mangrove

scarlet macaws on the Osa Penninsula

christmas comes

It feels a bit like Christmas, at least a bit more than it did this time last year. We’re putting up a tree this week, hauling in a Norfolk pine that manages to survive in the tropics and allowing him a holiday high up in the canopy for a week or so before he returns to his regular spot outside the house. A month ago I made a plum pudding, it’s waiting patiently for the 25th. And on Sunday we made mincemeat pies. Really delicious, we didn’t used suet, instead substituting vegetable shortening, and we can’t buy currants or sultanas here so we used more raisins and substituted dried bananas and fruit leather for the candied peel. We substituted rum for brandy and used allspice rather than mixed spice, we also added some black pepper and a pinch of salt. This makes about 3 pounds of mincemeat, it’s best to make the pies a day before you want them: the flavours get a good chance to blend. Though perhaps make a smaller one to eat right there and then, so tempting straight from the oven.

Mincemeat
8ox apples, preferably green, grated
4oz suet
6oz raisins
4oz sultanas
4oz currants
4oz candied peel
6oz sugar
Juice and peel of a lemon and an orange
2 tsp mixed spice
¼ tsp cinnamon
Pinch of nutmeg
3 tblsp brandy
Mix together all ingredients except brandy. Put in very very low oven until suet melts and coats other ingredients (or alternately leave out in sun). Wait until cool and mix in brandy, keep in fridge or can with hot water bath until needed.

Pastry
1 ¼ cups flour
½ tsp salt
½ cup cold butter
1/8 – ¼ cup iced water
Mix dry ingredients first, chop in butter, rub to breadcrumb like texture, add water to firm dough, allow to rest for 20 minutes, roll out and line pie or tart trays.
Fill with mincemeat, cut more pastry strips and lattice pie tops, bake in 350F oven for 20-30 minutes until just golden. Sprinkle with sugar if desired and serve with thick cream or vanilla ice cream.

work

Yesterday we planted out yard long beans, 16 of them spaced along a fallen pejabaye palm. The palm will rot down over the next two months adding lots of great nutrients to the growing beans: slow release fertilizer I guess you could call it. They are planted in an area I’m calling the salad bowl, a sunny spot nestled between passion fruit and black pepper with jungle on one side and orchard behind. We planted katuk and cranberry hibiscus in gentle curves and purple spinach in circles. We also have some older chilis there, peppers and tomatoes which we’ll eventually harvest and take out. This will be my main work area on the lower farm. I need to make a bench and a covered work table and enclose a space for compost bins. We have impatience started for the flowers and I want to bring in some white ginger – the flowers are delicious and very pretty, a soft luminescent white. Peter’s not so keen on the white ginger, it’s an invasive, but I think we could grow it in big tubs. I have to research other edible flowers, they add so much to a salad. We also have Malabar spinach and I need to transfer some purslane to the spot too. We cut down maybe 8 pejabaye palms to allow more light in and used the leaves for mulch, the whole area is ankle deep in palm leaves right now. I think I’ll wait for them to break down a bit more before bringing in the purslane, it’s such a small ground cover type plant it’ll struggle just now. It looks great. I’m hoping that in two months I’ll have enough to begin harvesting salad greens for the farmers’ market.
We have to plant out the same in the upper farm as well, but right now our cuttings and seedlings are too small, it’ll be at least another two weeks before they are ready. The ground isn’t prepared there yet anyway, we have to harvest most of the yampi to free up space. Ah, what lovely work awaits us.

. . .

It’s one of those wet tropical mornings where everything is damp and chilly. The mosquitoes are out in full force and I’m sitting with the fan on wrapped in 3 layers and longing for a pair of woolly socks. It’s November: a good time to plant, the beginning of the rainy season, not a good time to wash clothes.
My life is changing again, and again for the better. I’m leaving school. I really don’t know how I feel about this, I keep expecting pangs of regret and fear, but nothing comes, just a sense that this is right. I always thought I would be one of those lifers, someone who would remain immersed in schools until they dropped, but at 40 I’m bowing out, hopefully gracefully, and taking up another passion. And it’s okay.
I’m stepping into a life that feels ready made: I’ve been working at the farmers’ market for 4 months now and this will continue and develop as I move from working a stall by myself or with Heather, to sharing stall space with Peter. I started with selling mixes of dried fruit, then added sprouts, and now we are making granola bars with the fruits and the cacao we grow. When the salad greens are ready we’ll sell those too and we’re working on jams, pickles and preserves to add. On the farm I’ll be working with the salad greens and the fruit trees, propagating and grafting, and on the landscaping side I’m working with Peter, but concentrating on edible landscapes. This is a dream. I’m very happy.
We just came back from a job on the other side of Costa Rica on the unspoilt Osa Penninsula , a wonderful eco-lodge called Sabalo Lodge, an hour’s boat ride along wide tropical rivers and dense mangrove. I thought the mangrove would never end and then suddenly we stopped before a wide open lawn shaded by coconut palms, delicious. The owners, Dan and Holly, are creating a beautiful secret space, tucked away from everything, collecting their water, creating their electricity and caring for their guests. We were there to work, but felt very well cared for. Peter laid down a good orchard with a rich variety of fruits, we worked with epiphytes and flowering shrubs and I worked on edible landscaping, 4 beds with a good variety of greens, tubers, herbs, spices and vegetables. It was great fun, 10 hour days, but rewarding.

new

I’ve been experiencing an enormous surge of creative energy recently, resulting in a really good shift towards a different direction in my life. It all began with fruit. There is so much fruit here that I have been drying the surplus and in August began to sell blends of dried fruits at the Saturday Farmer’s Market in town. My little business is called Homegrown Organics and is expanding. The fruit is all organic, all local and all fresh – meaning it’s freshly dried the week before the market. I share the stall with Heather who’s selling plants and is expanding into herbal medicinal preparations. We also made seaweed emulsion and are carrying that too.
The blends are what I harvest so the fruits change, but in general I always have banana, pineapple, papaya, carambola and a fruit leather – often cas or guanabana. Then I have different blends, a tropical which is plain, a cacao which has cacao nibs, a hot, which has ginger, a coconut mix and a sour mix with sour carambola. It’s great fun. I love the harvesting, the prep and the social buzz of the market.
Over the last year the garden and working with plants has given me more joy and satisfaction than working in education. I’m ready for a transition. I’m growing sprouts for the market too, it’s difficult to get a good selection of seeds, but I’m growing mung and will add lentil and mustard soon. I’m also beginning growing edible leaves to make up salad bags. This is more a long term project, but slowly, slowly it’s coming together. By the end of the year I’ll be working with edible landscapes. It feels wonderful.

breathe

I feel bathed in air, the beautiful fragrant cool moist air of a tropical morning. It feels like all I have to do today is breathe, what a great feeling. My mum is here and she seems to love this place just as I do. I’m so happy, I’m hoping she’ll come to live here part time. There’s a frog to my left, a large sleeping female Red-eyed Leaf Frog, (Agalychnis callidryas), before me sitting on the orchid is another, the Lemur Leaf Frog (Phyllomedusa lemur). A leaf falls from the fig tree, slowly parting the air until it touches the grass. Everything is beautifully still.
It’s been a really busy month. The garden has been full of growth and I’m doing all I can to keep up with the weeding and harvesting. My dear friends arrived and a lot of work was needed to make the house shine and the garden just right, and then my house needed a thorough clean for my mum and then there was the trip to the hot springs and the city and then and then and then. It’s been busy. But today is all about just breathing.

back on

It’s Friday afternoon, the monkeys haven’t started their afternoon chorus, so it’s not 4:30 yet, but it must be close. The temperature dropped out of the muggy and into the cooler, stiller part of the day where the air feels heavy. I think it will rain tonight. I’m sitting on my deck eating sweet tahini from a jar and all is well. All is well. Young Jack is at my feet, Hoss and LJ are off with friends, there’s a toucan scritching his beak somewhere to my right, a house gecko above me. Surrounding the computer are vegetable starts: chili, pepper, tomato, katuk, cranberry hibiscus, pumpkin. There’s pomelo seeds drying and a mabola slowly moldering. At the other end of the deck a load of cacao is fermenting beside some sea grape seeds. Yes, all is well.
I’ve been sick, with parasites and the concoction of herbs I’ve been taking has created a massive die-off which has lowered my energy and resistance, so I have a sore throat and a cold too. But I think I’m on the turn. I’ve been running ragged for the last two weeks preparing the house and gardens for visitors, but they are now here and happy which is a load off my mind and work schedule. I’m tired, but it’s good.
My mum flies in next week for two weeks and I’m very excited. It’s been almost three years since I’ve seen her and this is the first time she’s ever travelled on her own. It’s also the first time she’s ever been to the tropics, but I think she’ll like it.

been away

This I think is the longest time I've spent away from the blog in over a year. I've been busy, but more than that my computer finally died. i hopefully will have another, a very kind friend is sending one by the end of the month, until then . . .

boa

I was cycling by the snake man’s yesterday and he called me in. he had a 10 foot boa curled up below the sink in his bathroom. She was beautiful; fat, sleek, almost marbled in her scales, curled elegantly with her head resting upon her tail. I could feel her smoothness and her weight just in looking at her. someone had seen her below his house, he was very happy to be rid of her: his cats had been disappearing. It was lucky he hadn’t killed her, perhaps because she really was big. The snake man said when he grabbed behind her head she simply pushed her head back and trapped his hand – tightly – between her head and her spine. It took two men to carry her. She certainly looked strong and very heavy. She was a chocolate brown with tawny patches above, a creamy mottled with lichen green below. He was going to take her far out into the forest. She’s the second boa I’ve seen here.

The first was on a walk home last year. It was when I lived in Guanacaste and wasn’t so wary of snakes. I was scrambling up the hill path I used every evening. Hoss was before me and a friend visiting from the States was behind. Suddenly Hoss stopped and his energy changed from forward scout to cautious uncertainty. I pulled him back and there just by the path was a big boa, maybe 7 feet. His head was up and he was moving it from side to side. I think Hoss was happy to be pushed behind me. I shone my torch directly at him and slowly he receded. He was no threat to us. Beautiful though, very creamy colouring with large uneven patches of a greenish toned brown.

