Students at Zuni High School in New Mexico are learning how to plant a “waffle garden” as part of a project intended to revitalize traditional agricultural practices among the Zuni tribe.
A waffle garden, I learned from a press release about how some of these students took away ribbons for agricultural produce at the New Mexico state fair, is a garden constructed of parallel square or rectangular depressions in the ground. The depressions create a pattern that looks like a waffle and make good use of water resources.
The press release says that the proportion of Zuni adults engaged in agriculture has decreased over the past century from 30 percent to 1.5 percent. Partners in a horticulture project, which attempts to teach traditional agricultural practices to Zuni youths, hope to reverse that decline.
The partners include the New Mexico education department and New Mexico State University’s Cooperative Extension Service.