As you can possibly imagine, designing an intensive 90m2 forest is the easy part of the process. After that comes the fun part…digging hundreds of holes and planting all the trees.
We thought we would be intelligent and hire an auger to drill all the holes. But unfortunately the head of the drill was either damaged or too blunt because we couldn´t get deeper than about 10cm. The ground is hard here, but not impossibly hard. (complaint pending with Sodimac for our money back)
So it was pure elbow grease for all the holes. After the initial hole was marked with the auger, we soaked the holes overnight and then finished them off the next day with spades and the chuzo. This was definitely a good workout for the upper body muscles. A huge thank you to Don Jorge and various friends and family members who not only volunteered for the fun planting part of the project, but helped out tremendously with the not so glamorous job of hole digging:
Once a section of the holes were complete, we got out the map and started planting:
Over the course of 5 weekends we made slow but steady progress on planting. We were very lucky to have enthusiastic friends and family who happily helped plant, and just as importantly, helped us by donating funds to the financial investment needed to buy all the trees.
It was really great to have so much help, but honestly, I also enjoyed the days when it was just Rodrigo and I planting together. We had a good routine going…I got to do the fun part, planting and watering, while he did the back-breaking work of deepening holes or mixing the soil and compost, and the scratchy job of installing the anti-rabbit mesh.
As we mentioned in the first blog post, the Miyawaki method (intense planting which aids competition and rapid growth) often has to be seen to be believed. These final photos serve as our baseline to show the state of the forest as of May 2022. We will post on a regular basis in order to show how the forest has grown.
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