This is the year for infrastructure. Having purchased our tractor we now need a place to put it and all the shovels and other equipment. So we dug the footings for a shed 20 x 24 feet. Here are some pictures of the progress.

"Gmelina in a year".

Last Easter Cory and I and a bunch of teachers went cave tubing in central Belize. On our way back we stopped in the capital and picked some seeds of a Gmelina tree the Ministry of Forestry told me about in a nearby park. Some say that in 12 years these trees will grow to be so big you can no longer put your arms around it. Well here is our results.

We dried the seeds then soaked them for a bit. We placed them in the seed bed and within a couple weeks they had come up. From there we moved them to bags (early May) and there they stayed until the beginning of September when we stuck them in the ground.

To our amazement they grew and grew and grew. By the end of rain season we could hardly reach the top of the taller trees to prune off the branches. But the rainy season never quite ended this year and so they kept on growing and growing.

Today we went out there to take more pictures. The tree we had taken the above photos of was so tall I had to put Pedro on my shoulders. Even then we could not reach it. We forgot the measuring tape but our best guess is it has passed 11 feet now. Interestingly that one tree has some competition now and some of the other ones around it have passed it.

Found a secret waterfall.... at the entrance to the tree plantation is a deep ravine. It is all dried up now during rainy season but when the rains come down heavy this ravine is prone to flash floods.

Last Sunday we set off on an expedition down the creek bed of the ravine. It was really cool with old trees all up the banks. In some places large trees grew out of the rocks on the side of the creek.

Finally we reached a spot where the creek cascaded over a huge waterfall (maybe 70 feet tall). I pulled out the GPS and we were only 2300 feet from where we will be putting next years plantation. In fact the same ravine below the fall will turn and cross the bottom of the 200 acres we are planting in.

The bean results are in. So for all you bean counters here is how it went. In the end we harvested 3 five gallon buckets of beans. Not bad considering we started with only about 1 or 2 gallons of beans. The problem was most of the money went to labor so in the end we lost money. Blame it on lots of rain rotting the beans before they germinated or just a bad idea but it didn't work so great. The trees are fine though, can't see much of a difference probably b/c the soil was already high in nitrogen and not depleted yet. But they did get the area around them well cleared and they were well looked after. We'll have to come back after a year and see how they are compared to the surrounding trees.

To celebrate the harvest we had a big bean feast down at Carl and Margarets. They cooked up the beans and we digged in. Probably the most expensive beans we've ever had. But hey, it was an experiment.

Conclusion: Don't pursue beans to subsidize the plantation directly. We gave Marcus (our beans guy) the numbers and he still thinks he can do better so we developed a contract. So next year he'll get to pick any land he wants and put the beans on it between the trees. We provide the land, the beans, the fertilizer, one worker to help harvest and then we split the beans 50/50. He is convinced it will be good and wants to go for it so we're all game.

We went to an auction yesterday. One of the people close to the community had passed away and he had spent his life inventing all sorts of interesting farming tools. He even had made a machine to refine crude oil into diesel and gasoline.

We picked up a few things we badly needed for the plantation. The first was a bush-hog which is like a giant lawn-mover that is pulled behind the tractor. This will fit between the rows of trees and keep the weeds down.



The other machine we bought was a tractor. A big old Ford 5000 that runs on crude oil (cause fuel is really expensive). This will be used to pull the bush hog, haul water, spread manure and so forth.



We also picked up the bottom of a trailor for $50. With a little work this will be our water tanker. We found a water pump at the auction too so we can pump water from the pond into the tanker then attach a garden hose to it and water/fertilize the saplings this year.

Growing trees through cuttings... now that is an interesting idea. The idea came to us in two ways. The first was when I was home last month my mother-in-law had taken my indoor fig tree and made a new tree out of some of the leaf cuttings. The second is we have some trees that are well over my head while the ones beside them are only a third the height. Obviously there are some stronger genetic trends.

So today we went out in the field and took clippings from all our different types of trees. I took some rooting hormone designed for hardwoods and I put the clippings in bags. So now we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Recommendations on how to root tropical tree cuttings
Study on Teak Propogation through Cuttings

Recently I was asked, "How did you get started in planting trees?" I showed the person a picture of a Mahogany tree, something that is perhaps one of the most beautiful trees in the world. This tree was planted only 25 years ago and was already almost 2 feet in diameter.

This tree was at the school in Belize I was serving at. As I drove around the community I saw several houses with beautiful mahogany trees in front of them. Around that time a friend started telling me about how you can plant them in a field and in 25 years harvest them.

So we decided to give it a try and in our first year we planted 20,000 trees over about 25 acres. Recently I walked through the plantation and some of the trees were as tall as me. Of course not all of them are that tall but the early results are very promising.