A group of nine volunteers from the school community and members of the Bolivar Garden agreed to help water the cacao plot and new terrace during our hot Christmas vacations. From the 15th December till the 6th January these volunteers came and used a newly purchased tube system – courtesy of the Don Simon Coffee Club – attached to an existing, yet seldomly used water tap near the swimming pool.
Over 200m of tubing delivered water to our growing maize and mani forrajero and our cacao plants. Without this vital service many of our cacao plants would have suffered from severe dehydration.
Communication between volunteers was excellent. Information from our weather station helped us decide if volunteers needed to go and water the garden. We could see if it had rained and what the level of evapotranspiration was. If the level of evapotranspiration was greater than rainfall, then our plants needed watering.
During this period there were some exceptionally hot days with extremely high levels of evapotranspiration and no rainfall – 18 days with less rainfall than 0.2mm per day, in fact December was unusually dry, with only 97mm of rainfall throughout the month, compared to over 190mm in October and 175 mm in November.