We recently had an agricultural expert from Burkina Faso visit our village to help Megan and I with some of our project questions. He said that he has never had this problem in Burkina, but that a Moringa Cooperative in Niamey this year had the same problem with the lizards and their trees. Then, he looked around and said "Truly this is the desert. WOW! No wonder the lizards eat your trees ... the tree starts to grow and the lizards are attracted to this new, fresh, bright green plant!"
All this said - I will write the last two parts of the tree planting story, so that you can see it to its end!
Tree Planting - Part 5
This lesson in the tree planting program was digging and spacing the holes for the trees - and how to plant the trees around their fields.
The holes for the trees needed to be spaced 5 metres apart - the men measure the space of a metre by the span of their steps. Roughly equivalent - but it works for the village where metre sticks don't exist!
The trees also needed to be planted at the edge of the field - and in between the direction of the wind and the field to help against soil erosion. So, if the wind comes from the South-East direction, then the trees need to be planted on the East and South borders of the field. As the trees grow - their presence will keep the wind from blowing across the fields and sweeping the sand away.
To demonstrate this, I printed pictures of little sandals and trees that I received from SIL ... I then taped these to our large board to demonstrate the spacing and direction of the tree planting:
We then went out to the field and practiced digging the depth and width of hole for the tree sacs and spacing out five metres between the holes.
Tree Planting - Part 6
This was the final tree planting training day ... the culmination of 3 months of work!
Today, we learned how to plant the moringa tree seeds - and the spacing of these trees. These are different than the acacia and neem trees - there are planted in rows. With two feet between the rows and three feet between the trees. Again - I brought out the tree and sandal pictures to demonstrate this!
We then went back out to the tree holes that we dug the previous lesson and I taught them how to plant the tree sac in the hole.
They needed to ensure that the tree sac fit in the hole - not too deep nor too shallow:
Then, they needed to cut the bottom inch off the tree sac, carefully place the sac and tree in the hole - angled on its side. Then they needed to slice up the sac, about 3/4 of the length - not digging too deep so as not to cut the roots of the tree.
As our trees were not sprouting nor ready to plant, I demonstrated this with a sac filled with sand.
As you can tell in one of the above photos - we had a tree seedling start, based on the photos we found online of the acacia and neem trees - this was an acacia tree sprouting. It was soon eaten by lizards.
I could tell the men were as discouraged to report this as Megan and I were to hear that all our work was for naught!
We will try the trees again this year ... but rather than starting the trees from seeds in tree sacs, I am hoping to buy the trees already started as seedlings from tree farms if I can find them!
1 comment:
Sorry to hear about the trees. We had a similar problem when we lived in the High Desert in Apple Valley, California. The problem we had was with the ants eating our little trees. I hope that buying trees already started will help overcome the lizard problem.
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