them cover the cost of their own education and support themselves and their families in the future. We are thrilled to now see that the important first steps of this initiative well underway.
Marking out the site for the seedling greenhouse was an exciting day.
The construction of the greenhouse took shape over the last academic holiday period.
Members of the Setem team, from Barcelona, were happy to be able to give a hand during construction and help to put on the shade cloth.
The completed greenhouse is another great addition on the Suubi SS site.
Once students returned from holidays, they enthusiastically got involved in learning the many and varied skilled associated with growing coffee. This began with the importance of adding compost to the soil to give the new seedlings the best opportunity to thrive.
Students then worked together to fill potting bags in readiness for the propagating stems which will grow in to new seedlings.
They were then taught how to cut pieces from branches that had come from Suubi Centre's coffee mother garden. Each stem needs to have the leaves clipped from the lower half of the shoot so that a bare stem can be inserted into the potting mix.
The final step before putting them in to pots; each end is dipped in to rooting hormone which helps the cutting take root more quickly.
Hundreds of seedlings have been planted and these will be added to as the project progresses.
The students have the responsibility of watering and caring for the seedlings as they continue learn important skills of how to successfully grow and earn an income from coffee growing.
Once the seedling have grown enough to be planted out in to the ground each student, who has participated in the coffee initiative, will be rewarded with 10 seedlings to plant at their own homes. This will become a permanent project for them, with money raised from these trees helping with education expenses, even beyond their time at Suubi SS.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to those who have donated to date to kick start this project. How exciting to see that when lots of people join together we can truly make a positive difference in someone's else life!
If you would like to support the ongoing success of this project, just 50cents can cover the cost of growing a single seedling; for just $5 you can help provide 10 seedling to a student, enabling them to create a better life for themselves. A few cents x lots of people can make a big change!
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