I have a few palms of the Conga Variety at Sardine Bay, but not enough. So the first step is to buy leaves and get them brought to the bay.

The price of palm leaves is very volatile depending on supply and demand. From 10c a leaf to $1 a leaf over the last few weeks.These cost 30c each, and are not as long as the ones I am paying 40c each for (which are 10 feet)

Here they have reached the shore. The boat took on a lot of water on the 3 or 4 mile journey. They spent about half an hour after each trip bailing it out. The boat is about 5 years old, quite old for a dug out canoe I believe it it hasn't been painted or varnished.

Unloading the leaves is easy. Wet feet because they are in a few inches of water, but the leaves are not that heavy even wet.

There are 250 leaves in this load and it took them about half an hour to take them out of the canoe and onto the shore..

Then off they go to bring more and Saulo splits them in half and stacks them to dry.

The split starts at the top of the leaf. Saulo says it's important to be careful splitting them. That they can be permanently damaged if the split doesn't go down the centre.

Then onward and downward towards the base of the leaf.

And more

And here the palm is in half.

Then it needs to be stacked in the sun to dry.

And here are some fresh stacks of leaves drying. About 50 leaves to a stack.

The stack shrinks down quite rapidly as the leaves dry. These started out as high as Saulo could reach.

Here is a Conga palm that I have at Sardine bay. We took about 40 leaves from this one. I've planted another 50 of them and intend to plant more as soon as I have time. When the palm thatch needs to be redone I want to have my own leaves for it!

And here is a bay conga palm that we found. There are a lot of different palms here and none of the others will last long for a roof. The red in the leaves and stems gives this one away as a conga.