Plants at attention!

The cacao plants are picking up their leaves.  It's odd that they start out pointing down, but I think they'll all be pointing out soon.

Before picture - cardboard sheet mulching

Here is a 'before' picture from January showing the paper, soil, cardboard layering we used to try to amend the soil and kill the weeds.  Over time, we added oat seeds in too as a green mulch.  They sprung up well, but died because they couldn't get through the cardboard and get water.  Note the T posts used to hold the cardboard down in fairly high winds.

There's also an in-between picture from February here:
http://pixelfarmsalpha.blogspot.com/2018/02/cover-oats-sprouting.html

Clover prep for wheat

We finally decided it was time to till in our cardboard mulch experiment in our (small) field.  The kids had a lot of fun playing in the mud, since we had to spray it down and mix it up to keep the paper from going everywhere.  The muddy part (pictured) was several days ago.  Tonight, we all went out and spread clover seeds to grow as a cover crop / green manure.  The ground here has tons of clay, so we're trying to prepare it as much as we can to be a successful wheat field later this year.

Suddenly, watermelon!

So, somehow we missed these and thought our giant watermelon plants were fruitless.  Today, I looked around the back and found 5 watermelon, with one almost grocery store sized!

We'll let them grow for a bit before harvesting them.

Outside the safe haven

We pulled out 2 cacao seedlings to see if they can survive in the much drier environment outside the little greenhouse.  Time will tell, but it would be nice to not have to baby these so much...

Big Cacao Leaves

The leaves are getting big now, probably over 4 inches on some plants.  What's strange is that they're all hanging down!

I hypothesize this is an adaptation to help them on a littered jungle floor to pull their leaves up through the brush before opening them on top.  Whether that's true or not, I think some of them are starting to angle their leaves out some, so they probably won't stay like this for long.

We're preparing another little greenhouse like this one so we can split the group up and give them more space.  They'll also need larger cups soon!

Tiny cacao leaves

The cacao plants are growing up and getting real leaves!