26

Apr

Chestnut trees growing progress 2

Just a quick progress update on our chestnut trees about 9 months after we planted them.

Five trees are dead but the other seven are going great. From what we have seen we believe that we have killed the five dead trees by burning them with too much fertilizer.

Out of the seven chestnut trees that are going great we have one that has even got some chestnuts growing on it which surprised us a lot. We didn’t expect any chestnuts until year 2 or 3.

Filled Under: Progress

10

Sep

Chestnut trees growing progress 1

I went to check for progress on our chestnut trees about 1 ½ weeks after we planted them. All trees have started to bud and some trees have already opened their firt leaves. See the pictures below for details:

Filled Under: Progress

31

Aug

Installation of watering tree guards.

Today we installed a product called WaterTube around each of the chestnut trees we planted a week ago. WaterTubes are manufactured out of recycled plastic, hold about 20 litres of water that is slowly released over the period of a week or two, and are bio-degradable.

We have used WaterTubes around some other fruit trees where we saw a marked improvement of the young trees a few weeks after we installed the WaterTubes.

Following are some pictures of the WaterTubes and the installation process.

Filled Under: Activities

24

Aug

Planting of the first lot of chestnut trees

We have planted our first 12 chestnut trees today.

The following pictures show the preparations we made before planting the trees.

The next picture shows the bare rooted trees as partially unwrapped. Believe it or not that is actually 13 1 year old chestnut trees.

And here is one of the trees planted and watered. As you can see it got dark before we managed to finish planting all 12 trees.

Filled Under: Activities

24

Aug

Organic inputs 24 August 2008

Below you can find pictures of all products we have used in the planting of our first batch of chestnut trees. All inputs are organic as we are in the process of getting ourselves certified as organic growers.