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.
No comments:
Post a Comment