Sept-Dec 2012: Report of our activities

The beginning of 2012 was primarly dedicated to install solar panels for our pumping operations. In the last 4 months our team focused on planting fruit trees and performing several maintenance works.

The choice of fruit species, as our gardening products and sales of Moringa leaves *, is part of our commitment to plant species more productive, and therefore more interesting for the local community. We want to make the nursery a reference selling point for the area and a place to exchange tips and to promote tree planting and awareness of the Tree-Nation project. Throughout these months, many hours have been dedicated to Ziziphus and Mango transplantation (Learn more about Ziziphus), two species already available on the Tree-Nation’s website. We expect to include soon on the platform others species to offer Tree-Nation’s members the opportunity to plant more fruit species.

Our team has also improved the drip irrigation system to ensure that water circulates properly and reaches each young #Moringa_oleifera. This became necessary after the rainy season because some pipes were buried or damaged. It has been a long task, checking and correcting the connectors’ perforation and replacing them in front of each tree. We have also reduced from 1 m to 0.3 m the distance between the pots of the irrigated surface to increase the system’s performance. In total, it has been necessary to produce 1500 pots of Moringa, reinforced by direct sowing of Moringa seeds on 15000 (whose have also being used for replanting operations on the Moringa site with manual watering).

Alongside these activities, many other important tasks have been completed as:
We gradually started the woody species seeds production for those species already existing in the farm. These are the seeds of Acacia senegal, Bauhinia rufessens, Leucena and Ziziphus. This will significantly reduce seed requirements for the production of plants during 2013.
In September Moringa gave us a beautiful production of 375 kg of leaves (15 bags of 25 kg!). October and November the production has decreased due to the rain delay and a caterpillar attack. We took the opportunity in this period to prune the trees and thus multiply the main branches. In case of thorny branches, the pruned ones were reused to build fences where the #VegetalFence is less dense.
Finally, the irrigation reservoir was fixed after finding some leakages.