I found a dead snail eating snake on the path. He was about 20 inches long, dark grey with black stripes, below a cream flecked with black. I didn’t look too closely – the ants had found him also.

five fruits

Fruit season has begun in an explosion of scents, colours and forms. I’ve encountered four fruits brand new to me this week and rediscovered another. The mangosteen tree is a beautiful triangular shaped tree with dark green shiny leaves, it reaches about 15 feet in height. The fruits are like a child’s drawing of ‘fruit’ – round and plump and purple with a pretty, leathery dark beige/purple cap. Opening the fruit reveals a soft intensely purple flesh which cushions three seeds enveloped in white goop, much like the cacao seeds have. It is this white goop that one eats. The taste is strong and to me it tasted like tamarind: tart, sweet and sour. I liked it very much but was sorry to see so much of the fruit was inedible.
The second fruit grows on what looks like a cecropia tree. The fruits grow in clusters and look like large muscadet grapes. They too have sweet white flesh surrounding a hard heart shaped seed which dries with a green coppery tint. We can’t find the fruit in any books or on the internet, but we believe it comes from Brazil. There are several trees growing in ordered rows in an old established orchard, so we know they are edible!
The third fruit is either a gnip or a local lychee depending on who you ask. It is smallish, green and slightly ovoid and grows in clusters. I don’t know what the tree looks like but the leaf is long and pointed, and leathery, a little like a eucalyptus. Inside the thin green shell the flesh is tan and soft and surrounds a hard egg elliptical seed. Very sweet and juicy.
The fourth fruit is nanci. These small round fruits grow on large stately trees. The fruits look like large currants and are orangey yellow. Inside the flesh is again a clearish white and surrounds a single small black pip. They are not so sweet and the ones I had tasted overripe to me, in fact they tasted of blue cheese! In Guanacaste these fruits are much larger, about the size of kumquats, here 15 would fit on my palm.
The fifth fruit is breadfruit. In the past I’ve waited for these fruits to become soft before I opened them. This time I cooked it as a vegetable. George says, “when there’s breadfruit, don’t need no bread”, and he’s right. I shallow fried thin slices with garlic and chili, the taste was fabulous, like overly soft fried potatoes, but smoother and with more taste. Difficult to describe. And very filling.

Seaweed

We are harvesting at the beach, no, gleaning is a better word. Recent storms and who knows what have washed a lot of seaweed in. It’s beautiful stuff, not the heavy bladderwrack that filled my childhood in Scotland, or the giant kelp that washed up on the Californian Pacific: these are small bundles of fairy foliage, in reds and metallic blues with tiny globular air sacks, almost like moss. It’s easy to gather, and a bit like a ‘treasure’ chest, for hidden within and amongst the seaweed are many bright colourful objects: plastic trash. We gather a trash bag of plastic for every 2 of seaweed. Rainbows of bottlecaps; toys; shoes; so many straws; nylon rope; bottles, especially those little sample bottles one finds in hotels (or cruise ships??); toothbrushes; wrappers, and then minutia - shreds and shards of plastic.

Plastics, like diamonds, are forever. The pieces we gathered were, in the main, recognizable, and in this tropical sea probably looked enough like colourful fish, to be swallowed by turtles, birds and larger fishes. The shards and shreds, and straws, being smaller were probably being seen as food by smaller sea creatures. The action of waves, water and sun which has ground rock to sand and worn shells to dust, will over time wear plastic pieces into smaller and smaller ‘mouthfuls’ for smaller and smaller ocean species. “Nurdles” the raw materials of plastic production find their way by the billions into the ocean every year, as do polyethylene beads which are increasingly being used as exfoliants in products as diverse as paint scourers and body creams: just the right size and colours to be confused for fish eggs. Plastic particles are small enough to enter the very bottom of the oceanic food chain, eaten by larger creatures plastic trash is accumulating in the stomachs and intestines of most of the world’s sea creatures. In a study of fulmars washed ashore in the North Sea, Richard Thompson (University of Plymouth marine biologist), found 95% had an average of 44 pieces of plastic in their stomachs.

Of course there’s more: from ‘The World Without Us’:

“free-floating toxins from all kinds of sources – copy paper, automobile grease, coolant fluids, old fluorescent tubes, and infamous discharges by General Electric and Monsanto plants directly into streams and rivers – readily stick to the surfaces of free-floating plastic. One study directly correlated ingested plastic with PCBs in the fat tissue of puffins. The astonishing part was the amount . . . the plastic pellets that the birds ate concentrate poisons to levels as high as 1 million times their normal occurrence in seawater.”

What to do? Be aware, be conscious. Don’t buy overpackaged items, support companies which use recycled materials, reuse those recyclables. Avoid plastic bags like the plague . . . and pick up trash.

Seaweed Emulsion

Seaweed along with a good nitrogen supply can deliver everything a plant may want: up to 60 trace elements, natural growth hormones, natural disease control and a great food for beneficial fungi. Strong stuff!
Making the emulsion is simple.

First rinse the seaweed (or let it sit out in a couple of tropical storms!), to leach out salt and sand. Chop enough to fill a bucket then add water – rainwater is best. Adding molasses will speed up the process, a ½ cup will do. Let the bucket sit covered for a week stirring every day to aerate. When a foamy, filmy, yeasty surface develops the emulsion is ready. The emulsion is best diluted, 1 part emulsion to up to 5 parts water. Use as a ground soak or as a foliar spray.

#$%*!

This morning I woke to a dark house, I tried the light. Nothing. It’s not unusual for power cuts, especially after a night of heavy rain, but something felt different. Maybe a branch had knocked down the line. I went to look. I looked and looked at the place where my power line was yesterday, but there was nothing there. There are two power cables leading from the road to the houses. Our neighbour’s was there. They have the higher cable, we the lower. Ours was simply gone. I walked to the road, yes, there about 10 metres in from the road was what was left of our cable, cut and hanging in a sad, naked mess. Someone had stolen the cable. How . . . low. Cables, like everything else in Costa Rica have recently undergone a price hike, cables by 40%. So now people are just stealing them. Can you believe it? I walked back to the house staring at the place where the cable should be. It’s 200 metres from the road to the house, that’s a lot of cable. Then I got worried, what if they came to the house and why didn’t I hear them and why didn’t the dogs bark, and who were they? No point in calling the cops, no point at all. They probably wouldn’t even come out for it. There’s no point, they wouldn’t catch the thieves, and if they did they would in all likelihood be bought off.

Costa Rica is no place for law enforcement. Firstly the police make $200 a month, so bribes are taken just like tips. Secondly the police are never locals. They are stationed in different parts of the country, live in the police station for three weeks and then are moved somewhere else. The idea is that non local cops will not be part of the community and therefore not have family ties or friendships with lawbreakers. Perhaps, but the result is that I who have lived here 10 months can point out the thieves, the drug dealers, the thugs, but the cops who have no frame of reference, can’t. Every time they start with a clean slate – they don’t know where to even begin. And the community is tight, the thief or attacker or dealer is always someone’s brother, son, nephew and the family will take gather round them, maybe even threaten revenge. Then, if the amount stolen is less than $210 it doesn’t count, it’s not really considered theft. If there is no sign of breaking and entering then it’s not treated seriously, the thinking being that the ladron just wandered in and ‘found’ your valuables. And lastly it is fairly acceptable to take from foreigners because we have more. Yes, that last is true, most of the time, but it’s hardwon and certainly not easily replaced. And what the hell kind of reasoning is that anyway????

It’ll cost $700 to replace the cable. For me that’s a month and a half’s wages. And with new cable, who knows if they won’t just come back next week?

This is the kind of thing that makes people leave. Lack of trust is very tiring.

odd

It’s been an odd week. Sunday was a blur with new ideas, high energy and inspiration. Monday was the opposite in every way until a dip in the ocean balanced me out. Tuesday was laden with internet followed by delightful social surprises, and today has been a social buzz for this normal recluse. Talk about extremes and facets. Odd.

I’m working on a web site which I’m excited about. All my confusion and conflicted emotions around land purchase in this area finally burst with an idea: a guide to responsible land purchase in Costa Rica. Rather simple, but something I can get behind, at least feel I’m doing something. It’s a work in process, I’ll publish the url when I can. Thank you to Bryan for working on the site and Jon for critiquing.

Another idea: I want a stall at the farmers’ market. Two reasons: firstly I have some beautiful organic wild harvested and homegrown goodies, and secondly I think I need to make some effort at being social, and the farmers’ market is the one place where everyone gathers. Okay, a third: I like making things. So today Heather and I trooped to the beach and gathered seaweed to make seaweed emulsion, and noni for noni tea.

worthy reads

I’m reading a couple of books just now: ‘Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans’, by Sylvia Earle, and ‘The World Without Us’ by Alan Weisman. ‘Sea Change’ is part memoir, part natural history, part warning about what we are doing to the world’s oceans. Full of beautiful descriptions of sea creatures from Humpback whales to the bioluminescence of millions of krill, Earle fills you with the beauty in the first part and then delivers a strong message of what we are doing, exactly, to Humpbacks and krill in the second. Having lived almost all my life near the coast watching sea water – slate grey, black brown, green, turquoise blue, lap against shores – boulders, shingle, shells, red, black or white sand, I’ve had the greatest respect for the ocean, and a total ignorance of what really happens below those waters. With Earle’s book, and I just finished, ‘Underwater to get out of the Rain’ by Trevor Norton, I’m learning a little more and becoming increasingly convinced about what we have to do to keep our world a livable environment.
I’m re-reading ‘The World Without Us’. This is a brilliant ecology book. It delves into what would happen if humans were to suddenly and completely disappear. Thus it takes a very serious, and potentially incredibly depressing subject – what we are doing to our planet, and works backwards, outlining the way nature would rebalance the environment. It’s a fascinating read and while it delivers a powerful illustration of how, especially in the last 50 years or so, we have really damaged the planet, it’s written with such affection for both humanity and nature that one feels that recovery is not only possible, but probable. I really believe that this book should be required reading in every 10th grade class. And again in every University.

Starfruit and Chili Preserve

1 pound starfruit
3 – 4 chilies, depending on taste and heat of chili
Juice of 1 lime
2 inches ginger
½ cup unrefined sugar
salt
½ teaspoon of cinnamon, optional

Finely chop all ingredients and cook uncovered over low heat for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. You may need to add a little water, red wine or orange juice. While hot pour into sterilized jars. A sweet sour spicy preserve, great with cheese and bread. I can imagine it would be wonderful with stilton (not having tasted stilton in 2 years, I can only imagine).

