We have built a new palo santo nursery in Santa Marianita 2021

We build a new nursery in Santa Marianita

At the end of July 2021, we began with the creation of a new nursery located in Santa Marianita / Manta / Ecuador.

This nursery is made in a sustainable way with bamboo cane, it has a space of 4 meters wide by 10 meters, which allows it to house around more than 3000 Palo Santo trees.

At the beginning of August 2021, we planted the first 500 palo santo trees, we used the transplant technique, which consists of taking small trees that are located in an overpopulated area in the forest since this influences their growth.

That is, what we have done here is to extract them and place them in the nursery so that they can be developed in a better way, here we will take care of them for a while until they are ready to be able to reforest them in different areas of the city of Manta, they will also be georeferenced and uploaded in our geoportal, in which all of you will be able to access and see in what condition and place our reforested trees are.

Within our planning is to go every 8 days to the nursery to give maintenance to the trees, today August 30, 2021, when we arrive at the nursery we get a great surprise, and that is that the trees have leaves, showing that they are adapting to their new home.

In addition, we also found 5 dead trees, this we can know because these trees took a red color and their bark was dry and their smell was scarce.

This is no reason to be sad, as we have also started with the creation of our seedbed for the germination of Palo Santo Bursera Graveolens seeds.

As you know this year the winter was very good and we have been able to collect many seeds, which are produced by palo santo trees 6 years and older during the rainy season.

These seeds are greenish in color, but to be able to use them it has a process; Palo santo seed is put to dry in a dry and dark place, it will turn orange-red and then turn black. When the seed is black it means that it is ready to be germinated.

What we did was build a 1.20 meter by 1-meter box. The base of the box is made of black  soil, we proceeded to place the palo santo powder and mountain  soil, trying to cover the entire drawer.

Then we proceeded to place another layer of black  soil with a little bit of palo santo powder and a little mountain earth, we proceeded to mix well. Once mixed, we make rails with a rope.

Once this is done, we add water making sure our seedbed is very humid. ready to place the seeds. We sow around 300 PaloSanto seeds so that they can all germinate, these seeds as well as the little trees will be monitored every 8 days to give them maintenance and put water on them.

Germination of new Palo Santo plants

After approximately 5 months of having sown our first palo santo seeds in our nursery and of giving it maintenance every 8 days. ON January 3, 2022, we were surprised to see many new palo santo plants that had germinated.

How they will know how to germinate these seeds in a place far from the dry forest, the natural habitat of this sacred tree, is very complex. For this reason we created our small seedbed combining various types of soil, to resemble that of the dry forest, we did it based on an impiric theory, which has given us good results and now we have to take it to the next level, which are the studies in conjunction with The academy.