The Green Advantage

Invest in your future, then invest in your world.^TM

OUR OWN TREE NURSERY TO PRODUCE 60,000 SEEDLINGS

We're very excited to announce that we've started our own nursery (vivero) to produce about 60,000 seedlings this year. That sounds like a lot, but we expect to sell out again as we have done every year.

It was getting harder to find nurseries that could handle our volume of rare native species. When we learned that one of our farm managers has worked with a large-scale grower and that his wife has experience in viveros, we knew the time had come to do our own. And we love that it provides jobs for several local women, who are very adept at handling small seeds and fragile seedlings.

An interesting thing about starting seeds is that often, you can’t just plant the seed and have it sprout. Teak is a very good example. In our zone, teak will not self-seed. Even though the trees will eventually produce seed after about 8 to 9 years, the seeds won’t usually sprout. To sprout teak seedlings you have to pretreat the seed by either immersing in boiling water or scoring each seed. One theory is that this is because teak, in its native element, tends to grow in river bottoms. The yearly floods will cause the seeds to be abraded so they can sprout. If there is not a flood, the seed’s hard shell remains undamaged, so the seed can remain viable for much longer. This means that in a year of drought, nature will save seeds for the following year.

This is one of several reasons why teak is so popular as a green investment in Costa Rica: Since it doesn’t self-seed, it is not an invasive species here. So not only does teak grow faster here than in its native lands and produce a very valuable wood, it will not become an exotic pest like invasive species.

Click here for more tree nursery photos.

Two new Gringa in the Midst stories: Abuelo Victor's Funeral and Costa Rican School Board

Gathering Endangered Seedlings from the Wild

An added advantage to doing our own nursery is that we can use seedlings from mother trees near the land where the seedlings will be planted.

In the most forested of our fincas, there are rare trees that are producing seedlings. We sent our crew out to gather up 10,000 of them and plant them in bags. We had wooden racks called aparejos built for our horses to carry the seedlings up to the nursery.

Most of the trees we’ve planted were raised from seeds that come from good sources such as CATIE and sometimes from mother trees found on our farms. But sometimes we find literally thousands of seedlings below one mother tree. These are especially good, because nature has already selected the strongest, so all of these will be very high quality. Not only that, it gives us the ability to plant trees that normally are not available in the nurseries. Sadly, year by year, fewer native seeds and seedlings are available. Most people only want to plant a few species, but we need many others – partly because you, our tree owners, request them, but also because we need them in the permanent forest to bring back diversity.

Most of the trees planted by Finca Leola will continue to be raised from seed, but the wildlings allow us to have available trees that nature has already shown to be the strongest and the best for the area. It is actually a little more expensive to use wildlings, but it is worth gathering them when we find them.

Click here to read about some of the varieties we grow.