10,000 Seedlings Ready To Go

Our nursery is packed with nearly 10,000 young seedlings right now. Our goal is to have these trees healthy and ready to be sent to homes by October. But our biggest challenge is financially providing long-term care for these seedlings.

Having steady money coming in through monthly donations support tracking each tree and paying each farmer to care for their survival through the dry season.

Currently, it would cost about $8,000 to add these trees to this pay-to-grow program. Right now we are regularly supporting nine farmers to grow young trees through this dry season, but we would like that number to be 900! Every donation supports our mission, and we’ll be launching our farmer sponsorship in the upcoming weeks to support farmers, their families, and the seedlings.

Goat Proof Fencing At Our Second Nursery

Our team is building a hybrid living fence to keep grazing animals and curious neighbors out of our nursery in Boileau, Haiti. After setting the posts, they placed and secured barbed wire on the posts and wrapped the wire the length of the perimeter. Unfortunately, goats will even dig under barbed wire, so they’ve been planting cacti, called Plan de Lab. Our team uproots them from a location where they’re overgrown and replants them along the fence line. As the plants grow, they’ll grow around the wire, improving the effectiveness of the fence.

This second location will also be affordable because we won’t need to build a greenhouse since there’s an abundance of shade.

Repurposing A Second Nursery

We're closing in the land around our original nursery site in Cavaillon. This location offers an older nursery setting that is being reborn for the first time since Hurricane Matthew wiped it out in 2018. We've added more land, a house/depo, and a deep-water well to water trees year-round and for the whole community to have access to water.

Luckily, like LaSikri, this site is well shaded, so there's no need to invest in costly greenhouse infrastructure. The trees in Cavaillon, many of which are wide-reaching mangos, protect new seedlings from hard rain and excessive sunlight. And with the new fence, we'll be able to keep out grazing livestock that may wander over from our neighbors' lands

Adding Onto The Depo

We are building a shed with natural materials against the depo. We can’t put a mill and food in the same place as a motorcycle so we are building a secure place for the motorcycle and tools outside.

An update on our old tree nursery - and our latest work.

In 2011 we created a tree nursery in Bwalo.  The nursery grew over 40,000 trees for the local area. We've decided not to focus in this area this year - in part because we've got so many other really exciting opportunities! 

Instead, in exchange for a small donation, we are giving people the more difficult to grow and more expensive fruit trees. The money that we get (which is much less than the cost of the trees) can then be used by communities to start other nurseries using the existing Proje Pyebwa Ayiti (Haiti Tree Project) organization. We've found that by asking for a small donation up front, we get buy in from the local folks, plus they are then able to create this small fund to use for additional projects.  

It all gets to our basic philosophy - we don't tell people what to do - we just offer education, resources and support for communities that want to improve their communities.  We believe in honest and open partnerships.

If you'd like to help - head over to our take action page.

Starting a new nursery in LaSucreie

We've been working with some wonderful people in the community of La Sucrerie to create a new nursery.  This is a great example of how the Haiti Tree Project works.  We find partners who have a strong desire to reforest their community and then we work with them in multiple ways.

First we provided education through a seminar led by an agronomist Jean who talked about the importance of reforesting around the gardens and gardening in terraces to stop erosion and mudslides. (apologies for the blurry pictures!)

Agronom meeting

Then we provide tools and tree seedlings.

Tools of the trade

And then everyone gets involved filling seedling backs with with compost and good soil for planting hardwood trees.

We're really excited about the enthusiasm everyone has for this project!   We appreciate everyone's help so far in making a small, but meaningful difference in our world!