Palm Tree Plantation

Our next stop was a Palm Tree Plantation.  Our guide actually called it a Palm Tree Forest, rather than a plantation.  In some ways, that seems more correct.  By that I mean that to me, a plantation would infer some uniformity such as the trees would be planted in rows.  But that was not the case here.  The palm trees were just all in the same area, but looked like they had just sprouted in their locations.  Nothing looked organized about the trees locations.  But so much for western agricultural practices.  I’ll tell about the palm tree farm as I go through the photos.

1.      The first photo will explain how the trees looked to me, as in not in rows.  Focus on the palm tree in the middle of the photo.  The farm owner is climbing the tree to demonstrate his trade and technique.  You can also see that there are lots of other trees (nonproductive) and shrubs growing in the area.

2.      The farmer is at the top of the palm tree in the second photo.  The process seemed most similar to me, by comparison, to harvesting maple syrup.  The guy cuts a new branch sprouting near the top of the tree and then hangs a pot underneath the cut branch.  He goes back up the next day and brings down the pots filled with fresh palm juice and puts up some new pots.

3.      After the farmer’s demonstration, he asked if any of us wanted to try it out.  I took the challenge.  I did pretty well climbing up, getting over half way, before I ran into a problem.  The ladder was right against the tree with zero room for my feet to go into the ladder.  The farmer had put his feet sideways and kept going.  But my feet were too big to fit between the ladder’s edges and my toes were not strong enough to support me, so I headed back down as you can see me doing in the third photo.

4.      In the fourth photo, you can see two pots in the middle of the photo.  The lower pot with the greenish liquid is the fresh palm juice.  It was cool and very sweet and very good, but I don’t recommend drinking too much of it.  The other pot was more of a yellow liquid.  That was the same juice, only it had gotten warm and fermented.  It was also very good and didn’t have too much kick to it.  They also make sugar from condensing the juice.  We tried the sugar and liked it as well.

5.      The last photo is some honeycomb that the farmer cut down from some trees on his farm.  In the top of the last photo, you can see some of the palm sugar.