Video log #1 - Reforestation progress report

For those of you that don't know, my wife @ecoinstant and I dedicated our life for the last four years to living in rural Colombia. As a sociologist tree farmer interested in sustainable development, with a journalist, artisan and general re-user wife, we decided that the only way to truly develop localized solutions to sustainable development was to actually life on site, and suffer if need be.

Part of our 'job' was to take our basic and theoretically knowledge of homesteading, farming and permaculture and transform it into something real - real techniques, strategies and plans that could be repeatable and replicable.

For example - we had purchased a small farm with traditional monoculture coffee crops where chemicals and poisons and store bought fertilizers were used. We did our own experimentation and made some moves that have caused many people locally to laugh heartily at us. For example, (and there are many examples) in this particular lot of coffee production, we immediately stopped applying anything. No fertilizers, no sprays, we just started planting other things. As coffee plants died, we replaced them. But others lived!

We learned a lot, and have developed all of the above - techniques, strategies and plans! We have tons of great ideas and we continue moving forward; we plan on continuing to share our findings and journey with you here.

Finally, after several weeks of studying Papa-pepper, I decided that video and editing quality would no longer be something that would get in our way. Instead of taking 4 years to produce 2 minutes of video - @ecoinstante and I produced 2 minutes of video in, well...2 minutes.

Here it is - let us know what you think!

So I almost fell over, but we think it went really well! Each of these species mentioned here will be featured more in depth later in a my plant diary style post.

In this video you can see that not all of the coffee plants recovered, they were not naturally able to sustain themselves without fertilizers in such tight densities. But as we will continue to show, coffee plants are very resilient, and as long as they have some friends, preferably providing light shade and good leaf litter, and a nice pruning every once and a while, they will happily produce coffee and firewood for 25+ years!

The dried up coffee trunks turn into beautiful walking sticks or chair legs - nothing goes to waste!

Until next time;


Love and Light!

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