Cocoa or Cacao or cacahuatl

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Cacao or Cocoa, one of the most desired and traded substances in the world, always a shortage, always desire for more. Theobromine is the name of that game( it is the drug part of chocolate that brings us joy), Theo (god) broma (food) Theobroma, the latin genus of the chocolate tree means literally food of the gods. I think most of us can agree it was aptly named. The adjacent foto is NOT a BF image, not yet at least. As our close blog readers may already know BF has fruited cacao and the region we are in has a histroy of its use historically and up to the present. It was used as money here, the cacao bean, which is where chocolate comes from(beans inside of colored pods). The image I am using speaks again to two major major BF themes: diversity and abundance. BF sowed all the seeds we produced form our small cacao crop, we also planted 150 more trees from other sources to total close to 200 cacao trees planted. The quantity of these tasty and useful trees represents a major milestone: UNDERSTORY. BF's determined and agressive agro-reforestation program has hit the milestone of having canopy, vertical architectural space that allows for the utilization of understorey trees to be cultivated below the shade of the trees, above. Cacao is one such crop, so is coffee, there are many others like patchouli, vanilla, ginger, turmeric, taro, thai ginger, araza, kandis, to name a few. This last week was our first significant understorey planting. Thank you to Hector, Martha, Cat, Mark, Kirstie and Marcia for your planting skillz, thanks to the BF personnel for prepping the site!!

In this last week BF also had significant help from volunteers both international and abroad concerning upkeep at the community center, work done on the gardens and nursery and of course ongoing house construction by a crack team of ninjas for Chris' house (seperate but worth mentioning as it directly relates to my general health and happiness).

Thanks to all.

Thank you to all BF supporters for all your help and advice and presence over all these years.

Best,

Chris Shanks