Summer time!!

I am afraid that I haven't been very active in the last few weeks.  I have other distractions! However there are a few things that I want to share with you.  Criss Juliard is in Haiti again and writes to say that the demand for VS is picking up - more NGOs are using the technology and the price of vetiver planting material has increased by 30%!  Criss has been translating into French and modifying "A Hedge Against Erosion" - the Green Book - for Haitian users.  We will upload it o Google Docs when we get a copy.

Google Docs - some of you may know that we have been using Esnips as means to store for public access large vetiver files.  With the improvement of Google Docs I have decided to use it for vetiver files - particularly for power point presentations and other semi visual info.  You can access the public files

Thus far I have uploaded to Google Docs  a number of useful power point type files, all our hand books (in all published languages - Technical Reference manual and and John Greenfield's hand books), old newsletters (still very relevant and not readily accessible on our website, that refer to much of the valuable vetiver research carried out in India at the end of the 80's and early 90's that focused on soil and water conservation), and P.K.Yoon's "A LOOK SEE AT VETIVER"  This is the first time that we have the document (193 pages of text, tables and photos) of the remarkable and practical trialing of vetiver that he carried out in Malaysia in the early 1990s. if you want to know how this plant works read it  All this can be downloaded to your computer.

The Chile Vetiver conference set for October is on schedule, there are some great contributors - I strongly recommend attendance.

One last comment, I noted that at least one potential user dropped out because of the "hundreds of thousands of vetiver plants that are required.  In the beginning it sounds daunting, but just remember 1 ha of well managed vetiver nursery will produce more than a million slips per year, year after year! enough to plant 100 linear km of vetiver hedgerows - that is a lot of protection!

Enjoy the remainder of the summer!!

Dick