Our sustainable future starts today

With his ever impeccable timing, Suparman succeeded to hold another fun-filled morning at Suparman Pizza and nursery. Monday 17th August was Indonesia’s 75th year of Independence. This was the perfect opportunity to promote green sustainability on Gili Trawangan!

Trawangan island’s community got together to hold another seed planting event. Suparman has set his Gili goal aiming to plant 5,000 new trees off by the end of 2020. He wants to ensure our island stays green for the future. A pretty overwhelming goal… unless you have the fantastic help of this island community.

Photo Credit: Charlie.Submerged

Why plant trees?

Planting trees isn’t a short term solution to helping our environment. It takes time, patience, love and a lot of water! In the past decade, much green areas and shrubland on Gili Trawangan have been acquired for development. We have slowly watched this tropical island being deforested and replaced by a thick layer of cement and resorts. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of visiting a lush green tropical island in the first place? 

Who is this Suparman guy anyway?

After his first year on the island, in 2018, Suparman (yes! It is actually his name!) set up a small project in his back garden, planting as many seeds as he could find on the ground. When we caught wind, we helped by bringing in more seeds, our community compost, and of course the essential ingredient… Green-fingered volunteers! Discover his beautiful story after the last Treevolution.

Photo Credit: Charlie.Submerged

Why Flamboyan?

Flamboyan is known for its huge red flowers and large canopy. It’s a beautiful ornamental tree and great for providing shade along the dusty streets of the inner island. You’ll spot it when you see the floor littered with beautiful red flowers! They are fast-growing in the right environment (good job we have got non-stop sun all year round!) and they work well to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Reforestation has been proven to be one of the best ways to help save our planet from catastrophic climate change. It’s funny to think how something so small can help save something so big!

How did we do it?

More than thirty volunteers turned up to help plant seeds. Seeding is excellent for tree-planting newbies. A job suitable and fun for everyone!

Suparman and his friends had collected many of the seed pods from the Flamboyan tree all over the island. After handpicking them open, we learnt there is a knack to it, as they have a tough shell to crack! The seeds were soaked for an entire day to soften the hard shell casing and help speed up germination.

Photo Credit: Charlie.Submerged

Suparman purchased more than 3,000 polybags to plant the seedlings. Many hands made light work of filling the little bags with rich nutritious compost. With all this help, the grubby work was finished within an hour and a half!

The prized dirt is a mix of our organic food waste project. Food waste collected from all the businesses on the island; along with the secret ingredient of goat poop! This makes for the best compost with great drainage.

Volunteers then planted 2 seeds in each bag after sorting through and finding the most likely ones to germinate. The rest of the seeds were scattered over an entire plot. Suparman’s blessing of luck for our newly planted trees but also, in case any of these smaller seeds will germinate, they have the second chance at life!

Photo Credit: Charlie.Submerged

These seeds will be cared for for the next four months. By Suparman himself, his friends, and anyone who stops by for lunch of the famous Soto. You’ll find it hard to resist the infectious wave of green scenery that fills this little rustic restaurant. The aim is to plant all these trees come December, the beginning of the rainy season when the saplings are large enough for transplantation.

Done! Now what?

Next up on the green train is planting papaya trees. Everyone loves papaya! They proliferate and produce lots of fruit, meaning we can strengthen our independence from mainland imports and independently grow beautiful fresh food!

Suparman’s selfless wish is that the island will be littered with free papaya fruit, to be picked by anyone. Locals can care for the trees to then harvest and sell locally, or tourists can come along and pick their very own fruit fresh from the tree.

Our current fundraising campaign is focussed on buying 3,000 papaya trees which are 2,000rp (around 0.13 USD) per tree. They are sold around 20cm high, and then Suparman and his voluntary team will care for these babies until they are big enough to plant out! Edible re-greening of Gili Trawangan never sounded more delicious!

Photo Credit: Charlie.Submerged

If you haven’t seen the latest Treevolution documentary of the day you can find it here. With this, we have already raised 2,793,000rp to buy more seedlings to reforest Gili Trawangan! If you would like to adopt a tree and support this campaign to re-green Gili Trawangan you can donate via our PayPal.

Save Gili Trawangan and adopt a new tree to help forward the TREEvolution!