Fourth-Level Certification

The Fourth-Level Young Women can meet these requirements in the Hulaco garden:

  

As crops grow they deplete vital nutrients from the soil.  We preserve the garden by adding these nutrients back to the soil.  The fourth year Young Women get to fertilize the garden.   This is also a skill the Young Women can teach to someone else. 

Just as we need a balanced diet to be healthy, so do vegetable plants.  We know that vegetables need 16 nutrients to grow healthy. 

Three come from the air: Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen.  Three are Primary nutrients: Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium.  Three are Secondary Nutrients: Calcium, Magnesium, Sulfur.  The last seven are Trace Elements: Boron, Copper, Iron, Manganese, Zinc, Molybdenum, and Chlorine.  

Just like people can become malnourished when their bodies don't get all the nutrients they need.  Plants also get malnourished. This plant didn't get enough calcium.

Calcium for vegetables comes from Lime.  Lime is made by crushing limestone rocks into a powder.  We sprinkle it in the garden near the water pipes and the water takes it to the roots of the plants.

You can find the fertilizer in the Green Garden Box which is in the garden.  

Inside the box is another box.  

Inside the lid is a record.  Mark the day your group fertilizes the garden because there needs to be 7 full days between each application.  To much of a good thing is not a good thing.  

This is what is in the fertilizer and here is the recipe

Using the blue cups in the garden box scoop up enough fertilizer to just come to the 'fill line'. 

 It will take all the cups to fertilize the garden.  There are 12 cups so 12 different Young Women can help.  

Find the rock in the garden that matches the number on your cup.

Each section only goes from one white post to the next white post.  The Young Women won't fertilize the herbs in the box without the T-Frames. It's the box in the far right of this picture.) 

Now evenly sprinkle all the contents of the cup into the space between the outside of the wooden box and the white pipe. 

Evenly sprinkle all the contents of the cup from one post to the next post between the wood and the pipe.  If you don't have quite enough to go from post to post, that's okay.   Don't add more.   Remember to be careful not to get it on the plants.  Lift up leaves that are in the way. 

You don't need to remember all this.  It's in the notebooks in the garden box in the garden.