Charity Work and Farm Work

Yesterday was charity work.
My son and I helped at the spay and neuter clinic offered by Amigos de Animales.  Our job was to help the cats and small dogs wake up after the anesthesia. Some animals took only a few minutes and some took over an hour. It was a ton of rectal temperature taking and vigorous animal rubbing! It was fun and rewarding to help out. They spayed and neutered over 200 animals yesterday and it is amazing to see the clinic in action. They primarily survive off of donations and people donating their time. They are a huge help to the community and great people to know!

Today was Farm Work.
We will be cleaning up the coffee rows for a long time. We are guessing that we will get everything mulched and caught up in the next 3 years. Yeah, 3 years! We have been working on this one row for over a week now. We try to do some each day in between all of the other chores and when it is not raining. It took us over 8 months to find a used/affordable chipper, so we did not start in the dry season, which is inconvenient. 

There is nothing wrong with the way it is currently, but it can be challenging to walk down some of the rows and the bugs seem to like the decomposing wood ALOT. We are mulching/shredding all of the leaves and wood to make it a little nicer and easier to navigate. Here is a BEFORE picture.

Here is an AFTER picture. We started on a row that we had already stumped this year. This row had more clean-up than some rows, due to all of the coffee tree trimmings that were chopped off. These trees will start producing coffee again in about 3 years and the mulch will help them more than the larger trimming. There is about 5 inches of mulch on the ground now, so the above picture does not give a clear picture of exactly how much there is!!!!