The Mamá Tingó Garden

 The Mamá Tingó garden is a garden classroom at The Mariposa Center for Girls on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. The Mariposa Center for Girls offers an alternative education program to adolescent girls in Cabarete, empowering and educating them with the vision to end generational poverty. Environmental education is an integral part of our holistic girls education program.

Our biggest project, started in June 2013, is establishing the Center’s first-ever garden, using the design principles of permaculture. Our vision is to create an experiential, cooperative classroom; to grow organic fruits and vegetables; to learn to prepare healthy foods and to create fundamental connections between food, the environment, and sustainability for Mariposas and our extended Mariposa and Cabarete community.

Growing organic food will allow our girls to learn more about the environment they live in and how they can grow and utilize local organic foods at home. The Mariposas will be having garden to table snacks at the Center in no time and our hope is that they spread the permaculture love.

So, what’s growin’ on right now in our garden classroom? We have the beginnings of a food forest (with coconut palms, papaya, sugar cane, guandules, auyama and black-eyed pea ground cover), banana cirlcles, annual beds (with tomato, eggplant, hot peppers, sweet potato), and an herb spiral (with oregano, mint, ginger, and basil), and we’re waiting for more seeds to sprout!

Check out more at our garden blog:

http://mariposapermaculturegarden.wordpress.com