My Cacao seeds have germinated 🌱 Progress in my Vegetable Garden.

In past posts I showed how I was preparing to germinate Cacao seeds. They have officially germinated, I feel joy, anxiety and a lot of optimism for this new stage in production.

From a small vegetable garden to an edible forest.

For those who don't know me my name is Ivan aka Arrozymangophoto and I'm the creator along with @cvnuitter of the @vidaverdeve project which is based on offering a bridge between Art + Regen and Web3. Among some ideas that we have already materialized is El Agro Café a small outdoor kitchen / Cafeteria venture. I imagined being in the middle of nature surrounded by orchards where you can select yourself what you are going to eat. That's how our little place works.

Now we have to get down to work on the first phase of planting our own agroforest 🌳 an edible forest, syntropic forest or whatever you want to call it.

Our goal is to plant more than 300 fruit trees, especially Coffee and Cocoa. Among the varieties will be Avocados, Oranges, Mango, Lechosa or papaya among others. This will allow us to have the capacity to supply our store with fresh and 100% organic fruits. We want to strive for a Slow Food Kilometer 0 certification.

Cocoa Seedlings

For us it is important to take care of the technical and ancestral details of the handling and care of these Cocoa Seedlings until they are ready to plant. Out of 50 seeds we have selected only 14 whose fully erect roots are indicative of highly productive trees.

On the 14th of this month we will have a planting activity with more than 20 people that we have specially invited so that together we can take this historic step in the history of @vidaverdeve, the planting of our first Agro Forest.

Progress of our Orchard

You will also be able to appreciate how our crops have grown since the last publication. We have not respected the time of growth of lettuce and we have already eaten some salads 🥗 but calm now is that it remains to harvest and leave some to continue growing after the last harvests to take advantage of stocking our seed bank and repeat the cycle of germinating lettuce to sow again.

Sowing of Conuco, an ancestral crop.

I have had a space that we plant every year for the same season: corn, Yucca and Caraota or black beans. I had to weed a little bit always leaving the weed cuttings in the same place so that more organic matter is generated.

The Yuccas have been planted since before and the Caraotas I planted about 1 month ago before the rains started. That's why I took this opportunity to plant corn and some sprouted pumpkin plants or as we say here in Venezuela auyama.

The power of Hive Blog. I love that there are spaces like the Hive Garden to express all the wonderful things about planting. We have a small community called Vida Verde, you can look us up if you want to see our activity.

I'll say goodbye with some general images of the garden and some wildflowers that are slowly appearing as it rains more often. Included is a hen that the rooster has found somewhere to be part of our family.

I love that I can document all the processes, I really enjoy with other users of the community always seeing their progress.