My Sister, Jenny, cutting down the old rice in the flooded paddy so we can prepare a seedling bed to seed up new rice for the paddy behind her.

Debbie, Me, and Jenny all cutting down rice. This crop didn't do to well with the freeze so the heads didn't fill out and there was nothing to harvest.

Me germinating seeds in the seed bank. We test the germ on our seeds once a year so that we can know we are sending out seeds that germinate.

Out having a bit of fun, hiking in the everglades. Little did we know that massive herds of mosquitoes awaited us on that trail. We had bug spray but the little beast took no heed to the fact that we were drenched in it! Needless to say the actual hike was not so enjoyable.

The Hot Humid Lowlands, soon to be my area of the Farm

You can see the beds are all raised here too, because the lowlands get lots of rain too. The raised beds help the roots to stay up out of the water. And there is trellises to help some plants to stay up off the ground.

The Rice Paddies

Me, Debbie (my predicessor), & Danny (farm manager) Disscussing our Rice Paddies and the planting of 8 different varieties  this year. We will observe the various varieties and see which one does the best in our area. We demonstrate two methods of rice growing, the traditional flooded rice paddy and the SRI method. System of Rice Intensification, in which you do not flood the paddy, simply irrigate it, this method has proven to have substantial increase in rice yeild from the traditional method. The draw back is that there are more weeds and therefore more labor involved in the flooded rice paddy the water keeps the weeds down.

Me bailing out the flooded paddy so it will dry out and the old rice will die so we can plant legumes to fallow the ground for a few months and then plant a new crop of SRI rice.

Seining the duck pond for Tilapia

Several people spread out around the net. Those on the edges are to pull the net across the pond and everyone else is to keep the led line down into the muck at the bottom of the pond so that we catch the ultimate number of fish.

It is a lot of effort to pull the net across the pond as well as to keep the lead line down. We seined two ponds and it took us from 10am till 3 or 4pm with a lunch break and then we fillet all the fish we caught. 

The Tropical Rainforest

One problem with the rainforest areas of the world is too much rain, about 80-200 inches per year.  So to solve the problem of too much water you can plant things on raised beds so that the water will drain off naturally into the trenches. You could also grow thing on trellises so that you get it up off the ground and so that you can maximize your space haveing one plant growing up on a trellis and another growing on the ground. Above this method is demostrated.

An example of raised a raised bed.

More trellising with raised beds.

A Vanilla orchid growing up the side of the tree. And a compost bin be hide the tree.  Another problem with the rainforest's around the world is the slash and burn. Which causes the nutreints to be leached out of the soil and therefore very poor soils. So we would encourage people to slash and mulch in the rainforest. Mulch will help build up the soil and hold the moisture in.

Jason the Rainforest intern.