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.

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.

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.

feeling good

Feeling good
I feel good. This week hasn’t felt so great, but now, Friday, with the night coming on; some frog impersonating a diving submarine; pumpkin bread fresh from the toaster oven and a pair of happy dogs at my feet, well I feel good again.

The volunteer tomato is volunteering her first tiny green tomato. She has had three flowers thus far and I hope each will result in a fine red fruit. She’s in a bed of bromeliads so I have no idea what kind of tomato she is (I’m pretty sure she’s not a gee-whizz-bang H4 hybrid). She was the one who encouraged me to actively plant tomatoes and they too are already putting forth buds. I’m impressed by their short and stocky strength and how easily they germinated. I got the seeds from small cherry type tomatoes Moreno was selling, he said they were grown by a local and I figured they were a safe bet. They certainly look very hearty and have great foliage and sturdy stalks. I sowed them on March 18th, so 2 months until they bud, we’ll see how they do now. I’ve never grown tomatoes before but I have fond recollections of my grandfathers growing them in their greenhouses and I dimly remember picking the new shoots that came out above already established branches. Something to do with keeping the strength for the fruit – it gives an excuse to touch the plant and release that incredible scent. I remember seeing fields of sprawling tomato vines in a caked dry earth on Greek islands and wondering how they could possibly survive – so different from the lush steaming environment of a greenhouse. And I remember seeing open trucks holding thousands of tomatoes plowing the freeways in California, I never did see any growing there. And now here they are between the chayote and gandul looking quite happy. I’m glad.

There are also little white flowers on the chili peppers. These are a scotch bonnet type that came from Moreno’s produce shelf and are local too. We have 5 spots with I think 2 plants in each, so we should have something to add to the curries. They are all different heights and widths depending on when they were planted out and how much sun they get: the most advanced were the first planted and receive about a half day of direct sun. Pretty plants with dark green leaves and almost black crooks where the branches meet the stem.

My pumpkins are looking very sad. They have definitely had their season. They were the first things I planted and it was in the days before I kept track, but it was sometime in the latter half of January. Four months all in from birth to death – though they left a healthy legacy: the new generation I planted last weekend. I hope I learned from these parent plants:
- It’s okay to prune, rampant growth means more leaves, fewer pumpkins
- They need a LOT of space, don’t plant too many in one site
- Plant them so the main stem is easy to reach and water
- They wilt under strong sun and can do well with less
- It’s really wonderful to grow a plant that is entirely edible, next time freeze stems for a truly green pasta
- It’s a good idea to start new plants every 6 weeks
- They are a really pretty edging plant.
The bed where I had most of the first generation has the best sun. This time I am planting only two pumpkins and hopefully red peppers. This means I have a gap, still waiting for my peppers to get large enough to plant out. I think I’ll just mulch as heavily as I can. It’ll take a while for the new pumpkins to take over. I was caught unawares, they died back so quickly I was just thinking about sowing more when suddenly everything started turning yellow.

in the garden

The rambutan, a lychee, is flowering. Or at least one tree is. We have two, supposedly one male and one female, I wonder when the other will react? I’ve heard that we get fruit, supposedly in September, but others say it has another season now. Who knows, I’ll have to wait and see.
The carambola is also flowering. This is quite exciting as the tree has never flowered before. I’m not so keen on the fruit, but it makes a great jam, so I hope we get fruit this time. The orchard across from the school has several very productive carambolas and they had a huge harvest in December, January. I wonder what this tree is doing?
A soursop fell yesterday. It got badly bruised, but I think I can save some of it, it’s not big enough for jam. This is also good news, it’s not such a productive tree but seems to be getting better.
The gandul I transplanted on the full moon – when the sap is at its highest and there’s least energy in the roots – and protected as best I could from the sun with a crazy arrangement of sticks, umbrellas, sarongs and ladders, and which looked like it was dying, is showing small signs of life: little new nubs on lower branches. I hope it makes it. In hindsight it was really too big to move and it was growing in gravel which meant I planted it more or less bare rooted. I’m impatient with these trees, not sure why, still haven’t tasted the beans. My two I’ve grown from seed are about 2 foot high and I think can be moved from their pots. Everyone says these plants are slow to start and then suddenly take off. My little ones are over 2 months old – when will this taking off begin??
The chayote seems to be taking off, twice a day I find myself wrapping growing tips around trellis. The four I planted two weeks ago have recovered from the garden ‘hazing’ (insect attack) and are sending out nice thick shoots. I wonder daily if the trellis of bamboo and string will be strong and big enough to handle them, perhaps they’ll grow as far as they can and then having nowhere else to reach will save their energy for fruit.
The pumpkins are stepping up production too. For the longest time I had three fruits, now there are 7 in various stages and some more possibilities on the way. One seems to be a different kind, though all the seeds I planted came from the same pumpkin – it’s long and a pale pale green. I’ll have to keep the seeds.
The wild spinach is flowering, I’m curious to see what it does. I’ve propagated it from stem cuttings and didn’t even realize it flowered. There’s a big female basilisk on the coconut 8 feet from my desk. She’s pretty. It’s funny, Michael was just here and we were talking about basilisks, I was saying I rarely see them here because of the dogs, and now here’s one, at eye level 8 feet away. Once again I wish I had a camera with a zoom. She’s exactly the colour of a hibiscus leaf with a series of turquoise spots on either side of her spine. There’s a pale orange stripe along her spine and she has several black stripes crossing her back. Her tail is green with many thick brown bands. She has a small crest, more like a triangle which rises from the back of her skull, it’s the same green colour. Her eyes are yellow. Right now she’s clinging to the brown sisal stuff on the sheath of the coconut leaf, she can’t get purchase on the smooth leaf stalk. Oh she just caught something, she has such a pale pink tongue.

