When life gives you lemon (trees) - plant them!

Lemon trees can take quite a while to grow - even in Haiti where the climate is warm and wet - but there's a shortcut.  Use lemon branches grafted on to existing root stock.  You get a healthy larger tree!   

They're a little more expensive than regular seedlings but we think that the results justify the investment.  Talking about investments - have you considered helping us?

Loading up trees

Loading up trees ready for distribution.  These are 1000 fruit trees, mostly Mango Madam Francique.  We're getting them from Les Cayes to distribute in the mountains of LaSucrerie. 

This Friday March 16th will be their first training seminar on reforestation with 300+ villagers. 

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It's planting time!

The rains have been good and we're busy acquiring and distributing native fruit trees.  We've even been expanding to several new villages.   Mostly we're focusing on Mango Madam Francique this season.  It's a native fruit tree to Haiti, and it's mangoes are so delicious Whole Foods Market goes out of its way to import them every summer. 

 

It's been a while - but we're still busy planting trees!

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We've been a bit quiet of late - in part because the fall is a quiet time of year for planting, but also because, as a volunteer run organization here in Raleigh, sometimes we get busy doing other stuff!

But here's some news from Haiti...

We've distributed all the lemon trees that we raised.  This is great news, lemon trees grow fast and provide a really valuable crop to the local people.  It's a win-win.  We tackle deforestation and provide a valuable cash crop.

Those lemon trees that were planted two years ago are growing nicely and have started to produce lemons.  These trees survived the drought really well.  We'll be planting more lemons in the future!

We're in the process of figuring out the budget for next year so we can buy seedlings and plant more trees.  We're also thinking about creating a tree nursery up in the mountain so the people who live up there won't have to come down to get trees.

As always - we appreciate all the support!   

8,000 trees in 2016

Just a quick update on last year -  we planted 6,000 hardwoods and 2,000 citrus trees in 2016!  

Our previous totals:

2011 - 600 mango trees, 15,000 hardwood seedlings.
2013 - 3,200 mango, lemon, orange, and grapefruit.
2014 - 1,800 mango
2015 - 2,400 mango and lemon trees.

So our running total is about 31,000 trees since the start of our project and we've got big plans for 2017.