On the 23^rd of January 2019, FSL-India’s Sea Turtle Conservation (STC), Environmental Education (EE), Sustainable Agriculture Project-Kundapur (SAP-K), Social Entrepreneurship (SE) and Work Camp volunteers went to Angali Primary School with FSL-India’s Field Officer, Manjesh.

It is a very small school with around 40 students who live nearby – some of them can see their houses from the school, and the classes have reduced groups.

In that school, another FSL-India Long-Term Volunteer who teaches the schoolchildren, took the initiative to request the implementation of a bag garden. Apart from that, 3 trees (Kokum, Dalchini and Rampal) from the nursery garden were planted in the school’s playground.

As the soil in the school was too dry to grow plants, the school’s Principal showed the volunteers an appropriate place, from where they collected fertile soil. After that, the soil was carried to the school in the bags. Compost was added and mixed thoroughly, and then, each volunteer got some different type of seeds.

There were 11 bags, and each of them was filled with a different kind of vegetable seed, such as spinach, ladies finger, capsicum, red spinach, white spinach, chilli and pepper. To keep track of what was in each bag, the principal helped to write down both in English and in Kannada, the names of every vegetable. With that information, the school students helped to create some labels for the bag garden.

During the whole process, each class came to visit the volunteers’ work. They introduced themselves and asked the volunteers some questions in English, and learnt about what the bag garden was, and how to take care of it. Moreover, some of them helped the volunteers planting trees, cleaning the plastic in the playground, and adding compost to the soil.

When the bag garden was ready, all the volunteers and Manjesh were kindly invited to have lunch at the school. In general, it was a beautiful day and everyone enjoyed themselves a lot.