The seeds were collected from trees just a couple of weeks ago. A truckload of soil was spread across the ground to sprout them along with any other seeds we collected. This week we'll transfer t the sprouts into bags, and hopefully, they'll be ready by May.
Kouray Women: An-Hour Long Trek
An organized group of women hiked for an hour from Kouray village into the mountains to collect trees from our nursery to start reforesting their homelands. Our nursery manager Enel emphasized the importance of digging a big hole and mixing the soil with mulch before planting to keep the seedlings alive. They are taking home breadnuts, cacao, and mango seedlings that grew tall in our nursery these last few months. In the coming weeks, they plan to make the hour-long trek again for cashew, mahogany, and other trees.
Enel's Breakfast: Bannann
Banana trees are really popular in Haiti and eating boiled green bananas with a tomato-onion (tomat-zonyon) sauce is a breakfast staple. The banana (bannan) trees do not live long but they grow fast, providing plenty of leaves for enriching the soil. The large leaves also offer shade for seedling trees like the hundreds of cacao seedlings we are about to plant. Cacao seedlings love the shade!
Setting Up The New Water Tanks
Our nursery team has set up our new water tanks, and we’re excited about having steady nourishment for our nursery seedlings. Each water tank gets a strong base, so it can’t be moved. Our nursery team also adds piping to reinforce their stability and secureness.
Water is the biggest challenge for growing trees. But these tanks gradually fill up at night, so the next day, our nursery team has enough water to care for every plant and seedling in our nursery.
Breadtfruit Flour Ready
Below, we have 60 lbs of breadfruit flour ready to sell in our market. More income offers new ways to increase our project’s reach, provide jobs, and expand our work in reforestation and self-sustainability.
Tree Monitoring Apps
Tracking trees is Tikouto's specialty. And he’s great at his job because he’s constantly learning the latest tree tracking app that will help him follow the lifespan of our seedlings. Up until now, other companies have sometimes supported the trees we plant and track. But currently, we’re working on a platform exclusively owned by The Haiti Tree Project where donors can sponsor Haitian farmers. Having dedicated sponsors will increase tree survival through the first dry season, and the app will allow the sponsors to watch the trees grow!
Stay tuned!
400 Breadfruit Roots
Immediately after the konparet breadfruit seminar, Enel got back to work to increase our breadfruit output. He's growing as many breadfruit seedlings from roots as possible thanks to the knowledge he acquired in the Jeremie breadfruit factory.
We bought 400 hundred roots today that will go in a rich silty soil bed covered in mulch and that will be watered twice a day for a month.
LaSikri's New Reality: A Growing Economy
Thanks to the hard work of our team in Haiti and global donors, agroforestry has created a growing economy in LaSikri. Our smaller depo, large nursery, mill, solar electricity unit, and new hanging scale have slowly brought more attention to our growing project.
It's starting to look like a shop! We have breadfruit flour for sale at $1.50/lb, and people can grind their produce in our mill or charge their phones. While Rosnie works, she sets up a section to sell sandals for her own business.
What's next? Most likely, we'll be selling homemade chocolate from the ground cacao.
New Watertank
The water pipe is fixed and the villages are getting water again. However, the water is at trickle during the day and our Nursery Manager Enel has been getting up several times in the middle of the night when it flows well, to change the water pipe and fill the different drums.
Enel needs to get enough rest, so thanks to some donations we were able to purchase a storage tank. The tank will serve the 10,000 seedlings in our nursery well, and at times, we will also be able to give our neighbors some clean drinking water from this sealed tank. It’s a big expense but well worth it as we work on our goal of 100,000 trees for 2022.
Rosnie couldn't be more thankful for the new water tank that just arrived. Making sure every tree in the nursery gets just the right amount of water isn't an easy task, especially when our water supply is low, but Rosnie has kept our seedlings healthy and alive for over a year now.
Now we no longer have to use our motorcycle for multiple trips to the spring or preserve water so that seedlings only get a few drops each. With the new water tank, Rosnie will connect the hose and easily water the seedlings twice a day.
Increasing Our Breadfruit Flour Output
In the video below you can see the sundried breadfruit flour broken into pieces and being fed into our mill by Samuel, a farmer, and local artist.
As we fill the 20lb bags below, we'll send them to our professional chef, Marie Maude, who oversees the nursery land in Bwalo. She'll be making test products out of flour to sell all over the Saint Louis-de-Sud and Les Cayes regions.
