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Terra Frutis in Ecuador is looking for members!

Posted by Peter Csere on March 30, 2015 at 10:27am in Travel

Hi traveling folks,

Terra Frutis ( https://www.facebook.com/TerraFrutis ) is a fruitarian community/permaculture food forest in southeast Ecuador. It is located on 326 acres of land with a large banana grove and a small number of other fruiting trees including abiu, papaya, zapote, araza, soursop, and mandarin orange. We recently received an order of over 200 baby fruit trees including 120 durians, and our nursery also includes jackfruit, rollinia, salak, marang, mangosteen, and others.

We are currently looking for new long-term members, and you are welcome to visit and check it out for a few weeks or months if you like. We need people who are interested in staying here long-term and being a part of our fruit forest. You are especially needed if you are experienced in working with tropical fruit trees and permaculture farming/gardening, construction with wood, bamboo, or clay, graphic design/marketing, or emergency first aid. You can come here and build a bamboo house on the land if you'd like.

More information about the location and other details are on the website here: https://www.TerraFrutis.com

If you have questions you can reply here, or you can send me a PM on 30BaD, or you can send an email to: terrafrutis.ecuador@gmail.com

-Peter

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  • Charlotte Pickering February 4, 2019 at 11:39am

    FUTURE TERRA FRUITARIANS

    We are still looking for more long term members! Our farm has had much development, we recently held our first fruit festival (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtO7j8H8cE0) and now we have the infrastructure for a community twice our size, we're ready for you to move in! We have plentiful bananas, papayas, naranjilla, some citrus most of the year, lots of seasonal fruits like abiu, ice cream bean, cacao fruit, bunchosia (peanut butter fruit) and more. We've recently had our first jackfruits, marang and bell starfruit.

    We are looking for people to fill these roles:

    • Fruit picking and ripeness management
    • Tree planting and mulch maintenance
    • Construction and building maintenance
    • Online correspondence and advertising
    • Nursery apprentice - grafting, potting, weeding
    • Vegetable gardener

    If you think that you could fill one of these roles, or another role that we don't know we need yet, you can contact us through www.terrafrutis.com

    We hope to hear from you soon!

  • Nicholas Maiolo March 29, 2016 at 10:45am

    Just checked out the website, looks awesome. Hoping to volunteer sometime in 2017. Keep up the good work.

  • Nicholas Maiolo March 29, 2016 at 10:33am

    Hey! I will be doing a bicycle tour from North to South America starting within the next year, I'd love to come by and check out what y'all have been working on.

  • Peter Csere March 22, 2016 at 6:30am

    More updates! 

    • We are still looking for community members and volunteers! Check out the links under "Join Us" on our website: http://www.TerraFrutis.com 
    • We re-designed our website to make it simpler and more mobile-friendly. 
    • We just built a new building on the farm that can sleep 2 people with a porch area in front. Materials were wood, bamboo, and zinc roofing. 
    • We have around 10 members staying here long-term and 3 volunteers in our volunteer program. 
    • We've successfully crowdfunded over 50% of the costs of our gigantic new tropical fruit nursery, which is currently under construction. Including paypal direct donations, we've received over $1100 and the total cost will be around $2250. Link here: https://www.youcaring.com/terra-frutis-521915 Here's a video of the blueprint: 
    • We are trying to arrange a group buy of a nearby 26.5 hectare property for even more community fruit forest space. This property is also riverfront and has a stream, a house, electricity, internet available, and other great features. 
    • Abiu, ice cream beans, oranges, and rollinia are currently in season, so we are feasting! There is also a super-delicious wild avocado-like fruit called "iñaco" that we have been enjoying. 
    • We've started making contour lines across the pasture and planting lines of ice cream beans which is a permaculture technique known as "alley cropping" with nitrogen-fixing trees. 
    • Our 100+ durian trees are still growing strong, and of course our banana trees just keep producing massive amounts! 

