Fertilizing and killing Ants with pink fairy dust.

So a while ago I chatted about planting 1000 trees for our natural boundaries, this in itself was an arduous task in the heat of the Guanacaste sunshine. Little did we know that after all that the job is not over, oh no, not by a long way. Fertilizer is a must for these little politas (baby trees) as is some very toxic ant killing repellant that looks very pretty and pink (think along the lines to Tinkerbell’s fairy dust in Peter Pan) .21 days after planting the trees we were told that we must go back over every single tree we had planted and clean all the grass and weeds from around them and cut back any big leaves that were covering them, then dig a small trench around them and fill it with fertilizer and ant repellant. Here they use Obono, 10-30-10 it is a mix of nitrogen and some other very helpful stuff for baby trees. After this we must also douse them with some magic sparkly (but super toxic) ant repellant to stop the ants from eating the roots and destroying all our hard work. This stuff has no cure, and on the label it says that you must wear boots (god knows why) a mask, gloves and ear protection!!! Nothing like overkill on the health and safety label!!!So we took our strange shaped machetes, designed for clearing trees & Nick collected his gas mask (very Bane from Batman esk) his toxic ant killer and I utilized a kitchen ladle and a bin for the Obono and we headed out to the fences. We struggled for a while to find our little budding trees as they were so covered in grass and had small vine like plants growing all around them, but eventually we trained our eyes to see them and got to work. We cleared 12” (about the size of a decent 2 person pizza) around each tree, with the machete and cut back the bigger plants to give them more light, then dug a small hole near to them in a kind of horse shoe shape and filled this with the fertilizer, the pink anti-ant dust was puffed (as you would imagine) over the top of everything so that no ant was left un-deaded.It took 2 days to get through them all, almost as long as it took to plant them but we got it done and the trees were once again living in the sun and getting stronger by the day. However, another 21 days later we had to go out and do the same thing all over again, oh joy!! These little suckers take a lot of care, poor Halley and Cook haven’t seen any attention for the past week as we have all been so busy digging, chopping and fertilizing the trees. But I guess in the long run its worth all the trouble, and the Faunafifo people are happy too, as there are now 1000 more trees in Guanacaste.Till next time from Tinkerbell, Bane and the living dead pink ants…pura vida