Clay Plager-Unger
Clay Plager-Unger is the former director of Planet Drum Foundation's Eco-Ecuador project.
June 15-30, 2009 Our volunteer force is a powerhouse. The usual Planet Drum house more or less doubled in numbers with the special 3-week visit or our friends from Saga Educators, coincidentally based out of the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Two volunteers of theirs from last summer have returned with a crew of five strong high-schoolers to help with the revegetation project. Two volunteers […]
May 27-June 12, 2009 Time has been divided between watering revegetation sites and tree production in the greenhouse. The seeds beds continued to pump out Jaboncillo, Seca, Guachepeli and Ceibo saplings. It is an endless cycle of bottle collecting, soil mixing and transplanting. Lots of times we dug up trees from the seedbeds, which would turn the soil, subsequently new seeds would begin to germinate, requiring further […]
May 6-26, 2009 We continued to ride out the previous period of rains for a bit, accomplishing lots of work in the greenhouse and visiting sites from previous years to check in on and clear the weeds off of the trees. But a lack of further precipitation and prevailing dry season weather eventually led us to resume watering. Among the revegetation sites that were revisited […]
April 20-May 5, 2009 Rain! The weather on the coast of Ecuador, like many coastal regions, is determined almost entirely by the oceans. Our Pacific Ocean currents are Humboldt and El Niño. Recent increased activity in the El Niño current, associated with the rainy season (January-April/May), has produced some beautiful rains during the past two weeks. This was after what had been assumed by many to […]
April 1-16, 2009 Summary: Volunteers Aaron and Maggie help Jaime and I take care of the tasks at hand. The major undertaking completed in the past two weeks has been preparation and planting of seedbeds. First, a truckload of river sand (salt-free) was acquired to mix with other compost ingredients. We had to go south beyond the town of Charapoto to find river sand in a […]
March 6-31, 2009 Summary: Another action-packed month passes by. Volunteers disperse and continue with their travels; and as their numbers dwindle, the rainy season seems to be petering out. The transition out of the rainy season means that changing the workload to adapt to the shift in weather. In total this year, eleven revegetation sites have been successfully planted with over 2,200 native trees in the […]
March 25, 2009 Hi, Things are going very well. Multiple really, really nice light but substantial rains this past week. Volunteers have died down from 15+ to 4, which feels like nothing in comparison. Things will remain relatively light on this front for another month or two and then pick up again come May/June. I’m looking forward to having a little breather. The summer months […]
February 1-March 9, 2009 Summary: So much to cover, and it all happened in one month!? 10th anniversary of the Eco-city. Tree planting. Myriads of volunteers. Rains. Ridiculously fast growing weeds. Land visits and field trips. I’m going to stick to the field work, since Peter has covered a lot of the Bahia happenings in his Dispatches. I will also rely on photos to show more of […]
December 29, 2008-January 16, 2009 Summary: House repairs continued. Stakes for tree markers are cut and painted. A new site at Bosque Encantado is created. Completed house repairs include (but are not limited to): hiring a contractor to repaint the front of the house, refinishing the Planet Drum sign, repairing the sign’s metal hanger that was in danger of falling to the sidewalk below, overhauling a […]
December 8-26, 2008 Summary: Despite imminent signs of the rainy season (increased humidity, blazingly intense sun, warm nights, etc) it hasn’t arrived yet, so we took advantage of the time to further prepare ourselves for planting by clearing more trails and digging more holes. I stepped up volunteer recruitment with a new volunteer announcement that I distributed in Canoa and to hostals around Ecuador. Also, I […]