    Let me know if you have any questions! You can post here, or email terrafrutis.ecuador@gmail.com. You can also find me on facebook (same name) and send a message. 

  • Peter Csere October 24, 2015 at 10:10am

    Hey folks! Just a few updates on Terra Frutis and how things are going here, and also a video of yours truly planting some Mangosteen and Durian trees in the jungle.

    -Construction of a new homestead area is going nicely, and we just completed the kitchen canopy, soon to start the house. We are using natural materials as much as possible, including Pambil palmwood for structure posts, and bamboo for the roof structure. Soon we will be making and firing our own clay tiles to use for roofing.

    -We continue to plant lots of fruit trees! We try to maintain equal focus on short-yield fruits (bananas, papayas, passionfruit, dragonfruit, pineapple, all of which fruit in 1-2 years) medium-yield fruits (rollinia - 2.5 years, jackfruit 3-5 years) and long-termers (Durian 7 years, Mangosteen 7-20 years, Langsat 18 years, Mamey sapote 15 years.) We'll be grafting onto our 2-year-old durians so that they fruit 3 years from now. We now have an extensive selection of exotic tropicals growing in the nursery, such as eggfruit, peanut butter fruit, blackberry jam fruit, lucuma, white sapote, etc. Next week we go to Loja to order some cashew and macademia nut trees! If you want to donate seeds (you can order them and have them sent to someone who is flying down here soon) please check out the "Donate" page on our website for the seed wishlist.

    -More people are showing up! Now we have me, Jason, Adelina, Karissa, Matthew, Taylor, and Shanti, and of course Stephen & Becci & Little Bear. With more scheduled arrivals in the coming months. Time to plant more fruit trees.

    -As always, we are looking for friends to purchase parcels of land nearby to start similar projects and expand the community of fruity folks in this area. We will gladly help you with land purchase if you are interested in buying farmland for $1000-$5000 per hectare. Contact me for details. We can offer tons of support and fruit trees from our established nursery should you wish to start your fruit forest nearby us.

    -Members are continually looking for ways to enterprise and build commerce, help the community, and possibly generate a little bit of dough to help the community remain financially sustainable. So we continue ordering and selling loads of 1000+ coconuts, teaching english, increasing our nursery inventory to a commercial level to sell fruit trees at the market, selling seeds online internationally, and even creative means such as doing Henna tattoos at the market (Karissa is making BANK at the moment with the local teenage girls.)

    -Upcoming projects include a hot tub and a 50 square meter hoophouse for heirloom tomatoes.

    Anyways, without further ado, here's a bit of jungle warriorism:

    Peace & Love from the folks at Terra Frutis permaculture food forest & fruitarian/raw food community.

    http://www.TerraFrutis.com

    -Peter

  • Dareios Rohan Katsanikakis September 27, 2015 at 9:25am

    If I came to stay how easy do you think it would be to find a side job teaching english in gualiquiza?

    • Peter Csere > Dareios Rohan Katsanikakis September 27, 2015 at 9:39am

      It depends. Right now, it is easy if you can speak spanish well. For basic spanish speakers, not much of a possibility. In the future, maybe not so much as more people will come to stay with us and will take up the english teaching jobs at the schools. However, there is also the possibility of giving private english lessons.

      Other ways to make money here include harvesting + selling cacao and other farm products, and panning for gold in the river. Or to make an online income, or to produce something to sell at the market, etc.

  • Alexis Rozzell August 9, 2015 at 12:48pm

    Wow that sounds amazing! I was literally just in Ecuador a couple weeks ago and it is an awesome place to be vegan. Too bad Im just your avg American in college but maybe after that... :)

  • Dareios Rohan Katsanikakis August 7, 2015 at 3:50pm

    Is it possible to cycle there at all?

    • Peter Csere > Dareios Rohan Katsanikakis August 11, 2015 at 4:11am

      People tend to bike around a lot. Lot of long-distance bikers come through here on the E-45.

      Right now you'd need a mountain bike to bike out to the big farm, the road is a bit rough lol.

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