April 16-20, 2007
The rains continue and so does the reforestation work. We are underway with loading up the greenhouse with trees for next year and this will occupy much time in the coming weeks and months. The slower growing trees are being planted early so they will have the most time to grow before being transplanted in the sites. Faster growing trees will be planted closer to the next rainy season so that they don’t get too big.
Our bioregion education preparations also continue. It is slow going preparing individual booklets on the topics we’ve chosen (such as Flora, Fuana, Marine Life, Esuaries, Nutrition, and Compost to name a few), but I think it will be worth it because once they are completed, we will be able to distribute the materials beyond our Bioregional Education class to communities and schools as well.
On Monday we collected more bottles. Aside from walking around town and picking up discarded bottles, we have developed what is now a steady source of 3-liter bottles, a local school of about eight-hundred students, who unfortunately drink a lot of soda. On the bright side, every bottle is going to be turned into the home of a native tree. We leave large sacks with shop owners who sell the soda, and every couple days we can collect the empty bottles. A new stash of baby Guayacan trees was discovered at our Maria Dolores site and we collected many of them to transplant into the greenhouse. The bottles don’t stay empty for long as we are finding more and more trees to fill them.
Liz and Lise worked on Bioregional Education materials on Tuesday while the rest of the crew went to Bosque Encantado to do some trail maintenance on the new site there. We found a new trail that is less treacherous and will be less erosion prone. On a lower section where there is only one possible entrance up a steep ravine, we began construction of stairs to make the ascent less difficult.
We were invited Wednesday to help plant some trees on land recently acquired by the Bahia mayor, Dr. Carlos Mendoza. The land happens to be adjacent to the Interamerican school where we have an old reforestation site from a couple of years ago. The mayor received several hundred trees from the Provincial greenhouse and is excited to plant them. Despite being late in the season for planting (we would have recommended planting a couple of months ago) the mayor insists on pushing forward and has excellent water access and people to water his trees on a regular basis. We helped with the planting in order to further improve our relationship with him as well as scope out a potential new site for next year. There are a lot of barren hillsides on his land and he wants to plant trees everywhere so there are a lot of possibilities.
On Thursday and Friday we continued transplanting little Guayacan from the Maria Dolores site to the greenhouse, turned compost and then finished the staircase at Bosque Encantado, while Liz and Lise worked on Bioregional Education materials.
Hasta Luego,
Clay
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