Greetings everyone,
We stumbled across a simple way to make a plant nursery at our farm in the mountains of Haiti. This may be so obvious that lots of people have done this already but I haven’t seen it described elsewhere so thought I would share it. We had a small gravel pad that was used for a temporary, sheet-metal/bamboo house here that we no longer needed so the house was removed. The pad had been surrounded by Napier grass on three sides. As the Napier got tall, it created a somewhat shaded area in the middle and so I decided to set up my plant nursery in there to allow the plants to get some light with getting too dried out by the sun. It has worked well so far. The only maintenance has been cutting back the Napier grass when it gets too tall and starts to fall over.
Here are a couple of pictures:
This picture is looking into the rectangular pad from the entrance.
This is looking at the entrance from an angle. I have used the one outside side of the enclosure that is most shaded from the sun to put extra plants.
Here is a diagram of the nursery:
It may not be as good as a shade net nursery but shade netting is something we can’t easily get here and Napier grass is abundant and free.
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Thanks @Joel_Mawhorter for sharing this! It is great to see what works in various contexts. My home nursery is a similar concept only in an abandoned trailer under some trees. Working with the microclimates that exist can be so helpful! Keep sharing these observations. I love seeing things like this!
Thanks Joel,
We have had success using castor bean for nursery shade. Grows fast and can be pruned to manage shade.
We definitely want to visit you if the roads ever open.
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Greetings Mike,
That makes sense. Castor is part of what we are using for biomass production and does grow quickly here. Unfortunately it is so toxic that this limits how I can use it in my context as I have young children. I haven’t seen it yet that I know of but I suspect there are Haitian children that die from ricen poisoning from having castor trees around their houses.
I want to do some more experiments with castor planted very thickly as a short (e.g. 1 season) fallow crop.
I’m planting an area of my property this rainy season as a syntropic agriculture experiment based on helpful suggestions from Roger Gietzen. I was thinking to use castor heavily in this as an early plant in the succession and then take it out when other trees got bigger but the area I’m planting it too close to our living area for me to be comfortable that children won’t get the beans.
Joel