garlic

I planted I think 6 cloves of garlic and a month later 3 of them have sprouted and are growing. They’re not strong plants, I think there’s too much rain. I’ll try again but this time in a pot which I’ll keep under the eaves. They won’t get as much sun, we’ll see, it’s all experiment.

sprouts and seeds

I’m trying out a new sprouting method. The beds I have are full and I don’t have enough soil to make more beds. Moreover the scattering seeds method seems to be wasteful here: insects get to the sprouts and my beds are spotty to say the least. So now I’m soaking seeds and sprouting indoors in tubs and jars or spreading them on a folded dishtowel and covering with another towel, then keeping the towel damp. This last is the most successful method – it keeps the seeds uniformly moist and dark. When I have sprouts with a good inch of growth on them I’m potting them out. Yes it means they essentially go through two transplants, but it gives me time to prepare a space for them and it gives me a good sense of what I’ll have and what I need. And as it’s only me and the dogs I don’t need a whole load of one thing or another; 4 tomato plants are more than enough. Right now I have melon, a type of gherkin, sesame, watermelon and pumpkin (ayote) seeds sprouting. The sesame are doing well. The watermelon seems to be doing nothing, I think my seeds must have molded. I’m growing sesame more from curiosity, though if I get enough seeds for enough a half cup of tahini I’ll be happy.

tomatoes

Even though tomatoes are native to Central and South America, they are not the easiest fruit to grow. I think it must be the commercial varieties and hybrids – they are too susceptible here to the fungus that humidity harbours. There is a local gardener who seems to have success with a small variety and he sells his occasional surplus to Moreno (our local shop-master and fountain of all knowledge). I’m using his seeds. The first lot I planted in the garden, I currently have 6 small plants, and by small I mean barely out of their sprout hood, but with true leaves and that incredibly wonderfully tomato plant scent which takes me right back to my grandfathers’ greenhouses. I have seeds drying on my desk waiting for a bit more sun. I’ll plant these in pots first I think. I know they don’t like to be moved, but I’m pretty sure they don’t like to be eaten by beetles and pelted with tropical storms either.
As I’m writing there’s a flock of Montezuma Oropendolas in the big fig. They must be among my favourite birds here, big, 20 inches tall with bright blue cheeks and yellow tails. But what I love about them is the noise they make. It’s too hard to describe – a sort of melodious clicking and tearing and whooping bantar with the males making a sound like branches breaking.

morning rounds

Every morning I do my round of the garden, if it’s rained and I don’t have to water, it doesn’t take very long. I pause to wind new chayote growth around trellis, or redirect a pumpkin vine, check on fruit, carefully inspect the newest members of the family – whether they be inch high tomato plants or the transplanted yuca I took from the roadside. I commiserate with chewed leaves, duck below spider webs and generally return to the deck and my brewing coffee much lighter and more peaceful than when I left.

