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

Café, fare thee well to Cat, (until you come back).

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

This past week was in great part about coffee. One of the world’s most coveted resources, still picked by hand world round, fuels economies of developing nations and satisfies the caffeine cravings of the Western world. Coffea arabica, or café in Spanish is an important crop in Nicaragua, especially in the north where it is a cornerstone of the economy, Ometepe though is no slouch, producing its fair share, many tonnes which are organic. Bona Fide has some few dozens of producing plants, this year as part of our understorey planting strategy we have put in close to 150 plants of both Coffea arabica and Coffea robusta. We plan on another 50-100 more in the coming weeks. We hope to produce enough to meet our consumption needs as well as our anticipated comsumption growth plus sell some value added BF coffee to help support our work here in the community. The lovely foto of a sea of red and yellow flags shows the tight plantings and shady area that is needed for a shade grown coffee environment, you do not need a lot of space for many coffee plants. The wonderfully shaped cone like flower bud with the ‘lily’ pads in the background is Nelumbo nucifera or Sacred Water Lotus, a key image in the Buddhist faith, also medicinal and edible, actually every part can be eaten. The root especially is favoured in many styles of Asian cooking. This blossom is our first and will produce a lot of seeds to continue our research into this promising crop for both food, medicine and the ornamental trade here in Nicaragua. The stone spiral you spy in the following foto shows the finishing touches going in on my new shower, sure to be an outdoor experience bar none. Kudos to David, Norman, Vienel and Martin for their attention to detail and craftmanship. This kind of stonework is a skill we are building to take advantage of the profusion of stone all obver the island to stimulate jobs and local economy here on island thru the development of skills and private business with social conscience.

The final image is a gratuitous foto of my darling baby girl, Osa. Gets cuter everyday.

Last but not least one bit. Farewell (for now) to Cat McGill, our dynamic garden co-manager and baker w/o peer. Cat will be back in 5-6 weeks after a tour of the US, weddings and visits. Buen Viaje!!

Thanks Bona Fide friends and supports,

-Chris Shanks