Kids at a local children’s home are taking part in a state-of-the-art aquaponics project that uses the same water in which fish are raised and harvested to irrigate organically grown vegetables.
The program will provide food for some 25 boys who live at Casa Hogar Una Esperanza en el Corazon (Hope House) in Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillos. Any surplus product will be sold in local markets and help defray the shelter’s operating costs.
Hope House has installed two fish tanks that can hold up to 5,000 liters of water each and will support up to 500 fish. Right now, there are about 200 fish in each tank.
The children also have two grow beds for vegetables: a ‘free flow’ bed, through which water continually flows, and a gravel bed, which is filled and emptied every 12 minutes.
The free-flow bed is for vegetables such as spinach and lettuce, while the gravel bed is for root vegetables and tomatoes.
Each bed will hold about 200 plants. At the moment the free-flow bed is filled with growing lettuce. The gravel bed is in the process of being planted.
“We are slowly but surely getting everything finished on this particular system,” said Walt Heine, who is spearheading the project. “We’ll soon have walkways around the beds, build greenhouse type shade, seed new plants and get the work area in a production form.”
Hope House administrators plan to build another equivalent system in September and are now in the process of coordinating a team for that time. They have some funds for materials (more would be good) and feel as though they are on the way to making the shelter self sufficient.
Besides the aquaponics project, Hope House has a wood-working shop with a top line of tools.
Two years ago the Rotary Club of Ajijic, in conjunction with the Rotary Club of Langley, British Columbia, provided funds for the tools. The shop has two goals: to train the boys with life skills centering around carpentry and to build products that they have already successfully sold locally.
Hope House is committed to providing abandoned, abused, orphaned and poverty-stricken boys with a safe and loving home, the opportunity to receive an education and a religious-centered foundation so that they have hope of a better future.
To learn more about Hope House go to www.shmius.org and find the link to Hope House on the right hand side of the home page. To find out how you can help with Hope House projects, contact Walt Heine at 766-5068.