September 13 - TCHAP

Tonight an event happened that we have been looking forward to for about six months. The second TCHAP is today!!!!! Hosted by the Hernandez family, we start at one in the afternoon with guest speakers this time the main speaker talked about Aquaponics. For all of those readers that are like me and have no idea what Aquaponics is here is a brief explanation of it. Basically it is growing a garden using fish. You have two tanks, one is quite a bit larger than the other. The larger tank holds fish, and the smaller one has a Styrofoam sheet floating on the top. In this sheet there is holes that are about 2" in diameter in rows drilled through the top. In the holes are little baskets. These baskets hold your vegetable seeds. You have to have something in the baskets so that the seed doesn't fall out into the water underneath. The speaker uses ground up coconut shells. The manure from the fish feed the plants above. You have a pump that runs water from the fish tank up to the vegetable tank, then that water free falls back down to the fish tank through a pipe inserted in the bottom of the vegetable tank. The speaker is a missionary to a little area in South America. The village that he started this "experiment" is on very poor soil and they live by a bad river, so they don't get very much nutrition in their diet. The village took to his idea right away about two years ago. He has gone back several times to work out some glitches in the system. They still have some problems that need work, but as a whole they are doing well. 

After the Aquaponics session they had two classes at the same time. Dad, Janessa, Zach, Shea, Garrett, and Gabe went to see how to use a Sun oven. Which is exactly what it sounds like. An oven that uses the sun to bake things. Mommy and Kacy went to a super-food/sprouting class. We learned about how to store seeds to sprout, what foods count as super-foods, and how to sprout seeds. Both classes were very interesting, but unfortunately we didn't get any pictures of either class. Then they had two more classes at the same time. Dad, Kacy, Shea, Zach, Garrett, and Gabe went to a well water/electricity class. Basically it was giving different ideas of what to do if your well runs out (with the drought we are having that is some good knowledge to have) and it told about different options of drawing water up without electricity. Mommy and Janessa went to a gardening class. They talked about how to garden in small spaces or bad soil.

After all the classes, we had a delicious pot luck dinner then a dance. We did English Country Dancing. Peter Hernandez lead the dances, and did a very good job of it.

Grand march. A favorite.

The following pictures are of a new dance we learned, The English Snob.

And of course the evening wouldn't be complete without the Posties Jig. The all time favorite dance.

Another one we learned tonight was the Spanish waltz.

We had a wonderful day. Lots of new things learned, and we are really looking forward to the next TCHAP. Thank you so much to all the Hernandez family for putting it together. And thank you to all the speakers that did such a good job teaching.