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.