July Update from SALVEASERRA

Project update. July 2008
By Roberto Lamego - Director, July 14, 2008 04:30 PM

Dear donors and Project friends.

We continue to look after our agroforestry systems experiments and of the new “coffee under shade” plantation. Everything is growing nicely as we had a very good rain season this year. The dry season approaches and we just finish installing a new irrigation system that will enable to water with our mountain sources, all the new plants that suffer very much during the dry period, that every year seems worst. We will lose much less seedlings now and we can irrigate our coffee and fruit trees.

With the dry season we started again to receive school groups to visit the Concordia Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary and spend their day in the forest. See pictures in Photo Gallery.

At the Wildlife Sanctuary, we are preparing 4 tree days courses called “An immersion in the Atlantic Rainforest”, that will take place during this winter, two in August and two in September. Each course will be for 20 students and they will spend these three days living by a forest and feeling and learning its relationship with water production, climate and Biodiversity. They will also see the agroforestry solutions we propose to recover economically the forests and deforested land.

These environmental awareness courses are offered to our community by a Fund that SALVEASERRA created with part of GlobalGiving donations. These donations are paying for 75% of the courses costs.

This Fund makes also possible our Donation Program Project that is at this moment ending the implantation the first Irrigated Organic Vegetable Garden donated to a needed family. We expect that 3 persons can immediately work from this vegetable garden and we hope that in one year from now four families will feed and live from there, as this garden will also produce surplus vegetables and fruit for the local organic food market. This project will produce fish and ducks in the irrigation reservoir and possibly chicken in the same area.

We are looking for another person to receive a second donation. For the moment we still do not have any Tree Nursery, the other donation possibility, in sight.

See Photo Gallery for the first vegetable garden plantation and the water reservoir pavement work.

Thank you all for the donations that are making possible these good things happen in this Brazilian part of the Atlantic Rainforest region.

Roberto Lamego, director.