Year 2: 2020, Proyecto Paraiso was Born

Creation of a natural pool
Hector and I Catherine, became business partners and decided to commit to the project of building an agricultural paradise in an agricultural wasteland. The first thing we did was take care of our comfort, so we did something that could immediately make us feel cooler in the boiling heat and bring a lot of biodiversity back very quickly. We built our natural swimming pool, the first bit of beauty to come from human hands to the property.

Started planting 600 giant asper bamboo
We also started the planting of 600 Giant Asper Bambu trees, these Aspers will go to 30 meters and can be used for construction, they will also provide a wall around the farm that will help to protect it from chemical sprays coming from the other farms, the bamboos also help by keeping the water table high, they sequester carbon dioxide and will keep humidity within the farm by creating a microclimate. Volcanic soils are also deficient in silica, the bamboos will replenish this with the enormous amount of biomass that they will contribute through their fallen leaves, which are high in silica.We also started the planting of 600 Giant Asper Bambu trees, these Aspers will go to 30 meters and can be used for construction, they will also provide a wall around the farm that will help to protect it from chemical sprays coming from the other farms, the bamboos also help by keeping the water table high, they sequester carbon dioxide and will keep humidity within the farm by creating a microclimate. Volcanic soils are also deficient in silica, the bamboos will replenish this with the enormous amount of biomass that they will contribute through their fallen leaves, which are high in silica.

Started the ever-evolving mushroom laboratory
The aim with mushroom lab was to make a quick income whilst we learned the best way to make the rest of the land productive, however with unpredictable rising temperatures, power cuts and environmental contamination it wasn’t easy, it was a year before we got our first actual fruiting mushrooms. Now three years into the project we are successfully producing reishi and oyster mushrooms, and we have built a new lab in the colder region of San Lucas Sacatepéquez where our sterile work is conducted and we also fruit our cold climate mushrooms, reishi is fruited at the farm and is used to make an immune boosting medicine.

Started a trials garden and nursery
The trials garden was a small area that we used to learn what was possible in the farm. We conditioned the soil with lots of compost and employed the best practices to find what could be grown. In our region people generally don’t have kitchen gardens and only produce a few simple crops for the kitchen, most of the regions local seeds have been lost and only a few elders remember what used to be grown. The land is occupied by huge monocultures only, so it was a beautiful work to trial different seeds, we found that eggplants, okra, turmeric and ginger loved growing and some herbs. Many things were immediately destroyed by insects such as the tomatoes we trialed at this time. In the nursery we started many tree seedlings such as jack fruit and Annona, it is our safe place for starting off the baby plants.

Mountains of compost from cow poop
Lucky for us, there are many cow farms nearby, the cow farms don’t use the cow dung that is left over when the cows are stabled during dry season. So, we offered a free cleaning service for those barns and made lots of compost. This is something we still do now and hopefully will always do. Originally, we did it all by hand but now we have a tractor that means we can process huge amounts of manure very fast. The compost that we make is the backbone of what we do and has enabled us to feed the soil and produce crops early in the regeneration process.

Fruit trees
We got impatient so we planted 500 fruit trees into the old yucca field, the soil was like concrete before planting. We had left it for a year so the weeds could take hold and we ploughed them back in, we added compost and corn husks around trees. But we lost quite a few trees, and many were severely attacked by insects, however we have since replanted and the system is coming along quite well now.

Chickens, Ducks and Fish
We gave their hutch a make over and fenced them in so they couldn’t destroy everything, we got them working for us building compost in a deep litter bedding system, eventually this chicken area turned into a fish breeding area coupled with ducks. The fish eat the duck poop and the algae that grows in the water and just keep breeding, so we have a continuous supply of fish without many inputs.

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