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.