I am writing a separate blog just for a farm report. It seems many people do not know that I have also been using most of my Saturdays to oversee work on our farm on the mountain. A tree farm was started there about 5 years ago and for the last 2+ years, I have been assisting with this work.
When the farm was first started over 100,000 trees were planted. These were both pine trees and eucalyptus trees. Unfortunately, two years into the project, there was a horrible fire on the mountain which killed over 90% of these trees. During the last two years, we have planted more trees and worked hard to ensure the growth of the ones we had left. Below are a few pictures of some of our current trees. We have around 20,000 now and some are big enough to start trimming off the bottom branched to help with their upward growth.
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| These are a few of the first trees which were planted. |
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| These trees are about 3 years old. You can see the recent growth at the tops of the trees and how we have trimmed the bottom branches. This will allow the trees to grow taller and straighter so we can use them for lumber. |
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| Of course, this is a long-term (15 year) project. |
Additionally, we have been trying to plant some crops to help provide some food for the schools. We have had little luck until this year. The year before I became involved, they tried to raise cabbages and had very minimal success. Last year, we planted white beans and had some success with around 10 gallons of beans for the schools. This year, we tried maize, beans and potatoes. Just like farming anywhere, you have some bad years and some good; some bad crops and some great crops.
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| Our maize did great! |
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| We had many ears of corn to shuck, so below you will see the shucking machine. Whew! this was a hard day of work! |
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| We had 11 huge bags full of maize |
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| Below is a picture of the three large bags we brought down the mountain today for the schools. |
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| And our beans also produced well. We sent two good sized bags to the school (oops...I forgot to take a picture of them!) |
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| We also have planted several avocado trees which are doing well. |
I had mentioned that we planted potatoes as well. But this was our failed crop. We had one crop which came in well, but just after blooming the entire crop was infected with a bacteria killing it completely. So we replanted, but that crop also failed. I was very disappointed. But over-all, we did well. The school gets a little food.
We are expecting a new missionary at the end of this year who is an agricultural expert. Hopefully, he will be able to assist us in building this project into a very big success.
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