New growth and agroforest management

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

These last 3 weeks have been busy friends, a lot of traveling for BF and for one's living, keeping the balance. The 'veranito' or mini summer has ended and now its dry. Ironic that when it was supposed to be dry it was not not and now in the supposed wet times sunny with wind, nice weather though for working and the trees are loving it. Anticipating dry weather, our Escuela de Campo students left their intercropped annual grain fields with a 'living mulch' layer between the corn and rice so our sensitive crops are still faring well, cucurbits like pumpkin, cucumber, and squash are begining to produce and the corn field is tasseling, we are just readying for the first red bean harvests, should be some pics next week!!

This week's update is all about GROWTH, now that we are about 1/2 of the way thru the wet season new plantings and older ones are all sprouting. The top two bamboo fotos feature healthy and vigourous shoots rocketing upwards on Bambusa stenostachya and what I believe may be B.tuldoides, we call it Hondureño as that is where I collected it from years ago. The beautiful red new leaves in the singular foto below is the first new growth on the cacao we planted, its looking very healthy and HAPPY!!





The last two fotos of pruned (pollarded) trees with our volunteer coordinator, Martha Fuchs in it for scale and her nice smile and the pile of pruned woody biomass show the abundant harvest we reaped from maintaining an area of planned living fence for animal/tree systems planted called the 'pig system', this site had tree planted around it over 3/4 of an acre 4 years ago and now with our first pollard we have reaped dozens of cubis meters of woody biomass. Happy bread/pizza oven for all the sustainably grown carbon neutral firewood we have produced. One has to wish others would see how easy it is to grow wood here and how you do not need to cut or gather it from the forest. Oh well, with time the paradigm will shift 'si diosa quiere.'


Thanks everyone for reading.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director Project Bona Fide
Chris@projectbonafide.com

The rain keeps going, the crops growing, seeds flowing!!

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

These past few weeks have been busy and the weather has been excellent, wet enough for the crops but sunny enough to work, we have been planting some but as we are in the midst of what we call the 'mini summer' from the middle of July to the middle of August we have been taking it slow. Fortunately the rains have been better than average during this normally dry perios and as one can see in the left hand foto our rotating annual system of the traditional local crops: corn, beans, squash, and rice are THRIVING!!. Thanks to the hard work of Nevis, Aleida, Roger, and Norbert. We are already havesting pumpkins and our beans are looking good, corn is coming up and folks have now moved to the interplant stage where we are experimenting with species of intercrop legumes (hyacinth bean, black eyed peas, red beans, mung beans, and Mucuna). So far so good. As for the othert two fotos I am featuring a shot of an immature fruit from the Mangosteen tree, why you may ask?? Well because each time I come to Costa Rica to collect seeds for our nursery and Agro-biodiversity program the little feller is almost never ripe. Pretty though. Mangosteen is known as the 'queen of fruits' and is extremely popular in SE Asia, if you are from Canada and reading this sometimes you can find it in the large Chinatown areas of major Canadian cities. Go for it!! The last foto is of course a gratuitous shot of our cute doggies frolicking on the coolth of the day before it all heats up. This coming week we are looking forward to beginnig to resume plantings with layout for some native tree plantings as well as welcome some new volunteers.

Thanks evryone for your readership and suppport,

Chris Shanks