The Gift of Mangoes!

Thanks to a local magistrate, we’re now able to add mango trees to our list of new growth for the fall rains. A $40 donation brings 240 mangos to the nursery, and once the mangoes are in, we invite locals to enjoy them. Of course, the children get to eat first, and they eat mango until their bellies are full and sometimes sore. Everyone drops off the seed pods and we gather as much as we can to prepare for soil planting.

Beyond growing mango trees, we also want to take advantage of all the mature mango trees and the fruit they're already providing. Throughout the years, we've seen mangos come into season, mangos fall and rot on the ground, then a month later we see locals struggling to find enough rich natural nutritious food. So our next goal is to start preserving mangoes before they rot, and add mango slices to our all-natural shop.
Thanks to our partnership with Trees That Feed Foundation, we've been gifted a commercial-grade food processor to cut perfectly thin mango slices. We're also building a solar dehydrator that can dry hundreds of mango slices at once.

This is going to be huge for adding more jobs and income throughout our nursery. We should be receiving these by the end of the month, and we're hoping you could pitch in with a one-time donation. These are our current fund needs:

• Transporting these machines across Haiti - $150

• Cement foundation for the dehydrator - $300

• Secure fencing around the dehydrator - $200

Konparet Breadfruit Factory Visit

Today, six team members traveled to a breadfruit konparet factory in Jeremie, Haiti. Our team has been chiefly grinding breadfruit into flour, but thanks to the seminar, they'll learn to make more marketable products from the breadfruits we grow.

Agronomist Pierre Moise has been growing his breadfruit business for 10 years. And now thanks to the support of Trees That Feed, our team can start growing our own.

Here you see a konparet, a kind of dry sweet bread, that is being produced in Jeremie. Once our team returns to our Saint Louis de Sud, they’ll be able to teach the rest of the nursery team everything they’ve learned from how to produce this Konparet from the seedlings to the ingredients.

Breadfruit tends to be either overabundant at certain times of the year or hard to find most of the year. When it is in season, a lot of the fruit either falls to the ground and rots, or it's fed to livestock.

After you shred the ripe breadfruit, you can place it in the sun to dry. But during the rainy season, this method doesn’t work so you’d need a dehydrator like the one below. The pieces of breadfruit are on screens and hot air from the solar oven wings, push up through the center of the dehydrator like a fan and dries out the pieces. We hope to build one of these in Saint Louis one day.

At the konparet factory, our team was able to see how a fruit dehydrator works. Think about all of the dried fruits you purchase at stores; if we can purchase a dehydrator for our nursery, we'll be able to make nutritious products year-round with all of the fruit we grow.