Thank you to Mindy Feldman for her support of the La Reserva Forest Foundation. She ordered some trees while visiting her second home nearby in Chimurria. She set it all up for the children from the nearby school to plant the new seedlings giving them each a chance to adopt a tree by planting and watching it grow over the next few years.
We arrived at her property at 10am to set the trees out in the places we felt were appropriate for each species and began to dig the holes, so that when the children arrived they would only need to remove the plastic bags, place them in the holes and cover them over with dirt. They had to walk up to the property and arrived a little before 11 am.
I showed them how to plant each seedling, stressing the importance of collecting all of the used plastic bags when we were finished, to be discarded properly, and then stomping the ground down around each tree.
No one complained and, one little guy even got stung by a wasp, but he didn’t say a thing. Mindy took him to the house and made up some baking soda paste and applied it. His eye got swollen but as you can see from his photo he is happy to be out planting, proud of the work he is doing.
On the walk back to the house we were all talking about how beautiful
it was to have such a nice creek running through Mindy’s property.
Since all of the children are really neighbors of Mindy’s they all
talked about how that same creek flows through all of their places as
well, and they all have one or more springs (nacientos) coming out of
the ground. I missed my big chance at that time to remind them that the
trees that they planted today, and in the future will only add to the
clean, fresh waters coming off of the Chimurria mountain. I didn’t
think of it until later, but one can’t always remember the right thing
to say at the right moment all of the time. I will save it for next
time.
Thank you, Mindy and all of you kids who were there to help. You did a great work to help our environment to heal. Every little positive effort is felt and will be rewarded a little later with water, fresher air and homes for the myriad creatures that depend on the forest trees for homes.
Here we all are afterwards in front of Mindy’s beautiful Poinsettia bush. We all called it the “mata de Navidad”. Come on everybody….
Let’s Get Planting!!
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