Starfruit (Carambola) Salsa

2 starfruit
Juice of ½ lime
½ chili, or to taste
2 teaspoons of unrefined sugar or 1 teaspoon of honey
½ red onion
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
salt

Finely chop the starfruit, onion and chili. Mix all ingredients together and leave to blend for at least 2 hours. Serve with tortilla chips.

today's harvest

Today was a good day: 2 pineapples, two handfuls of cherry tomatoes and a dozen starfruit (carambola). The beds I made by piling heaps of dead leaves over and again has become the most delicious compost. I started the piles 3 months ago. The only issue I can see is that it looks like it needs nitrogen – some west Indian creeper was growing from it and the leaves were much more yellow than the patch growing from the clay soil beside it.
I was very happy to take the starfruit: it’s the first time the tree has given fruit and there is quite a lot, it’s difficult to see as the fruit is the same colour as many of the leaves and each side of the fruit is the same shape as the leaf, so you have to be standing at the right angle to see the fruit. I made a chili relish and a salsa.

waking frog

A red eyed tree frog visited last night and spent the day sleeping on the deck. Sleeping he’s paler, the colour of a banana leaf, and in profile he is streamlined, clamped tight shut against the surface he’s clinging to, all limbs tucked in. Above he is green, below he is pale yellow with blue or purple vertical stripes on his sides and orange and blue legs with big orange feet. His eyes are blood red with a black elliptical pupil.
I happened to be passing him at dusk just as he awoke. He was several shades of darker green, like the colour of a old fern. He raised up and stretched just like a cat, arching his back, straining his skinny legs so they shook with the stretch. And he yawned. I’ve never seen a frog yawn before, it was the same as you or I, a great big mouthed gape and the skin of his neck folded upon itself several times. He closed his mouth and blinked and then with one leap jumped over 8 times his length and landed on a vertical post in the most perfect impersonation of spiderman: you know the pose with back legs apart and crouched, hands almost together below his chest? At that very moment the frog chorus began and he turned his head to the direction of the closest sounds. He looked very alert, clearly listening and watching and then off he went in great bounds towards the others.

Addendum:
This morning I shared the bathroom with a toad. He was delightfully full and round and his front legs were bent out at the elbows, his feet tucked under him like an old man with rickets. The line of his mouth took up the bottom of his head, such a wide mouth, I think as wide as mine. He was an olive brown above and a muddy cream below. His eyes were black and he watched me with his head slightly cocked. I marveled at the difference between this stately, rotund, placid fellow and last night’s athlete with the spiderman crawl and the go faster stripes.

muscle rub

A good long day in the garden can leave muscles sore and tight. This recipe makes a super simple and effective muscle rub which also eases sprains. And it’s actually good enough to eat.

Wide mouthed jar
Sesame oil
Ginger
Turmeric
Lemongrass

Fill the wide mouthed jar 2/3rds full with grated ginger and turmeric and finely chopped lemongrass, add sesame oil to fill the jar. Screw on lid and shake vigorously. Leave in a warm spot for up to two weeks shaking daily. After two weeks strain oil into dark glass bottle. Spread this warming, relaxing oil into sore muscles or sprains.

If you live in the new world tropics, add juanilama, hoja de estrella and zorillo for a super muscle rub / insect bite oil.

snakebite

A friend got bitten by a snake last night. I wasn’t with him, but I was passing on my bike when he and his wife and dog came bursting out of the undergrowth trying to stop a car. Heather was wide eyed with panic, the dog was going crazy, and Cache looked like he was trying to hold it all together. They got a lift home on a truck and I followed stopping to get the snake man on the way. I was expecting us all to get in the car and drive to the clinic. But he was sitting on the grass sipping water while Heather piled green clay on the bite and on the machete cut above it. He said he felt fine.
It was dusk and they had been climbing around a fallen tree. Bad idea really. Dusk and dawn are big snake times. He said the snake had just leapt out bit and disappeared in an instant. From the description it sounded like a hog nosed pit viper: it was short, about 18 inches, dark brown with a red vertebral line, stocky, triangular head and it had been coiled up. The bite marks were about a good ½ inch apart. He had got bitten right on the ankle bone, a vein ran between the incisions. He said he felt something like a sting and looked down and saw the snake. He swiped at it with the machete and managed to cut his leg. The bite bled a lot and Heather sucked on it before running into the street. Vipers venom causes the blood to flow to the extremities, with great swelling and burning at the site. After 20 minutes Cache was feeling nothing, except tingling where the machete had sliced him. There was no swelling and he was totally coherent. His heart was fast. The snake man arrived and looked at the puncture holes and wanted to go find the snake. It was dark, no-one else wanted to go. Heather had started feeding Cache mother in law tongue (Sansevieria) and rubbing it on the incisions. The snake man said the clinic wouldn’t give anti-venom until he began to react, everyone thought he might as well wait at home. We swapped snake stories and then scorpion stories and then stories of things that had died mysteriously. And we waited. Nothing happened. The snake man said that 70% of bites were dry and this, after 3 hours of nothing, certainly seemed like a dry bite. Heather gave me a lift home. He was lucky. Snake boots from now on.

Chili Spread

I’m delighted that I can use tomatoes, chilies and ginger from the garden, all organic too!
Pound of tomatoes
3 – 4 chilies
2 inches ginger
3 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons unrefined sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ cup of red wine
salt

Finely chop tomatoes, chilies, garlic and ginger. Mix all ingredients in pan and simmer for 30 minutes until everything is soft, and the smell is overpoweringly good. Spread on bread with a little cream chess, or use with vegetables.

back to the garden

Back to the garden
It seems a quiet season. I’ve been spending time harvesting bananas and pineapple and drying, drying, drying. There are scotch bonnet chilies to be plucked too and cherry tomatoes. I made a chili spread this morning which I’ll test out on the bread that’s rising on the deck.

My weed whacker is slowly whacking its way through the garden. I can handle about an hour and a half of whacking before my eyes start to vibrate and my sweeps get faster and more hysterical. Then it’s time to stop. We really do have a lot of grass.

I have sweet peppers to plant out today and the third generation of pumpkin. I’m disappointed with the second generation, the leaves are small and the growth is slow, not a hint of the luxurious, abundant foliage of the first generation. And they seem to be susceptible to grasshoppers this time too. The seeds came from the first batch, and all the first batch came from one pumpkin. I wonder if it’s too much interbreeding? Is this possible? I don’t know if I’ll get any pumpkins from this second planting.

Joni Mitchell in my head

How does the song go, “Going to camp out on the land, going to try to get my soul free . . . got to get ourselves back to the garden”?
Today I went with friends to look at a piece of ‘the garden’ they want to buy. We drove into the hills over rutted dirt roads, pulled off eventually and walked the rest of the way. It’s beautiful back there, a different microclimate, hotter, stiller. The noise is different: the birds are louder than the insects. A keel billed toucan flew across our path, a 6 foot black and yellow snake disappeared before us. We passed the shack where the cat man lives. The shack is maybe 12 foot square and made of recycled scraps of wood, pieced together like a linear jigsaw puzzle, some had been painted long before in previous incarnations and so the house looked mottled in pinks, blues, yellows, greens. The sides we could see from the path were hung with plastic crates, bicycle baskets, little fishing net hammocks. There were cats in every available space. Kittens of various ages were scampering or staggering on the ground. Before the house was a structure with a tin roof and walls made of sewn together rice bags, more cats sat inside. The smell of cat shit was strong. The cat man appeared from behind the shack. He knows my friends by now and was full of smiles. Did we want a cat? No. But we had brought him some bread. He is old, early 80s, thin and wiry. His wide smile reveals one tooth and his eyes are a pale brown. The knuckles on his hands are huge. He’s worked all his life and clearly continues to do so, his shack was surrounded by banana, cacao, coffee, cassava and malanga.
Further on we came to the farm. We went to see Don Ulysses the farmer. Ulysses isn’t quite as old as the cat man. He is thin and wiry, with short shaven hair and a strong curved nose. His pants, like the cat man’s are held up with bailing twine. He has several teeth. He’s smoking a roll up cigarette and hacking. He has no cats but chickens everywhere. His house is a stronger shack made with posts. The lower level is storage, he lives above. Most of the space upstairs is open with a room at the back. His kitchen is outside under a tin roof. There’s no electricity, his stove is clay with a space for fire and a metal grate for pots – a barbeque. There are chicken sheds made of sticks and bailing twine. Around the house are cacao, banana, breadfruit and citrus trees.
Don Ulysses is angry and frustrated. He wants to sell his farm and has a contract with a woman we know. His farm is 14 hectares and he wants it bought in one piece. The deal is that he will be paid in installments until the end of the year. He wants $80,000 for the farm. My friends want to buy 2 hectares and have the cash ready. (They are paying $8,000 per hectare, the woman is making a nice easy profit for being in the middle.) But there are complications, she’s stalling and doesn’t have the money for the installments, he’s tied into a contract and can’t sell off a smaller parcel and two sets of lawyers are involved. It’s officially ‘frontier land’ being only 2 kilometers from Panama and that makes it all harder. As a simple farmer he doesn’t understand why it’s so complicated. Selling it is clearly difficult for him – it’s been his family’s land for over a century, but he’s getting sick and can no longer work it.
We walked out through cow pastures to the parcel my friends want. It is beautiful. Open pasture land with frequent graceful kapok and almendra shade trees. Natural springs feeding clear pools full of fish and frogs. The land is bordered by indigenous reserve – virgin rainforest for miles and miles. Looking into it was looking into darkness, dense vegetation all the way to the canopy. Their parcel is an irregular shaped field sitting on a small hill backed by jungle. There is a natural spring and a low marshy spot filled with malanga. Sitting where the house would be we looked out to forest, to the east was another pasture, to the west flatter grazing land, neighbours would be hidden from view. The sun was behind us, the house would be in shadow in the afternoon. There was plenty of room for growing a garden. Not enough for goats. It is beautiful. I was surprised at how familiar it looked – a green cow pasture with a wire strand fence surrounded by big trees. It didn’t look tropical. It looked a bit like Guanacaste, and a bit like home.

