Almost done with Training

Ok so we went on a Technical Training trip last week. First we stayed at a sweet hotel in Puerto Quito which is lower and much more humid than the Sierra. Lots of bug bites. The hotel was managed by a high school somehow. They had a nursery and some small livestock. Also down the road was an integrated farm called La Montaña they grew chocolate trees as their main source of cash but they also had banana, and various wood species. They also had Tilapia pisciculture, vermiculture (worms), and pigs and some other stuff. We toured there, trained there, build some A-frame levels and made some slow forming terraces. Thats basically a small ditch along a contour, with a slight decline to drain and some perrenials planted directly above it to stabilize. As rains erode soil down slope, the plants slow it down and filter out some soil while the water goes down the ditch instead of washing out more soil. Over time the upper wall of the ditch gets higher as the perennials catch more soil. And eventually you have a terrace, and it doesn´t take tons of labor.

Also, we pruned some cacao, you have to keep the branches low enough to reasonably harvest. There was a termite nest on mine, so I machetied it down and fed it to the tilapia. The chickens enjoyed the trail of termites as well. I hate to let tht protein go to waste (which is one reason I ate a grub that one time, but we feed most grubs to turkeys here).

uh i gotta run. i´m not even halfway done with the tech trip, and we´ve done more since then. and we´re done with training next wednesday when we swear-in, and then i´ll go to site where i don´t expect to have access to the web for quite some time. . . . so ¡chao!