Planting 1000 trees, sounds easy right??

Here on the finca we like to take care of our boundaries, the saying goes"take care of your boundaries and your boundaries will take care of the cows!?!?!" That's a saying right? Anyway, this week we planted 1000 trees, up, down and around our very hilly finca. Starting with 450 Cortez Amarillo trees, these are native to Central and Southern America and are a member of the Bignoniaceae – or trumpet creeper – family. They produce bright yellow flowers for only 1-2 days at the beginning of the rainy season and then scatter them around the floor - great for fertilizing the ground. Next we planted 550 Madero Negro trees, these beauties are a medium size leguminous tree belonging to the Fabeceae family, they produce lilac or pink colored flowers and the smooth bark can be either dark brown or a whitish grey. Not only do they make perfect boundaries, but they're beautiful too.

The plants arrived at the peak of the wettest month of the year here in Guanacaste, so as you can imagine, it was interesting navigating the hills in the pouring rain. It took 5 of our volunteers 3 days to get them all planted, we worked through the baking sun and pouring rain, and I mean pouring, it was like something from an extreme weather program with reforestation volunteer opportunities. We had some pretty hairy moments, our main man Manuel who is the Care Taker on the Finca and genuine Superhuman ran into a sticky situation when he slipped on a hill and straight into one of the barbed wire fences. Being the tough guy he is we didn’t hear a sound from him, but he did share his war wounds with us.

We found a few tarantulas, a scorpion or two (eek) and the skeletons of cattle that once roamed the fields, which we obviously brought home for decoration, who doesn't love dead cattle in the back yard. It was a tough couple of days but in the end we were pretty happy with our work, the trees will provide living boundaries for the animals and keeps the finca looking pretty too. Less barbed wire and more plant life can only be a good thing right?

We have another 3000 trees left to plant but we are now coming into the dry season so these will have to wait until the next season.

We do all this planting in conjunction with Fonafifo, a government agency that supports the use of living/natural boundaries, you can read more about these guys at http://www.fonafifo.go.cr/