St. Martin Kaewa’s Journey to becoming GIC Champions

Participating schools received multi-purpose Cassia siamea (Muveshi) and Melia volkensii (Mukau) tree seedlings for their 0.5acre school plots. Cassia siamea, a fast growing tree that provides almost immediate benefits through coppicing provides wood while Melia volkensii gives highly commercially valuable timber. A total of 24,584 seedlings were distributed with each participating school receiving 150 seedlings of each tree species.

St. Martin Kaewa students pose with their individual trees. The students and staff of the secondary school are proud of their school “greening” achievement.

“Planting trees is an easy task; growing trees is the real challenge. This story we can now tell with smiles on our faces. We embarked on clearing the bushes around the holes we had dug, and then we planted our seedlings clearly observing the stipulated spacing of 4 metres between individual seedlings”, the head teacher narrates.

The population of St. Martin Kaewa Mixed Day then was 283 students. Since the seedlings were 300, the students dug a hole each and the remaining 17 holes were dug by the teaching and non-teaching staff.

Once planted, the seedlings did well for the first 5 months, and the school decided to innovate by tilling all the land around the seedlings in order to successfully to grow the trees. Then disaster struck!

The first scare that came was a mite attack that was quickly fixed by insecticide brought to site by KenGen. Then the first heavy rains arrived, bringing with it the problem of water logging. The rainwater would collect at the base of the Melia plants and they would start wilting. The next innovation was to find a way of draining this excess water and all was well.