So many people here have the same dream: buy a piece of land, retreat. More and more people are arriving. Ulysses is selling his farm for a lot of money, it’s completely and absolutely unaffordable to a native. And he is frustrated because these white folks, who obviously drove and who have cell phones and whos’ pants are held up with belts won’t give him this money, which for white folks is so little. Via Campesina is a peasant organization which campaigns for land for peasants to work sustainably. I completely support it. And yet here I am supporting my friends in their purchase of this part of the ‘garden’ which will give Ulysses and his family comfort and ease for the rest of their lives but take away another piece of land from native Costa Ricans. It’ll never return to working farmland, it’ll never again be owned by Costa Ricans. Things are changing here rapidly. Ulysses has worked hard all his life, it’s his land. He can do whatever he wants with it. The world is changing, if borders are to become meaningless then land should be owned by whoever will respect and care for it. It’s grazing land, the cattle are for meat. My friends will build a house (and a cabin for guests), they will put in a garden, it will all be very green, very eco-friendly. They will drive 40 minutes to school each way.

There’s a billboard in the horse field next to the school. It wasn’t there yesterday. It advertises a development of 12 luxury villas with security and beach access and “Italian Standards”. The architects drawing shows an ugly two story blue structure with a deck, one can just make out that the car in the garage is a mercedes.
“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot, with a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot.” Sing it Joni.
“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone . . . “

Young Jack

There are a lot of street dogs here, and somehow many of them make it through life: skinny, riddled with worms, ticks, fleas, mange and god knows what else, but many make it. Everything here is tough, from the people to the horses, to the dogs to the damn mosquitoes. You can tell which foreigners live here by how tough they are, how weathered, rangy, leathery they look.

A dog has been living at school for maybe 2 months. We thought he belonged to our neighbours. He ‘s rail thin, belly full of worms, missing hair in patches. From what I can see he lives on the scraps that go to our compost. And he’s a sweet loving young dog: happy to see you, eager to please, mellow beyond words: he lets the cat eat from the compost first and hasn’t chased a single chicken. Because of his condition we asked the neighbours to pull themselves together and he disappeared for a few days. I was worried – they don’t seem to be animal lovers. But a week later he returned same as ever. The children fed him more scraps and I began to take more care of him. School has been out for a week, but yesterday we had a meeting. He appeared crying, could barely walk. He’s all swollen underneath, with several deep cuts that could be barbed wire or perhaps stones. The flesh around his genitals is inflamed, raised, leaking puss and fluid, it looks like he has an abscess at the top of a back leg. He is a mess. He wouldn’t let us touch his back end.

I fed him and with a friend tried to put a sulphur ointment on his inflammation and hydrogen peroxide on his wounds. He howled and cried the whole time. The vet came out this morning and gave him a shot for the pain and inflammation. She’ll be back tomorrow to tranquilize him and have a better look. He’ll make it, he’s a survivor. She thinks a car hit him. Someone went to the neighbours. They say he’s not theirs. This is good, he’s now free to be taken care of. I have the closest relationship to him among the staff at school, so he’s now my responsibility, at least until he is well again. He looks to me like a Jack, such a nice dog. I can’t bring him home – he has too many parasites and one vet bill is enough. And anyway he couldn’t walk that far. He will continue to live at school until he’s clear of worms and mange at least, then we’ll re-access the situation. We have several new families moving to the area – one of them surely will want a dog.

Hoss came to me when he was two months old, a month after I arrived in Costa Rica. Lady J turned up on my doorstep last May and didn’t leave. I really don’t want another dog. Hoss and LJ are a perfect pair, a third would shift the balance. Young Jack is a lovely dog and it will be easy to find him a home when he’s fit and healthy.

torcelos and terciopelos

There are many creatures here: something like 5% of the world’s animal species live in Costa Rica, and each must find its place within the whole. What to eat, where to eat, when to eat, how to avoid being eaten, how to find a mate, how to create future generations – everyone has their own niche world within the greater various ecosystems.
As a westerner, growing up in Scotland where the most dangerous animal is the rarely seen adder, (the bears and wolves hunted to extinction), I have a conditioned faith that nature is benign. And as a human living in the world’s temperate zones, it largely is: one must search fairly hard to find a grizzly or a rattlesnake or a puma.
Beyond those temperate zones nature, not man, holds the balance. (For the moment: pollution is man’s best weapon against nature and enters into areas where man hasn’t yet taken over.) In such places, man like everyone else must find his or her place. Here, on the edge of the jungle I see nature in her glory daily, whether it be the smell of death and decay from a ditch and circling vultures, to a wasp entering a hole in my chair carrying a paralyzed caterpillar, to the giant orange horsefly with the huge emerald eyes that just bit my leg. As a human at the top of the food chain it still looks fairly benign. But yesterday was book marked by two creatures who’s particular little niche world I would rather not encounter.

Torcelos (a type of bot fly) are rather nasty. The adults are large, bright green, squat and have no working mouth parts. After breeding the female catches mosquitoes and deposits her eggs on their proboscis. When the mosquito bites an egg enters the wound, soon hatches and the grub begins to grow. It lives below the skin feeding on its host for up to two months before pupating. It’s fairly easy to identify a torcelo – the skin is raised in a hard lump, usually discoloured like a bruise and there is a neat round hole, about a millimeter across on the side of the bump. If you discover it early it’s fairly easy to kill it – either squeeze it out (a knuckle size lump holds a 5 millimeter grub), or suffocate it. There are various folk cures, from tying a piece of meat to the lump, to rubbing with mashed hoja de estrella leaves to coating with gasoline. When the grub gets bigger it has to be cut out. Hoss once had one which had grown unnoticed for three weeks (he was staying with friends). When the vet took it out it was half the length of my finger, I couldn’t look, even the vet was horrified. There seems to be a season and we seem to be in it. Hoss has/had 4, clearly a heavily laden mosquito. Luckily I spotted them within a day and coated them with green oil (sulphur, camphor, citronella suspended in oil). It killed them quickly and now we are dealing with his body’s absorption of the matter, hydrogen peroxide and another green oil coating just to make sure. But Young Jack has a big one that sticks out like a third hip bone. It’ll have to be cut out. And we can’t do it yet given the pain and sensitivity he is experiencing in that region.

Terciopelos are often called the most feared animal in Latin America. They are in the viper family and are fairly excitable as snakes go – stories of them attacking rather than retreating are not uncommon. They are rather large too – the females on this coast average 66 inches (over a metre and a half), maximum recorded length is 97 inches. They have long hinged fangs which lie against the roof of the mouth. When they bite the fangs rotate forward into a stabbing position and their hypodermic needle fineness directs venom deep into the tissue. The venom is full of tissue destroying chemicals and digestive enzymes: when a human is bitten up to a third of the blood supply leaves the system and floods extremities or the intestines, the resulting drop in pressure stops the heart. In non fatal bites there is often permanent damage to the kidneys or lungs and to the site of the bite. The snakes look a little like rattlesnakes, brown with a chevron pattern of darker brown outlined in white or cream. They have narrow necks and triangular heads with large eyes and the typical heat sensitive viper pit between eyes and nostrils. They are creamy white or yellow on their underside and their lower jaw is also a pale yellow – their other Spanish name means yellow beard. And like rattlers they shake their tail when threatened, it produces a humming sound. Last night I was going to the banana box and one was lying, rather casually I thought, on the steps. I was rather taken aback. We looked at each other for a while; me trying to determine whether I could wield a machete with any real direction or effect on the steps in the dark, he realizing I probably wasn’t a threat and I certainly wasn’t prey. And then he left. Slowly, unperturbed, exploring a couple of crannies before entering the bathroom and then out of my sight. I didn’t follow him to make sure he really left. He was about 4 feet long. I like snakes, but I wouldn’t call him pretty: the markings are beautiful, but the neck is very narrow and the head a blunt arrow, he looks unbalanced. I was as close as I’d ever like to be. He was no more than 5 foot away, but down 4 steps – there was no danger. I was very very glad the dogs were sleeping inside. I woke this morning thinking I should have scared him or threatened him, chased him off. I don’t know why I didn’t, maybe that old conditioned faith in blind ignorance, maybe trust in the universe, after all I saw him at the top of the stairs.

bleuchh

I spent a large part of last night propped between two buckets. The lesson: when one opens a coconut and the water seems slightly fizzy, don’t drink it!

critical mass

I’ve just reached critical mass with my mosquito bites. That’s it, I’ve had enough. My feet are just two red lumpy appendages that itch and burn. I’ve even been bitten on the soles. I’m totally fed up with the staccato slapping of my body, the blur of smashed mosquitoes and that smoky ash residue they leave when swiped. I’m over the smears of blood. I wish I had socks. I wish I had some incense. I wish they would just curl up and die somewhere far from me. I’ve been munching raw garlic, eating ginger and chili and still they bite me, what gives? I’ve put my magic oil on to sooth the itching and it’s not working.

Green Banana Curry

Green, or unripe, bananas can be used as a vegetable, just like plantain. Watch out for juice from their skins, it will stain! Or you could do like the locals and clean your hands with petrol afterwards.

Ingredients:
A dozen firm green bananas, or 8 plantains
Water and grated flesh from a coconut
2 inches of fresh ginger
½ to 1½ inches of chili, depending on taste and type
3 cloves garlic
1 lime
1 teaspoon curry powder, or to taste
Few lime leaves if available
1 spoonful of honey, or to taste
Splash soy sauce
Oil for cooking

Cut the skin from the bananas and chop. Add to salted water with a splash of lime, bring to boil and simmer 10 minutes or until the bananas are soft, like boiled potatoes.

Meanwhile finely chop garlic, ginger and chili and cook in oil until softened, add chopped lime leaves and curry powder and cook on low heat stirring constantly for another 2 minutes. Add bananas along with some of their cooking water, stir to coat thoroughly and cook on low heat for 5 minutes. Add coconut water and flesh, the juice of the lime (if it’s organic throw in the peel and flesh too), a splash of soy and the honey. Stir well, cover and allow to simmer quietly for another 15 – 20 minutes. After cooking let it sit for another 2 to 3 hours for the flavours to fully work their magic. Can be served hot or cold.

snake in the bathroom

There’s a snake in the bathroom, what are you gonna do there’s a snake in the bathroom has it come for you? No, it came for the toads. It gave me a fright though, turning on the light and seeing a bright red snake with a black head and a yellow band on its neck searching out corners, completely unperturbed by the light or my presence. I on the other hand was rather perturbed. I hadn’t seen this one before but red, black and yellow is a coral snake’s signature and I had told myself that the single black and yellow band could be juvenile colouring. Coral snakes aren’t aggressive but they are deadly and I didn’t really want share the bathroom with one. I played with the idea of catching it but this was not the time. I wished it well and told it not to return, and kept my eye peeled.
But it wasn’t a coral snake. It was a juvenile mussurana. Mussuranas are ‘good’ snakes to have around, because even though this one was looking for toads, they mostly eat other snakes. They are venomous with rear fangs and they constrict. They attack by lunging themselves at their prey coiling around it and biting to paralyze. The incredibly noxious venom of even the baddest of the bad vipers doesn’t harm it. Scientists are studying mussuranas and the Brazilian government is considering special breed and release centres for them as a snake control tool. But surely we remember what happens to such plans (cane toads in Australia, perch in the Canadian lakes, to name just two manmade natural disasters). Anyway I wish now I hadn’t told it not to return, hopefully it wasn’t listening.

