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

Mangoes and Planting vetiver. Los Viejos (Baile)!!

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Been a while since I have had a chance to post, pido mil disculpas por eso, planting season is FULL ON and this means Chris is a super extra busy man, laying out agro-forests, landscapes and gardens at BF and all over Nicaragua for my business here. Well here we go. The first foto is one of a bunch of teens dressed as old men and women (it is all guys), It is ‘ La baile del Viejo y La Vieja’ which consists of a lot of rump shaking and old man cane shaking to modern music, it is a hoot to watch and many folks gather for this display, we were lucky enough to catch a few dances (see Osa as she looks on, she is the pupppy) when we were setting up for the 3rd annual Tree exchange in town. The ‘open field’ foto is a before foto of our 1.5 acres of annual demonstration cultivation planted on contour, with water rentention measures such as stones and vetiver on contour as well as cover cropping, mulching, NO BURN, and crop rotation. This is a model system co-developed and peopled by our Escuela de Campo members. This year Nevis is in charge of this field and Aleida the new field system on the ‘other land’ as we call it. Happy smiling people foto with my ugly mug included features a portion of BF staff taking home fruit trees from the BF nursery and beyond as part of their ‘perks package’ as BF employees, employees have first pick from the nursery of plants for thie home gardens and land.





‘The smiling kids and teenagers foto’ that also features Katie and Paco shows the folks who drove up to the finca in order to help us bring trees down to town for the 3rd annual tree exchange. We do this exchange each year after the rains have fallen as an extension to the seed exchanges we have in May. This year was really cool as folks I first exchanged trees with are coming back to me and telling me how healthy and fruitful the grafted citrus and avocadoes are that they asked for 3 years ago, fruit treee success takes years as does the feedback, know it is coming, now they tell their friends, soon hopefully we will be working with A LOT MORE trees to SHARE!!!!

The last two fotos feature a recurring BF theme, ABUNDANCE. Our food safe is featured with a cornucopia of BF fruits, local fruits and very little else. SWEET.

The shameless mango pile foto speaks for itself. Do not worry, there is tons more out there. Literally, actually TONNES!!!!!

AWESOME,

Bring on the abundance and we will find a way to put it away for a rainy day and share our success with our friends here for a more diverse and fruitful approach to food security for our region and BEYOND!!!!

Be well all and thank you for your support,

CHRIS SHANKS

Trees

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Anyone ever wonder what a half a million seedlings looks like? Well wonder no more as those rows of green in the two garden looking fotos are actually seedlings. A nursery owned by 3 brothers and their father, they collectively produce close to one million trees per year. Yee Haw!! This year BF bought some cocoa/cacao trees as well as a few hardwoods and other goodies for a coppice firewood system we are trialing with $$ from the UVM CUPs grant.
The theme of this last week has been trees and plants, personally I have purchased about 13,000 for BF, the community, and private clients for Living Systems Solutions, my for profit socially responsible business. It has been one heck of a week!! What I do not have a foto of, though what I would like to share is a tale of two ovens. One in the community, one at BF, each baked 50 loaves of bread to make 700 sandwiches for ‘Dia de Los Niños’ Children’s day last Saturday. Totoco eco-lodge donated the wholesome flour and BF donated sustainably produced fuelwood, our oven and the sweat and tears (from smoke) of our volunteer staff, thanks Cat, Martha, Clemencia, Charlie, Kirstie and anyone I forgot, (sorry).

Good work all around. Wish we has more nurseries like that and more crazed tree planting ninjas.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director, Project Bona Fide