Macadamia Finca
Beez Neez now Chy Whella
Big Bear and Pepe Millard
Wed 11 Jul 2012 22:01
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Todays School Trip to a Macadamia Finca
This morning we had lessons as
usual with a gorgeous little
visitor
At twelve we walked home to mama for
a delicious lunch and had time for a few minutes rest before todays school visit
to a macadamia finca. Bear looked at his I-Pad and saw that Pete (Troutbridge)
was on line. It was smashing to catch up via Skype. Congratulations to him for
his will power and stamina to survive a grueling year not only fixing, repairing
and painting, but overcoming the constant strain of keeping workmen ‘in line’,
to successfully launch Trouters in Fiji. (He is also on this site, see top of
page for List All Users, T for Troutbridge). It has not been an easy year and we
are delighted his home is once again afloat. Well Done, Pete – Whale Meet Again.
We had a sunny stroll back to school
and then on through town to the “Chicken Bus Stop”. Safely
aboard we saw we were on an original ‘Blue
Bird’ school bus.
Fifteen VERY bumpy minutes later
we arrived at Valhalla
We were welcomed by an amusing sign
There were macadamia nuts everywhere,
my beautiful assistant – “give us a turn, Anthea”
modeled for me as usual
Emily, our guide explained that macadamia nut farming does
not exhaust the soil and that the finca is a ‘fair-trade’ farm and the project
has planted over 350,000 macadamia trees all over Guatemala, positively
influencing the lives of many, their environment and their economy. In 2004 the
Valhalla Experimental Station was awarded with the International Human Rights
Consortium laureate for their work towards environment.
The
nuts are harvested from the ground after they have
split out of their outer covering. The trees here are grown without
fertiliser or insecticides, completely organically. Macadamia is a genus
of nine species of flowering
plants in the family Proteaceae, native to
eastern Australia (seven
species), New
Caledonia (one species M.
neurophylla) and Sulawesi in Indonesia (one species,
M. hildebrandii).
These evergreen trees range in
size from six to thirty plus feet tall. The
leaves are arranged in
whorls of three to six, lanceolate to obovate or elliptical in shape, with an
entire or spiny-serrated margin. The flowers are produced in a
long, slender, simple raceme, the
individual flowers can be white to pink or purple, with four tepals (just in case
you think I have done a typo with the word petal, a tepal is one of the divisions of a flower perianth, especially one that is not clearly differentiated
into petals and sepals, as in lilies and tulips.).
The fruit
is a very hard, woody, globose follicle with a pointed
apex, containing one or two seeds.
The genus is named after John Macadam, a colleague of botanist Ferdinand von Mueller, who first described the genus. Common names include macadamia, macadamia nut, Queensland nut, bush nut, maroochi nut, queen of nuts and bauple nut; Indigenous Australian names include gyndl, jindilli, and boombera.
Next was an even more amazing ‘piece of kit’ with its own labels
Simple and ingenious
ALL IN ALL A NEW ONE ON US
.
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