Mr. Hansel pays a visit

George came over this afternoon. He’s been threatening to for months and today finally made it with a bottle of homebrew, 3 giant avocadoes from his tree and an apple, “to sweeten your mouth”. He filled the afternoon with stories and gardening advice. George’s family came here in the early 1900s from Jamaica via Columbia. They settled with 6 other families this last stretch of southern Caribbean before Panama. They fished and they farmed cacao. That was when most of the coast was Jamaican and Mosquite – a blend of Nicaraguan Indians and former African slaves who moved steadily south until they could find peace. The Costa Rican indigenous people, here the BriBri, stayed in the mountains away from the coast. The ticos stayed around Limon or up in the hills. The life they had sounds good. They fished and hunted and put together gardens in the sandy soil by the beach: papaya, banana, plantain, melon, sugar cane, taro and yucca while they cleared the jungle and planted cacao and orchards of fruit trees: breadfruit, avocado, mango, akee, soursop, citrus, nutmeg, cinnamon. Then they waited for the trees to grow. Cacao are short shade loving trees so they cleared the bush and left the big trees. This was all virgin land, jaguars and crocodiles, macaws and harpy eagles. And mosquitoes. They brought their medicinal plants with them. Work was hard but living was easy: lobsters and crabs were so plentiful they almost walked into the cooking pot, bananas and coconuts fell from the trees into the embers. The kids too young to clear land caught dinner.

Rondon is now the famous local dish. Rondon means run down and is a stew of whatever was found that day. George kept telling me, “everything was fresh, there were no iceboxes, no chemicals, it was all fresh, all organic, all good for the body”. There’s no recipe.
Take fish, crab, prawn, lobster or a combination and cook with chopped plantain, taro, yucca, breadfruit, pumpkin or sweet potato, in whichever combination you have that day. Add the water and flesh of a grated coconut, chopped ginger and chili, black pepper and salt, perhaps a little nutmeg or cinnamon and cook slowly until it smells done.

weed whacker

I did it, I finally bought a weed whacker. There’s a lot of lawn in the garden, despite our efforts to lay beds and plant things, there’s a lot of grass. We have a ‘gardener’, a very lovely 19 year old indigenous 7th day Adventist. But he works full time for a hotel an hours cycle ride away and we get him every other month when we heckle the hotel enough. It’s not a practical arrangement, and I’m very bad at heckling. The grass wasn’t quite as high as an elephant’s eye, but easily 5 times taller than any lurking fer-de-lance and it looked overwhelmingly messy. I’d been intending to buy a weed whacker for at least the last 2 months, it had become a bit of an issue.

Firstly there was the petrol or electric question. All of the men who cut grass for money have big heavy petrol powered machines. They look like samurais as they also wear heavy ground length leather aprons and a mesh mask covering their face. The whacker is supported by straps which adorn shoulders and wrap around waists. Cycling round a corner and being met by a grass cutter holding his still running (people do so like to waste petrol here) engine singing, surrounded by clouds of gas smoke and a green haze of slowly descending vegetative particles, his small form enlarged and given great authority by his ‘armor’, is to suddenly realize and give thanks that one lives in a peaceful country and this is not some warrior out of control with blood lust, but a local earning $14 for sweating several litres under his garb for a whole day’s work.

As I would be doing the ‘whacking’ I wouldn’t need such a big heavy –or expensive – machine. And as there would be no need to do the entire lawn in one day, I didn’t need so powerful a motor. Petrol powered gives more freedom: one isn’t limited by cord or the need for power outlets. But I found myself unable to buy a petrol machine, simply because of the petrol itself. I know this is hypocritical and I claim no superiority in being a bicycle owner: I miss driving, there are times when I wish I had a car. And I know that most of my food arrives here thanks to various petrol powered grain harvesters, delivery trucks, fork lift trucks, trains, ships and buses. And I know that the weed whacker itself would be made out of parts that themselves were possible because of the petrochemical industry. All this I knew and the argument went back and forth in my head when I could have been thinking other things. The clincher was that all electrical energy in Costa Rica comes from hydroelectric stations and this was easier for me to justify in my ignorance. Of course it then turned out that the electrical models were more expensive because of the power cords.

It really has taken me two months to finally come to the decision to buy a small electric model. I not only went back and forth between the two power sources, but also whether I should really own a whacker, whether it wouldn’t be better to hire or borrow one, or simply pay someone else to cut the grass. In the end convenience won out – as is so often the case. The power cord was more expensive than the machine. I have 40 metres of cord, which should I think be long enough, given there’s a house at either end of the garden. The cord came as just that and I bought plugs for either end. It’s been years since I’ve wired a plug, years since those university days where fuses were often blown and tinfoil kept whole apartments running. The copper wire was surprisingly thick and set me off into another mental spin: I’ve recently finished ‘Conversations with an Archdruid’ which follows the brilliant conservationist David Bower on three trips into the wilderness. The first trip was to a mountain he was defending against the opening of a copper mine. As I wired the plug images of pristine mountains and copper mines drifted in and out of my head. The fine wire bundled into stiff copper rope in my fingers had come a long way, and from where? What processes had it undergone to end up in the jungle of Costa Rica? The electricity here is very simple, cables and wires are in clear evidence hanging from trees, dangling from roofs, miles and miles and miles of it, all tucked inside black or white plastic. How much ore, how many mountains had become empty pits? The only point to such questions is to raise awareness of one’s impact upon the land. The wire is already here, the damage done so that I can have power in the middle of the garden. But I have direct control over my purchases: perhaps a petrol powered machine would have been a better choice. Perhaps paying someone else would have been more appropriate.
Nevertheless, all doubts cast aside, I can now cut the grass. And when the rain stops I shall.

variation on 'unclean' women (see next post), or planting with the moon

I was telling Moreno, the local purveyor of all things good including information, stories and intelligent conversation, of my consistent inability to grow a certain plant. He asked me when I was sowing the seeds. I told him I’ve tried at the new moon, the full moon and in between. I’ve tried sowing it dry and sprouting it, I’ve tried in sandy soil and in loam, it’s not happening.
“But when in your moon?”
“What?”
“You know, there’s a time when women can’t make bread or mayonnaise.”
“What?”
He blushed.
“What? . . . You mean my period? What, I can’t make bread or mayonnaise during my period?”
“No, it doesn’t work.”
I laughed. Where does such an idea come from? Is it somehow related to the BriBri / tribal belief that sets women apart at this time (and gives them a break from the ordinary)? Periods must be the antithesis of pregnancy, does this make them anti-fertile times and so unproductive? I would have thought it the opposite. I tried it; the bread is just as fine, the plant still doesn’t grow.

cacao farm, or cultural homogenization

We took the kids to a cacao farm yesterday. The farm belongs to an indigenous family and they farm their hectare organically, of course. They have cacao, coffee, bananas and platanos. The mother, Petronila, led us through the process of bean to chocolate, which the kids, living here, knew quite well. (For the process see earlier post on Cacao.) What was more interesting was her sharing of the indigenous BriBri way of life. What she shared was related to the cacao, as food source and medicine: cacao was taken at every meal, the cacao paste and the cacao butter were used on the skin to nourish and protect and both were taken medicinally.

If one cut oneself one should take some cacao, rub it on the thing that did the cutting and then pack it into the wound. For example, if you cut yourself with a machete you rubbed the cacao first on the machete and then on your cut. I’d heard before that chewed cacao leaves were good for cuts and stings. This involving the offending item in the cure is interesting – it elevates the treatment from first aid to folk medicine and adds a twist to the doctrine of signatures. Suddenly one is aware of the consciousness of all items, regardless of whether or not they are sentient. It indicates the consciousness level of the person who has been cut: they have a direct relationship with what cut them and in order to heal they need what harmed them. Everything has power to harm and to heal – and this removes the whole victim mentality.

Pregnant women could not step over weapons or hunting or fishing equipment, nor could they eat the flesh of jaguars or eagles, nor could they touch blood. To do so would create problems with the child.
During their periods women were “unclean” and could not be touched. They did not participate in the general household tasks: cooking, cleaning, preparing food. During this time they had to eat from special leaves formed into bowls which had to be kept outside – if anything or anyone touched these leaves, or anything belonging to the woman they would get parasites. In general if anyone touched an unclean person they would get parasites.
After childbirth the women were also unclean and had to leave the village for a month. They would make a special shelter in the forest and wait for the shaman. During that time they would eat cacao with herbs and rub cacao paste and cacao butter onto their skin and that of the baby. When the shaman came he would bless the woman and child and she could return to the village. But she would still be unclean for another month. On her return her family would bathe her with herbs and rub cacao onto her skin. The shaman would visit the family and perform a ceremony with cacao and herbs. For a month the woman had an unclean mouth and could not talk to anyone, every afternoon she had to go to the river and clean her mouth and the baby with herbs. This ritual would ensure that the baby was healthy and free of any bad spirits.
And then our storyteller added: in 1965 the missionaries came and told us that Jesus had died to save us all, the blood of Jesus made us all clean. After that women went to the hospital to have their children.
Religion got the BriBris. And by religion I don’t mean their own spiritual understanding of the world. I mean western organized religion. Religion and alcohol got the BriBris. It’s odd how the story is the same the world over. That they go hand in hand marching into tribal communities for the last, what 5 centuries? That the people become shameful of their nakedness and cover up – the mother and her beautiful daughter were wearing more clothes than I’ve seen in a long while, covered neck to ankles in synthetics. That communities become divided between those who get the new faith and those who get the new drug. That trust in their medicine slips away and is replaced by blind faith in someone else’s pills. Old ways of life, centuries old, fall away in one generation. That which harms you no longer has the power to heal you, instead the doctors a day’s travel away can heal, but they need something in return, and suddenly within a generation a people go from an integrated, harmonious, sustainable lifestyle, to one where money must be earned.
The land that gave freely before now belongs (what a concept) to someone else and the people must move: there are indigenous reservations. These reservations are home to the ‘poorest’ people in Costa Rica. Forty five years ago they needed no money, now they are the poorest, least educated, most alcohol dependent and unhealthiest segment of the population. When a way of life disappears so radically – the way one prays, thinks, communicates, eats, raises children, maintains health it leaves an enormous hole and into this space comes church or alcohol, or both. Is it progress? Is it really what Jesus would have wanted?


