Coconut tales

Coconut trees are famous for making coconuts. I was once hit by a coconut, almost died. Around Bali, in all of the hotels and all the public spaces, they cut the flowers off, which means the coconuts never get born. You get the best oil in the world from coconuts. We have an amazing gardener at Green School and he did two things. If you look up and around at coconut trees around you, you’ll see a lot of damage. This is because of the rhinoceros beetle. It goes into the coconut and eats down into the heart of the leaf. The coconut trees die when their leaves are gone. At Green Camp, the gardeners put together a bio-agent to fight it. In the test trees, they’ve sprayed it twice and the trees are starting to come back. The other thing happening at Green Camp is the coconut sugar. It’s amazing- you’ve got to try it.

-John

A few words from Johannes, a member of the Green Camp and Green School landscape team:

We had this problem with the coconut or rhinoceros beetle, so we tried to develop a program with a specific fungus, which infects the beetle. We tried it on all the coconut trees, spraying them each twice. And it’s really good, it worked. All the trees are growing again, each leaf is getting better and stronger; before, the leaves would only last three months and die. We also produce coconut sugar here. We have more than 430 coconut trees in Green Camp and Green School. We have to think of the safety issues because we have over 500 people and kids a day on campus. So we tried to make it safe by taking the sap, this means there are less coconuts produced by the trees. We have a 13 person team in the landscape team looking after everything.