chayote

Chayote is a member of the squash family and grows on a climbing vine. There are several varieties from small white to giant dark green, all are native to Central America. The chayote is an interesting looking fruit, shaped like a large slightly flattened pear with a crumpled smiling indentation at the larger end and a smaller variation of the same at the top. The leaves are quite succulent, a dark green and vary in shape from a horseshoe in the early stages to a delicate heart. Seeds are hard to find – of course chayotes can be bought in any supermarket or vegetable stand, but removing the seed from the plant is time consuming and frustrating: the single edible seed is soft and difficult to remove from the flesh. It’s best to plant whole chayotes. There are two types – in Costa Rica a chayote which grows a single sprout is a macho – a male, one which produces two sprouts is a hembra, a female. Many gardeners here will plant only hembras which produce both male and female flowers. The problem is you can’t tell what it is until it sprouts, it’s a good idea to plant several to be on the safe side.
The first three I tried didn’t take, I was convinced that it was best to remove the seed and then sprout it. Finally I just left the vegetable in a dark corner of my kitchen for a couple of weeks and it sprouted – with two shoots! I built my simple arbor and laid it on a nice rich bed of organic garden compost and decayed wood and left it. It’s not as “crazy rapido” as one local said, but it’s a nice steady grower and there’s a noticeable difference every day. The grasshoppers ate the heart out of one of the shoots and it has taken about two weeks to recover but it’s growing well again. I have three more of a different variety sitting in the same dark corner waiting to send out their thin white roots through that crumpled smile at the big end.
Chayotes are completely edible – fruit, leaf, shoot, root, flower, seed, skin. My kind of vegetable! The fruit doesn’t have a strong flavor but is good in soups, stews, salads, baked – and can even be made into a fake apple pie or crumble. This last is especially important as apples here are ridiculously expensive, rarely organic and come from Chile or the US, that’s a long way for an apple (though given they are one of the most highly sprayed fruit, they arrive perfectly preserved).

cabin garden

The cabin garden too has suffered with the weather. I’m still learning how to garden and that probably doesn’t help. All my learning comes through experience, and as the garden suffers and I unwittingly do things that aren’t right my learning curve steepens. For instance I have beetles that look a little like the Colorado Beetles that terrify UK farmers, they are small, less than a centimeter and pretty with dark brown backs and cream and pink spots. I know they are eating the leaves but I figured there were enough leaves for us all. However they seem to enjoy the katuk and bean leaves the best of all. My little katuk plants which were just beginning to take after a month of sickliness and looking horribly munched, the tios have gone sending the plants into shock. Hopefully they will recover, but I have to start killing the beetles. The katuk and beans are between two rows of pumpkins and beside a patch of yucca and below a huge hibiscus hedge, all of which have plenty of succulent, edible vegetation. But the beetles show no interest. I don’t want to kill them. I’ll try spraying the leaves with soap first.
My pumpkins are slowly recovering from the dry weather, I watered them every day but they are big and thirsty. Older leaves yellowed and died leaving bare earth below which seems shocking to me in their patch of dark green mottled with silver. The pumpkins send up flowers along the length of the stalk and they bloom in steady procession one follows the other day by day. The male flowers that is. The females are much further down the stem and flower out of order, opening when only one other male on her plant is in bloom – cross pollination is thus more or less guaranteed. However with the weather the plants were cutting back, withdrawing water from tips allowing them to die and dropping female buds – conserving energy. Now with the rain there is new growth and I count 3 female flowers ready to open. However there are fewer males – yesterday I picked 14, two weeks ago I was harvesting 25. I had one female open the day of the heavy rain but there were precious few black bees out and she closed unfertilized. I tried my best with a q-tip but there were a lot of little ants in there and I think they ate the pollen I had smeared on her. Whichever, it’s been two days since she opened and her baby pumpkin which sits directly below the flower doesn’t look swollen at all.
Gardening provides such valuable lessons – patience, natural cycles, not taking things personally. My watermelons for instance. Such delicate plants and so susceptible to munching creatures. Except they must smell better than they taste for something chews through tips and the slender stalks of sprouts but doesn’t eat what it breaks off. Needless killing. My mind is trying to take this personally, which of course is insane. But I’m down to two chewed up and spat out watermelons which after 6 weeks growth are down once again to 7 leaves apiece. The beautiful flowers and therefore potential fruit are dead and rotting back to earth. Watermelons in the books like humidity and sun – they should be thriving here. But no. I’ll try again, but this time I’m starting them in pots on the deck. The same for my tomatoes, I’ll start more but up here where they will be more protected from insects and heavy rains.