Petronila came down from the mountains when she was an adult, there are still Bribris living in the mountains, there is still a shaman. Am I being a social luddite? Is my own bias against organized religion colouring my thinking. Sure. Is it better to have western medicine – no more “unclean” women; better to put new chemicals into bodies, the earth, the water; better to wear more clothes; better to have money; better to have an “easier” (note: not simpler) life with more time to devote to church and recreation drugs? Better to be educated in a school; better to learn reading and writing and someone else’s history? Last year we had an indigenous boy in the school. His family was illiterate, he had no sense of letters or numbers: the symbols were only that. He drew beautifully, his ability to observe nature and replicate it either in sound or on paper was stunning. He was different in a school full of different, unique, international, free children (post:Different, 2007). He was quiet, serious with a weight of awareness around him that was so out of place in school. He had no idea that he couldn’t do what the others could and was proud of everything he did. His mother became sick and they returned to the mountains; the medicine the doctors gave her had failed. I was sorry for him to go, I’ve never seen a child be so conscious of leaving classmates, but glad that we weren’t going to strip him of his abilities and self belief, replacing it with what our lifestyle requires us to know.

I asked Petronila if she would teach me what she knew. She looked at me blankly, “I don’t know anything about the medicines now.” I asked her if she had thought of writing down her stories, she said the university had books on BriBri traditions. I will try again, I will ask her if she will tell me and I will write them down. 1965 wasn’t so long ago was it?

miserable, except for the chocolate

It’s been raining for 3 days. It’s cold. I did my laundry on Sunday and none of it has dried which means I’ve been wearing damp clothes or dirty clothes since. My towels are damp. The electricity is on and off. The mosquitoes somehow have flourished. I have some mystery raised blister rash which is incredibly itchy and is spreading over my arms and hands. I have a cold with a racking cough, despite consumption of copious amounts of raw garlic. But I do have a big bag of organic chocolate crumbs.

conversation over coffee

“Last week I woke up with bat shit in my hair.”
“Yeah?, . . .yesterday I woke up with a tick on my top lip.”
“Nasty. This morning I woke up with a dead gecko stuck to my chest.”
Okay Shaun, you win. Jungle life.

solstice

Solstice passed with a delicious yellow moon caught in the branches of the fig. It was dark by 6:20, making a difference of one hour of daylight between the winter and summer solstice. I guess we’re only 8 degrees north of the equator. I spent the day thinking of family and friends and wishing them joy in their living and peace in their being.

nitrogen fix

Just finished my nitrogen delivery.

When I lived in my cob house I had a composting toilet, basically a bucket and a big bag of sawdust. It worked beautifully. I haven’t tried it here, though think about it often; I know several people with pit toilets, but as yet haven’t quite finished the loop on that one. And it is a loop: I really think it all started going downhill when mankind stopped dealing with its solid waste. To remove what every other living thing contributes to the soil and plants which feed us, and instead to dump it, treated or not, into our water takes us so far out of the natural order, sets us apart in such unhealthy ways. Yes, I could go on. In cultures where the loop is complete and waste is returned consciously to the land – well let’s just say the vegetables grow bigger. We have a septic system here with a leach field so somehow something is returned, but not much.

I don’t eat meat or fish and I eat from the garden mostly with grains and legumes added. I don’t take medication of any sort and I’m not a drinker, so what I could ‘contribute’, is certainly compostable. Maybe that’s the project for my upcoming 3 weeks off school. I already have an outdoor bathroom, it’s not such a stretch.

Unless there’s a guest, no one pees in the toilet. The boys just wander off for a moment in the garden, I on the other hand have a series of rotating buckets. Just before dusk the bucket’s contents are diluted with an equal amount of rainwater and fed to the plants in rotation. The nitrogen, potassium, calcium and trace minerals, the trace garlic, ginger, chili and whatever else is present directly benefit the plant and I feel good about contributing, and saving the water that would be wasted in flushing. The only thing I’m careful of is not splashing leaves or stems, if it’s too strong it can cause burns under sunlight. The buckets get a vinegar rinse and are left to bleach out in the sun: sunlight is an excellent bleach.
The average household flushes the toilet 14 times a day and the average flush takes 11 litres of water. That’s a lot of water. I keep hearing how the next oil crisis will be a water crisis, let’s start saving now and helping out our plants at the same time!!

While I’m about it, we also compost all our toilet paper, just add it to the compost pile along with everything else. We use unbleached, biodegradable, recycled paper, goes right in, perfectly simple, completes another part of the loop. Why flush it, what a waste of carbon. Offset your carbon footprint – compost your toilet paper!!!!!!!!

In many cultures – Costa Rica included – people don’t flush paper, instead there is a little bin or bucket beside the toilet into which all the paper goes. When it’s full some people burn it (I guess that’s not so bad if you put the ash in the compost), most others bag it and it goes to the land fill (is that carbon sequestered?). If the bin is emptied regularly there’s no smell, and really there’s no mess (fluids evaporate quickly even in this humid climate). It makes perfect sense to compost it. Try it for a week. Be part of the cycle.

tomato

Just picked the first ripe tomato from the garden. This is the sole tomato on a long spindly volunteer plant that must have come from the compost. We have a compost pile but we also feed kitchen scraps directly to beds and individual plants – it all breaks down so quickly with the humidity and heat, and countless insects. It’s a brave little tomato this one, rather scarred, not the prettiest, it certainly would get passed over in Safeways, but it made it: the plant fulfilled its genetic task, from that one lucky seed came, well I’m not sure, probably 80 to 100 others. Almost seems a shame to eat it. It was seeing the little volunteer in a bed of bromeliads and ornamental taro that inspired me to try tomatoes in the cottage garden. And now the first generation are heavy below fruit and the second generation are coming along nicely behind. I’ll get a knife, this moment must be savoured. Yep, very nice.

I've been tagged

Kanak, who has a great blog, http://terrafarmer.blogspot.com, tagged me. This is a new one for me, there are rules :) here they are:

Link to the person who tagged you.

Post the rules on the blog.

Write six random things about yourself.

Tag six people at the end of your post.

Let each person know they have been tagged
by leaving a comment on their blog.

Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

here are my 6 random things:

I type with two fingers;

Pacha Mona means earth monkey which is my chinese horoscope;

my favourite food is dried dates;

I'm beginning to find multi-tasking pointless;

I'd like to be a full time gardener;

the other week I ate a tick - I thought it was a chocolate crumb, it tasted foul.


the blogs I'd like to tag are:

allotment underground

the greening of gavin

urban subsistence living

indoor gardener

urban homesteader

La Ferme de Sourrou

coffee

I’ve stopped drinking coffee. A couple of weeks ago my stomach hurt after the second cup, it was an ominous kind of hurt and I decided maybe I should lay off. I’ve built a bit of personality around the whole coffee thing, but it’s just a front: I’ve found it useful as a teacher to have one obvious foible. That way the kids don’t waste time inventing more spectacular issues and they can alternatively use their energy to try to help/convert you or dismiss you as some typically flawed adult. When I’m in the UK I just drink tea so really I’ve only been a serious coffee drinker for 11 years. That said the day after I stopped I had an awful headache that lasted all day. And I’ve had curious flashbacks to various coffee houses, some of which I only ever visited once. And I’ve actually experienced several nasal hallucinations of freshly brewed java; I’ve asked others if they could smell them, all but one were indeed my own invention. This is quite strange for me.
I’ve been looking for differences. I don’t have more energy, but I have a different energy and would now categorize coffee energy as something dark and heavy, like a double lined curtain which keeps out light but makes you feel quiet and comfortable. I’ve replaced coffee with a hot mixture of ginger, lime and chili all from the garden – ridiculously healthy and tasty, the chili gives heat to the throat which kind of feels like caffeine. Another difference is that I’m thirsty all the time and must be drinking almost 3 liters of water a day. I will drink it occasionally, I had a cup at Shaun’s on Sunday (she makes a delicious espresso, chocolate, orange oil blend), just to prove to myself I’m not addicted, but short of the subconscious flashbacks and hallucinations, () I’m not consciously craving it. My compost will feel the absence of grounds.

