By Gabe Buttram, Ashleigh Burgess | East Africa Director, Partnerships
Lira Project Report – September 2016
These past few months have been a busy and exciting time with Trees for the Future in Uganda, with several new training events and extensive establishment of tree nurseries. It’s back-to-school season for our farmers, too. With your support, 285 farmers and their families – 2,020 individuals altogether – have received the training, materials, and support to begin establishing Forest Gardens. By the end of September more than 350,000 trees will be planted to create 285 green walls.
Trees for the Future (TREES) began to implement the Lira Forest Garden Project in January 2016. At the beginning the project, our technicians identified and mobilized 285 farmers from 13 existing farmer groups to participate. One person from each farmer group was selected by the group to take on the role of lead farmer. This lead farmer assists TREES’ technicians with training, materials distribution, data collection, farmer consultation, and other project activities.
The Forest Garden training program kicked off with farmer groups each discussing and identifying the various, diverse species of trees, vegetables, and other crops they would like to grow in their Forest Gardens. They then learned to draw maps of the land on which the training events were hosted, and practiced creating Forest Garden designs. After this first training event, farmers returned to their homes to develop Forest Garden designs of their future Forest Garden sites with their families.
During the next set of training events held in May 2016, farmers learned to techniques to create robust tree nurseries, and were given the seeds and tools (including hoes, machetes, and watering cans) to establish their own nurseries and begin cultivating seedlings for planting. At the start of the rainy season in August, farmers participated in a training event that taught them the best practices for planting their seedlings and tree seeds this upcoming planting season. The tree seedlings are grown in nurseries to out-plant in green walls composed of living trees. So far the 285 participant farmers and their families – more than 2,000 people altogether – have planted 224,800 trees in August to begin establishing the first two layers of the three-layer green walls. More than 100,000 more seedlings will be planted by the end of Sepetmber by Forest Garden farmers.
These green walls, planted with fast-growing species of Leucaena leucocephals, Calliandra calythrysus, and Sesbania sesban, will soon start to protect families’ Forest Garden sites, minimize wind and erosion, and provide them with useful tree products like fuelwood and livestock fodder. After participants’ Forest Garden sites are protected, and the soils revitalized, farmers will soon move on to the second phase of the project where they learn to diversify their sites with various fruit, timber, and vegetable crops.
We can’t thank you enough for your support to plant trees and change lives with our Ugandan farming families.
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