By Arielle | Project Coordinator
Dear Forest Guardians
How are you doing?
With this covid we are all in some sort of lockdown, right? We at Iracambi have been in total lockdown since the end of March. (But the rainforest is a great place to be locked down in!)
And work doesn’t stop. We had a lot of rain during planting season, remember? What we need to do now is check on how all the baby trees are doing, and whether they are being well cared for by the farmers. We need to check on the survival rates, figure out which species are adapting best, and ensure that the baby trees are being weeded and protected from ant attacks.
We did our last monitoring with our students shortly before lockdown. It’s hard work, but the students love it, and they love meeting the farmers and, after the day’s work, drinking delicious coffee, eating cornbread and jumping into the nearest waterfall. It’s a great experience for everyone, farmers and students alike, and of course it’s so gratifying to see the trees growing and bare fields turning into young forests. Not forgetting seeing springs running clearer and stronger than ever.
Then came lockdown.
How to check on our trees? We decided to ask the farmers to do the monitoring themselves. Send us pictures, share any problems with us, keep us in touch. Of course we don’t get as much information as if we were going there, but ít turns out to be a very good strategy. Sometimes they ask us to wait a week, so that they’ll have a chance to do the weeding!
So this form of monitoring is pretty successful, and we’ll certainly incorporate it in future planting seasons. Although there’s nothing like a personal visit, once in a while.
In the meantime, work in the nursery doesn’t stop. Seeds need to be collected, sorted and planted. Seedlings transplanted into plastic sacks, compost made, seed tables maintained, and of course there’s the watering. That takes two hours with two people, every other day.
This quarter we’ve collected seeds from 20 species and planted them, watered them, weeded them and loved them, so rainforest lockdown is never dull!
And one more thing.
You probably know that we work hard with the local community on environmental policy issues. One of these is connected with preserving our high biodiversity forest areas from mining. We’ve set up a facebook page and an online petition, and we’re excited that more and more people are determined to protect the forests that you, dear supporters, are helping to restore.
Well, I reckon I’ve brought you up to date. This was an unusual quarter, but, like so many of us we’ve learned to adjust! And we couldn’t do it without you. Thank you all!
We wish you all health and courage to keep going as we get through these hard times together.
with love,
Arielle and the Iracambi team
Links:
By Arielle Canedo | Project Coordinator
By Arielle Canedo | Project Leader
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