buoyant

I feel oddly buoyant. Trying to locate the source of such lightness: I ate a lot of fruit salad today; the week is half way through; it’s a full moon and the datura is ready to open; I had a good conversation with the snake man; someone suggested a new mange cure? Perhaps it’s a combination of all coupled with me getting home in time to feed the chayote and tomatoes. Whichever, it feels good.
It appears the yellowing chayote is a lack of nitrogen, I dismissed this before because I do give a fair amount of nitrogen to the plants – but it’s worth a try so they got more today. We’ll see.
I was telling the snake man about the beautiful salmon coloured snake I saw the day my camera died, he thought it might be a bird eating snake and the picture in his book while not as glorious a colour, was a match – plus the snake was waiting at the foot of a tall skinny tree with two very obvious birds nests. He was telling me snake stories – one of the locals was bitten by a coral snake, he was found on the road still holding the snake. They took him to the clinic and but when the snake started thrashing around they kicked him out and someone took him to the hospital in Limon, by then he was having convulsions. They ended up taking him to San Jose and hospitalizing him. He dismissed himself the next day and came back on the bus. He should be dead, but he isn’t. The locals kill all snakes on sight, dangerous or not. The expats seem naive (myself included) and tend to believe they can just move the snake out of the garden. But they are territorial creatures and tend to come back. I like snakes; I used to carry around garter and gopher snakes when I found them. It is very difficult for me not to touch those I see here, but it’s different: a gorgeous bright yellow snake, not so very big, so easy to pick up, sitting so still on a tree would in all likelihood kill me with its bite. That’s a big part of being in Costa Rica for me: it is possible to die here. Sounds so stupid and so simple, but life becomes different when death is present. I know this is stupid – car crashes and the dangers of urban life exist everywhere I’ve lived to date. But elsewhere death is hidden, here it’s clear, it can be found hanging in the bathroom, lurking below the bed, lying on the dark path. Death is present daily, vultures circle overhead, the smell of decay comes from ditches; today a street dog chased down and tore apart a chicken in the school yard in front of all the kids. After they spoke of all the blood, then returned to their drawings and schoolwork. This afternoon I found the back of something furry, maybe a raccoon, perhaps a peccary? below the carambola (good for the soil). One becomes aware of life here because one is aware of death.
I told the snake man I was always worried about the dogs getting bit: I live surrounded by jungle on 3 sides and the river on the 4th; the dogs are romping about in the undergrowth daily. He told me it takes a lot of energy for a snake to produce venom and they don’t give it up so easily – if the dog accidently stood on one while running through it was highly unlikely the snake would use venom. He thought that even if the dog attacked the snake it might not use venom, or not enough to kill. It’s highly unlikely the dogs will attack a snake, given the sidelong glances and sideways jumps that happen if they see a vine lying on the ground. This is great news. There are no jaguars so close to human habitation and the crocodiles were long since hunted out of the river; the dogs are at the top of the food chain, snakes are the biggest threat.
The mange treatment is something called green oil and is a mixture of sulphur, citronella and camphor. It smells quite good and it’s an oily green fluid. I hope it makes a difference; it’s the first thing I’ve tried that he hasn’t licked off. Right now he’s hiding under my bed. Unfortunately the smell will alert him. He has allergies to dog food and wheat and is prone to skin problems, it’s not unusual for me to slather him with odd things and he hates it. He’s become very good at deciphering my concern – if I look at him in any way suggestive of checking out his skin off he slinks under the house. It’s almost to the stage where he won’t come near me. If I take him to the vet she gives me antihistamines which work great as long as he takes the tablets but I don’t want him taking antihistamines all his life. He eats well; meat, veg, grains, fruit and a daily multi-vitamin, but something is missing. Lady J has no skin problems, she hasn’t even caught mange.

simple banana flower dish

Banana flowers are dark, powerful looking flowers, heavy and serious. Dark purple petals hide inch and a half long creamy flowerets which become the bananas. Hoards of black bees hover around these creamy flowers which are revealed one petal at a time in some exotic secretive tryst. The whole flower can be eaten but must be soaked in a lime / salt water bath for at least 4 hours first. Harvest with the banana, or cut earlier (when the bananas are 2/3rds grown) for a larger flower.
Preparing the flower
Banana flowers are horribly horribly sticky and their snotty sap will turn everything a dark brown, so unless you are naked in the kitchen, take care! They will also destroy cutting boards and render knives into gooey gluey nightmares, be warned!
Remove stem. Cut on a wet plate with a wet sharp knife. Holding the flower at the base slice as you would an onion, scrape the sliced flower into a bowl of salted lime water as you go, stopping often to wet the knife. Wash the plate and knife immediately after finishing. Wash hands with soapy water.
The recipe
Prepared banana flower
An onion
Turmeric, ½ teaspoon
Ginger, inch and a half, or to taste
Garlic, 4 cloves or to taste
Coriander, teaspoon, or to taste
Good sized lime
Coconut milk, 1 cup
Oil for frying, salt to taste
Heat oil and fry spices and garlic stirring constantly, until the smell is unbearably good. Add chopped onion and banana flower and stir to coat, cook for two minutes then add coconut milk and lime juice and simmer for 15 – 20 minutes until onion and flower are softened. Allow to sit for 5 minutes before serving.

warms the cockles

Waiting for a download today, and for my laundry, I had some time to browse blogs. I’m happy to see so many sustainable / eco-viable / alternative homesteading/organic gardening blogs online, quite a community! It would be so nice if there was some collective of such blogs. I know there are directories and online communities: blogcatalog, tribe, folio, blotanical for example, but to have an online home for sustainable blogs somehow tied in with other eco-sites and resources would be great. At least for me. It’s great to see so many people thinking about alternatives and putting their thoughts – and ideals – into practice.
Rather on the same note, though from a different perspective to be sure, was an article on rising fuel costs. Riots and demonstrations, strikes and blockades in Spain, France, South Korea, India and Scotland. I can’t help but feel this is a positive step forward in changing attitudes and looking for alternatives. I hope so. I understand that for those lorry drivers it doesn’t present itself as positive, but in the larger picture the more pressure people feel in the current paradigm, the more pressure to find alternatives, you know?

chayote blues

Something bad is happening to my chayote. This whole chayote business has been an ongoing test for me. First I couldn’t get any seeds, and then they wouldn’t sprout and then wouldn’t take and now my pride and joy which was doing ever so well snaking up a pretty pyramidal bamboo trellis is turning yellow and dropping lower leaves, like every lower leaf. It’s gone from a shiny green pyramid to a naked tangle of vines and higher leaves. I’m at a loss. It says in the books it grows best at middle elevations but that it will grow anywhere. It looked at first like only leaves with insect damage were turning, but no, they are all going. I think I’ll lose it. Sad. The vines supposedly live for 5 years or so, maybe it’ll come back, I hope so, I am very fond of the plant, fonder of the plant than I am of the fruit which takes the skin off my hands when I peel it.
Other than that the garden is coming along. Despite rain I managed to transplant the second generation of tomatoes, 3 melons, the jackfruit and a couple of papayas. I’ve sowed the third generation of pumpkin. And today I finally got a cucumber with a nice supply of healthy looking seeds. The red bananas I harvested three whole weeks ago are finally ripe and almost ready to eat, I think I’ll wait a couple of weeks before I harvest the next bunch, there’s no sense them hanging in the box when they could be hanging on the plant. I took three more pineapple which I’ll dry, they smell fabulous and I’m so enjoying the last batch I dried.

night monkeys

There are night monkeys in the trees. Sounds like a children’s story. I can’t find much information on night monkeys, they are not supposed to exist here, but are reported on the Panama Caribbean coast and we have unbroken forest, in strips, between here and there. The locals of course know they’re here. They are grey with buff bellies and white, owl like faces and exist in small family groups, and they’re nocturnal. But there they are darting away from my flashlight. I wonder why they’re nocturnal, what pushed them into the darkness? Smaller than the other three monkey species that live here, and eat the same foods, perhaps competition pushed them ‘underground’ high into the canopy. There are plenty of flowers that open at night for the bats, perhaps their favoured food? Right now they are in the cacao trees. This explains why I can’t get hold of any cacao to make into chocolate, the monkeys and squirrels are getting there first. Oh well. The fig by my house is dropping fruit, a steady thonk thonk of fruit hitting leaves from 40 feet up. The area smells of fermenting fruit. Unfortunately these are not the figs we eat, though maybe I should try one. I’ve started eating the fruit of the swiss cheese vine after I saw how greedily the pregnant spider monkey devoured them. There are a couple of vines that reach down almost to the ground with fruit within my reach, I’m not taking them from the monkeys who would never come that low. My mum had these vines all over the house when I was a kid, tied to mossy sticks. I had no idea then that one day I’d be eating the berries which taste like a mix of pineapple and banana.

ginger beer

I used to have a ginger beer plant but I didn’t make the beer often enough to keep it going. This recipe uses yeast and it’s super easy, quick and makes good ginger beer.
For a 2 litre bottle:
I cup brown sugar
¼ teaspoon yeast
Juice of one lime
A good 2 inches of ginger, grated
Put it all into the bottle and add enough water to give a good shake and dissolve the sugar, or at least mix everything up. Add more water leaving a good 2 inches of space. Cap tightly and put somewhere warm for 24 hours. Check after 24 hours – if the bottle is hard the beer is ready, if not leave but check regularly. When the bottle is hard put it in the fridge to stop the yeast. Alternatively you can allow it to become ever so slightly alcoholic. (Be warned it will explode when you open it.) Open slowly and enjoy.

soursop

It was a day for fruit: 3 pineapples, cherries and a big fat soursop. The soursop is slightly bigger than an American football and a lot heavier. I heard it fall with a satisfying thud and got to it before anyone else could. Strange fruit. It’s a pretty tree, like a laurel, with shiny green leaves and odd flowers with thick custard coloured petals which come straight out of the trunk. There are 3 outer petals which open to reveal two more sets of three within. I’m not sure what pollinates them but did see one positively pulsate with custard coloured beetles the other day, the like of which I’ve never seen before. The fruits are green with short soft spikes. Inside there are a very juicy series of fleshy envelopes most enclosing a pretty, shiny, black flattish seed which is toxic. The trick is to remove all the seeds. Soursop can be eaten as is and it’s very tasty, but it’s so big that unless one throws a party, it can’t be finished. Luckily it makes a good jam and a nice sorbet. I’ll make jam in the morning.
Between rain and the garden being full of ants today – when they move they really do move – I didn’t get much done except the weeding and twisting chayote tendrils round trellis. Picked some pumpkin leaves for dinner. I’ve cleared away all the first generation pumpkins and the second generation is still rather young so I’m without flowers for the first time in 3 months. The leaves are great though and I use them just as I would spinach or chard. The leaf stalks are hollow and look just like penne pasta. I have to use them like that some time. I also picked some ginger.
I’m going to Mr Eddy’s tomorrow and made him some ginger beer. Mr Eddy is an older Jamaican who went to university in England and now runs a couple of cabins from his front yard by the beach. He has a great garden: mango, avocado, cinnamon, lime, orange, lemon, manzana de agua, black pepper, lemongrass, citronella, malanga, cassava, sugar cane, ylang-ylang, jasmine, datura, juanilama, pineapple, papaya, coconut and I’m sure I’m forgetting others. I saw him at Moreno’s yesterday and he said he was looking for a gardener. I’m interested. I don’t think I have time but I’m interested. Mr Eddy knows a lot, it would be a pleasure to learn from him.

