Hello my name is Bryan,
I'm from southern Iowa, moved to Haiti in 2014. I'm the administrative director on a small community agriculture development project by a small NGO from Ohio. My background is cattle farming and fruit farming "in temperate climates" I grow chestnuts, peaches, apples, plumbs, persimmons, pawpaws, and lots of berries.
We do a variety of things here in southern Haiti. Our main thing is a program that works along side schools to teach science, especially as it relates to trees and forests, as well as teaching tree nurseries and tree care. Students prepare trees in a nursery and then plant them out on their land. Our main focus with this program is late season avocados and nutrient dense fruits for food security. We also work in animal husbandry, conservation agriculture and have a seed bank for vegetable and tree seed, we're currently working to develop several food forests with natives as well as lots of exotics that will serve as living banks of seed and scions for the school program, and maybe a fruit arboretum in the future.
In the past year I've started to collect lots of exotics for the food forests, and while searching the internet looking for plant information, I often came across this forum. I hope to learn from everyone on here and am glad to contribute where I can as well. My biggest regret I have is that I didn't start planting trees as soon as I moved here in 2014. So for those of you pushing it off for next year, START NOW!
To list some of the trees where growing now, avocados, mangos, barbados cherry, guava, citrus, carambola, annonas, jackfruit, breadfruit, breadnut, sapodillas, cashew apple, pomegranate, star apple and tamarind. We also promote planting of moringa, katuk, chaya and haitian basket vine. Some of the exotics I recently started to collect, several Plinias, lots of garcinias, eugenias, rollinia, mamay sapote, black sapote, columbian sapote, canistel, loquat, durian, abui, santol, nance, mulberries, cempajack, morang, rambutan, pulasan, longan, carob, Syzygium sp.
Sincerely,
Bryan.