Next door to the Greening the Desert site, a former student has been designing her land to be productive. She has added lots of compost, a shade cloth, and unglazed pots for efficient irrigation. She is growing a collection of herbs and vegetables, things such as clumping basil, Ethiopian cabbage, and marshmallow. She has support species—acacia, leucaena, casuarina, Tacoma stans, neem, albizzia—on the go, having learned to repair the soil before adding fruit trees. And, she has begun to slowly introduce productive trees like date palms, olives, peach, and guava. Compost is breaking down in a recycled water tank, an old tub has been turned into a worm farm, and local chickens occupy a coop made from recycled materials. This was the site for the design exercise in the last PDC course at Greening the Desert. Now, having compiled those ideas with her own, in just 11 months, she has gone from bare soil to a lush garden.