rain

It’s raining. A nice warm rain that’s heavy enough to keep the mosquitoes down but not so heavy as to be oppressive. Okay, I was wrong about the mosquitoes. They are bad right now. Whenever we have rain then 5 or 6 dry days, they come in hoards. It’s best if it rains each day – the rain washes out the eggs and larvae from all those millions of breeding pools tucked between bromeliad leaves or inside heliconia flowers or half coconut or cacao shells discarded by squirrels and monkeys, coatis and agoutis on the forest floor. Five or six dry days are long enough for the adults to develop and then we suffer through another 5 or 6 days before they start dying off. I’m peppered with bites and right now dotted with my own blood and various body parts where I’ve slapped them into oblivion. I can barely see the dogs through the clouds of whining blood hungry little nasties. And yet I know they have to live too so I continue to slap the ones I can reach and allow the rest to be. I’m not so bothered by the bites. I’m less bothered by the bites than the smell of insect deterrents. I got a couple of hours weeding in this morning and I’d like to rake, but the leaves are too wet and the grass too long and I shan’t put myself through damp hours of frustration .
Oh dang. House cleaner ants have just arrived. An invasion up over the deck. Dozens at the moment, soon to be hundreds, probably thousands. I shall have to evacuate. I do appreciate house cleaners, they do just as they say – flush every insect, lizard and scorpion from the house, eating those they can and chasing the rest. Hmm. I wonder what to do. The kitchen is full of intoxicating smells, a pumpkin pie (last of the flour) is in the oven and I harvested 3 pineapples this morning and they are in the dehydrator. The house smells of pineapple and pumpkin and pastry. I wonder if the ants will get into the dehydrator? I could stand it on a stool and put the legs of the stool in bowls of water. They could come along the power cord. Let’s hope they are just carnivorous. Time to go.
I arrived back just as they were leaving. They left in a line, carrying creamy somethings. Some were held aloft by three ants all working incredibly well together fairly trotting along, 18 legs between them and not one tangle or scuffle. The big soldiers carried their prizes below them. At first I thought that somehow they had gotten into my rice and was preparing myself to wrest each grain back from them – it’s my last kilo and you can’t buy brown rice for love or money right now. But, no, these were definitely whiter and lumpier than rice. I followed the trail backwards and discovered a wasps nest in the roof I hadn’t noticed before. Oops. The wasps were buzzing around but weren’t doing anything, I wouldn’t really like to see an ant / wasp battle. I saw ants kill a scorpion once and it wasn’t pleasant: the stuff Hitchcock grew fat on. I guess the wasps will just start over again.

home

Ah, so nice to be home. Mondays and Tuesdays are my longest days, I don’t get home til after 5, which leaves a scant 40 minutes or so before the sun sets. Just about time enough to check the garden, water where necessary, move seedlings, flick grasshoppers off things and wonder if I should be killing them instead.
Now it’s dark, the dogs are eating coconut from the shell (they come running when they hear the tell tale sound of coconut shell on concrete) and I’m waiting for the kettle to boil and thinking if I can wait to open the pineapple. I think I can. I want to dry it and will have more time tomorrow. It rained last night – thank goodness. After all that rain we had last week we’ve been dry for 3 days – it was a very welcome change until I discovered that the pipe that feeds the sink and shower had somehow come loose and emptied two water tanks. Bucket baths from the overflow tanks for three days. The tanks aren’t yet full but there was enough for a quick shower this morning. A hot shower is a wonderful thing and something to be appreciated. In Guanacaste I lived without for 9 months and here it can be off and on. The feel of hot soapy water on tired, sweaty skin cannot be underestimated. In trying to live a more conscious life I think showering and eating are the times when I might manage to be fully present in the moment – for a moment. It’s a good exercise for me as it’s so easy to get lost on some track of thought and time to slip by unawares.

what about the garden?

It’s been raining the last week or so, I haven’t had a chance to work, but yesterday was nice. I cleaned out the last of the pumpkins and mulched the patch with a thick layer of leaves, then compost then more leaves. I want to put peppers in there but my peppers are an inch tall at the moment so the bed will have a chance to rest a little. I’ll add more leaves and nitrogen until the peppers can be planted out. I have carambola coming! This is the first time the tree has fruited so I’m very happy. I was sure the flowers had come to nothing and was looking at the yam vine that is snaking through the tree wondering when that will flower and suddenly my eyes adjusted and I saw a cluster of young fruit. My jaw actually dropped, it would have been funny to see. The carambola or star fruit in other parts of the world are rather watery, very sour yellow 5 sided fruits that I don’t enjoy very much as is. But they make a great jam. Very happy to see them. Across the path from the carambola is the soursop and she has a few fruit and several flowers, happy to see that too. More jam. Hmm, if only I had bread . . . . My tomatoes look great and are setting several nice clusters of slightly larger than normal cherry style tomatoes. The plants have tipped over so that the bottom 8 inches or so of stalks are horizontal and they are sending out roots, the rest of the plant is upright. I’m not thinking of adding supports unless the fruits end up against the soil. I have more baby tomatoes which will soon be ready to plant out.
The chayote is working steadily up its trellis. I built a larger trellis behind for several other chayote I picked up. The first trellis has the big dark green variety, the second has small green and white varieties. I’m sure they’ll cross pollinate.
I have about 6 pineapple which I propped up with bamboo yesterday, the stalks aren’t strong enough to support the fruit which seems odd, but the plants look healthy enough. There are two more in the ornamental garden which I’ll pick tomorrow. The red bananas I cut last Sunday are still hard, it’ll be another week before they’re ready, though I might make a curry with a few of them.

keep it local

I’ve been reading the Via Campesina website, which thankfully can be found in English. It’s good, what else to say, it’s an international peasant movement campaigning for healthy and positive land reform and a return to food sovereignty and sustainable practices.
I’m almost out of flour and I won’t buy any this month to see how it goes (see earlier blog: Food Choices) I made cornbread and while it’s not as tasty as the cinnamon and raisin bread, it’s fine. I just have to work on a recipe I like. As for the lentils I’m switching to white beans (I found a Costa Rican supply) and liquidize them for a more soupy style dogs dinner. We’ll see. It’s more work and requires more gas and electricity – it’s all a balance isn’t it? The gas I’m sure isn’t local, I have no idea where the closest source is, I don’t even know what propane is actually, need to research that. But I’m not going to give up propane. All electricity in Costa Rica is generated by hydroelectric plants. I don’t know, one could go on and on. Let’s just start with grains and legumes.

small animal notes

This morning I awoke to find a Leaf Nosed Bat hanging from my mosquito net. He was beautifully enfolded inside his wings, wrapped around him in true Dracula style, hanging from two toenails. The flap on his nose was almost as big as his ears and he was such a dark brown to be almost black. He was about 3 inches long. I thought to move him and when I began to lift the net to let him out he watched me with the shiniest beadiest black eye. I’ll wait to dusk when he’ll be happier. How he got inside the net I don’t know.
There are many baby lizards around at the moment. I was finding perfectly white round single eggs all over: under the bed, in the shower, behind the dishes on the shelf, everywhere solitary white eggs. Now there are little lizards exactly like the adults but ½ the length of my finger, including tail. They are a little dopey and easily caught in would be dangerous situations; getting swept up with the dust or crawling into rain jackets and appearing again on a sleeve on the ride home. I wonder what the survival rate is? Enough, there are a lot of lizards.
Something is eating my soap. It’s a very nice seaweed soap and I don’t want it eaten. I even put it away in a soapbox and some cheeky rodent, I presume from the tooth marks, got into it and ate a lot last night. It must have some good fat in it. I remember making soap with a seventh grade class and while it was curing some mice got into it and ate a good ¼ of it. We had used coconut and olive oil. Well, someone has blue sudsy poop out there in the jungle.

5am

It’s 5am on Sunday morning. In the big fig there are a flock of parrots, maybe 20 in all, making such an incredible racket. They are Red Lored parrots, mostly a bright emerald green with red foreheads and blue and red wing trim. They live in pairs within a greater flock and spend all of their time 30 to 40 feet up in the trees. They are comical and agile birds for the stocky, compact frames and the pairs seem to argue and bicker much of the time. Such a different picture from a single parrot in a cage. I didn’t realize they were canopy dwellers, I wonder how it feels to be a canopy species kept so close to the ground in captivity? Perhaps for captive bred birds there is no recollection of their natural state.
In the other big fig, further down are a pair of Slaty Tailed Trogons, cousins to the famous Resplendent Quetzal. The slaty tailed have orange beaks, dark emerald heads and chests and back fading into gray and a bright red belly (females are dark slate grey and read). They are inspecting a large termite nest. Trogons often nest in active termite mounds, the mounds providing excellent shelter and the termites providing a steady, handy supply of food.
Below them, perched precariously on the tips of banana leaves are a family of Tropical Kingbirds. It’s a new family, the young recently emerged from the nest and their parents are still feeding them. The Kingbirds are in the huge flycatcher family, and are among dozens of yellow breasted birds in this area. The kingbirds are quite small, about 6 inches and very vocal. They build beautiful covered nests, a mess of twigs and leaves slightly bigger than an american football with a igloo style entrance and a covered porch. If you walk within 8 feet of the nest the parents will call you repeatedly from close by on another tree trying to lure you away. They stay very close to their nests.
On the lawn are a pair of Variable Seedeaters. These are among my favourite birds in the garden. Very small, maybe 4 inches and the very sharp bright birds. The male is all black except for a tiny dot on his wing and the female is a dark brown. They flit to and fro singing very sweetly a series of random notes. They eat seeds and insects, and spend most of their time close to the ground. Their nest is a very simple, very thin walled cup – you can see light from one side of the nest to the other, and they build about 8 feet up in the bushes and trees.
Before me on the table is a vase of flowers, heliconias, seemingly hanging motionless in the air is a Long Billed Hermit feeding from them. He is about 4 foot from me. Hermits don’t mind distractions. They are so exquisitely balanced from their long arching saber like beak to their long straight drop down tail. The plainest of hummingbirds the hermits have a different sort of charm, intelligent, curious and actually I think rather friendly given their name.
Across the way I can hear the Montezuma Oropendolas. This is another favourite. They are big birds, 20 and 16 inches tall with naked blue and pink facial patches and a lemony yellow tail. The tail is about all I ever see of them as they stay in the thick of the canopy in this garden. But one knows they are there by their vocalizations – an incredible series of whoops, yips, brrips and an amazing noise like branches falling made by the males. The local flock is about 15 birds, I think, it’s difficult to count.
The parrots have gone, now I can hear other bird noise beyond the river but I don’t know who’s calling. I have a bird book, so far in the garden I have made checks beside 57 different species of birds. The boys who are avid birders have many more.