…on the mountainside.  With lots of rain lately, the vetiver and trees are growing quickly.  Click here to see how it looked when we started planting a month ago.  This is what it looked like today.

There are approx 750 meters (2460 feet or 0.47 miles) of vetiver planted so far.  We used 150 dirt sacks (used like sand bags) to fill in ravine areas and help hold earth in place.  There are 50 palm trees and 200 other reforestation trees (mahogany, cedar, flamboyant, etc).  We used 360 pickets.  These are freshly cut sticks that you put in the ground that will start growing leaves within 2-3 weeks.  These have a lower rate of survival than a seedling, but they develop into a full grown tree faster.  They are planted close together.  When they start to take, we’ll throw big palm, coconut, & banana leaves and other things down (cardboard) on the upper side of them.  This will slow any mud run-off and erosion.

We planted all of the sacks that were in the first nursery already.  Today, they finished filling and sewing to complete the second full nursery.  It seems to take 5-6 weeks for the vetiver to really take off and grow so that the sacks are ready for planting.

They still need to burn the holes in the sacks that they did today before they plant them, but they went ahead and gathered vetiver starts from older plants that have been growing around Cazale for a couple of years…

…and separated them.  These are ready to go and will be placed in the sacks tomorrow morning.

This picture was taken a couple of weeks ago when they started on this section.

They planted 3 horizontal lines around the top of this huge ravine.  This isn’t from the same angle, but it’s growing really well too as you can see in this photo taken today.

They will continue planting vetiver in this same area tomorrow.  I’m not sure if you can tell the actually depth and distance of the ravine in the photo above, but the ravine is deep and big.  Prayers for safety are appreciated.  They will also be planting 100 lime trees.