February 27 to March 5, 2006
The week started off with a bang with carnival in full swing; luckily the rain held out until just the day after, when we got a heavy downpour, and another one a few days later. There was a mangrove planting for the Eco-Semana on International Day of the Mangrove (Feb 28), for which I helped to collect seeds. Patrick Wylie, the new Field Projects Manager, arrived on that day and is sharing the front room with Dan.
All the rain made it a bit difficult to plant with all the slipping and sliding, but we still managed to do a planting at the Bosque Encantado. One full day was devoted just to maintaining the trails and trees we had planted before, as the site was substantially over-grown. All trees looked good except 3, which had died. Two of them weren’t doing very well to start with. I also managed to show Pat around about 2/3 of the site. We blazed a trail with Ricardito through a new area we scouted out for future plantings.
I had forgotten to mention in the last report that Fidel, aka Rambo, cousin of Ramon of the recently inaugurated eco-tourism cabin at La Gorda, came to work with us at the Bosque Encantado last week. He is mean with a machete and does the work of about 5 people in one!
There was a lot of transplanting to do at the greenhouse. This time we added some more sand into the mixture, as well as some really good humus which Dan collected from the edge of the forest at the university. More bottles were cut for transplanting, including small bottles from our house. We ended up getting 500 free transplanting baggies from a shopkeeper in exchange for a couple of the fruit trees!
There was a larger amount of compost than usual from the university this week, and Pat did some composting on the weekend. Pat and I also organized the bodega a bit and Brooke made new sheaths for the machetes out of cardboard and duct tape as the old ones had fallen apart.
Peter and Judy are in Bahia now, visiting for one month.
All for now!
Heather
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