confusing thoughts

Part of the angst and general discomfort this week came from a –largely theoretical – internal debate. Some friends are thinking of buying a farm and are looking for partners. The farm is almost on the border with Panama and has coffee and cacao, pejabaye and platanos and pasture. It’s 17 hectares all in and would probably be split, partner wise, into several hectare pieces. I could probably scrape together enough for a hectare – in California I made that money in 3 months of working. But that’s not really the issue. There are several issues: money, moral, community, lifestyle.
It’s a working farm. Right now the money comes from cacao and coffee, but that’s only enough for the farmer who is on his own. Clearly split between several partners with western conditioning it would not be enough. I need to make a living and while I dream and work towards self sustainability in my foodstuffs, I can’t give up my computer and music and my internet access, plus money for vet bills, grains and flavourings I can’t grow and savings for emergencies. I would have to work my hectare to give me a living which means change of use and this would require initial investment, plus I’d have to be on site which means building some form of living space. While I can probably scrape together the purchase price, I don’t think I can get enough to see me through until – and if – I could make money. It’s too far away from here to continue working at the school, without a car or at least a motorbike I couldn’t get into town.
Then there’s the moral issue. I personally feel conflicted about owning land. I can’t really explain it, it may be a responsibility issue, it may be a commitment issue, it’s probably many things, but it just doesn’t make sense that anyone could own a piece of the globe – how is that possible? I can see owning a house, owning things, but land? I guess it’s a facetious argument: one doesn’t own it in the same sense that one owns one’s car or one’s ipod, but it’s a stumbling block for me. The concept is just an abstraction. I can understand working land, living on it, loving, it but owning it means very little to me. At the same time I am incredibly grateful to those folk who do own land and allow me to be on it. And to live work and play on it. Rather than own I’d prefer to do work trade. My family made their living buying and selling property, they would be horrified to hear me. They would be delighted if I were to buy land, they would see it as an investment, as security. But this requires that I would at some point sell it. While this makes sense if I were to buy an apartment or a house in an already established / developed area, it doesn’t make sense with farm land – unless I were to sell it to developers in which case it would no longer be farmland in which case it would be the wrong thing to do. Then there’s the argument, but if I don’t buy it then maybe it will go to developers. Is it my moral duty to save it? One can go many places from here: it has been farmland for about 50 years, is it my moral duty to return it to forest; is it my moral duty to make a reserve or to give it (return it?) to the indigenous people who live on a reserve which borders this land; is it my moral duty to leave it as is and not further develop / build on it? Do I have a moral duty to do anything or is all this moral duty stuff solely ego and a way for humans to feel good or bad about themselves depending on inclination? You may imagine that the moral issue is the one which has brought the most confusion this week.
The community issue is an interesting one. I have been looking for community for years. I have an image of what constitutes community, but the truth is I generally withdraw from community at the first opportunity. I’m a snob with expectations, am highly critical of myself and others, and woefully dismissive. There are 17 hectares, ostensibly there could be 4 or 5 families living on this land, if it continued to be a working farm. (That’s 4 more houses = more development, more water, more resources.)How would that be? My friends are nice people, they are trying very hard to do the best they can. They also have a very tumultuous and precarious relationship and I would be a fool to rely on them for anything.
The lifestyle issue. This is probably the simplest. I would change from working for someone else to relying on myself, I could see if my ideas worked. It would be a great challenge on every level, it would be exciting and difficult.
None of this could happen for at least a year. I made a commitment to dear friends to be here for at least a year and I love where I am. I have a great place to live, I have space to grow my garden, I have access to town, I have a job I like. Why would I want to change? To prove to myself I could. To maybe save a piece of land. To live a dream. To have more. I said this was largely a theoretical debate. While I find myself puzzling over ways to do it – and there are many puzzles, I wish to simplify my life and this isn’t the way to do that. Yet even as I write the fantasy of possibility remains. Yes, it’s been a disquieting week.

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.

banana/pumpkin/sweet potato/carrot cake

Banana, pumpkin, sweet potato, carrot Bread
An easy and tasty way to use up the last of that glut of produce.
When making bread with pumpkins first boil the pumpkin with some grated nutmeg and mash before adding it to the bread mix. With sweet potato I do the same, but use cinnamon instead. For bananas use the ripest you can find and mash, with carrots grate finely and add powdered cinnamon.
2 cups brown flour
½ stick of butter or 1/3 cup of oil
A good ½ cup of brown sugar, to taste
2 eggs
Bananas or pumpkin or carrot or sweet potato
Nutmeg or cinnamon depending on produce
Salt if desired
Soaked raisins, walnuts or almonds if desired

Cream together the sugar and fat. Add eggs and beat again until thoroughly mixed. Fold in a cup and a half of flour. Add produce and mix well. Check consistency of your mix, if it’s loose add more flour until the consistency holds together well but drips from a spoon. Pour into a greased bread pan and cook at 225 or thereabouts for 30 minutes. The bread is ready when an inserted knife comes out clean. Very nice served warm with cream cheese.

Pineapple Rice Pudding

This is a Nicaraguan recipe given to me by an English woman living in Belize. It uses the rind of the pineapple: make sure your pineapple is organic.
Rind and core of an organic pineapple, washed.
2 cups uncooked brown rice
¼ stick of butter
½ cup of brown sugar, or to taste
2 eggs
1 cup of milk
½ cup cream cheese or cream
Water
Fresh ginger
Salt if desired

Boil the pineapple rind and core in enough water to cover for at least 30 minutes. Meanwhile soak rice in plenty of water. Remove core and rind and scoop soaked rice into pineapple water. Add a couple of tablespoons of brown sugar and some slices of fresh ginger, depending on taste. Bring to boil checking on water content, add more liquid if necessary. Reduce to simmer and cook for 30 minutes. Mix eggs, sugar, milk and cubed butter and stir into rice. Simmer for another 20 minutes stirring from time to time and adding more liquid if necessary. Serve warm or cold with a dollop of cream cheese or cream.

This pineapple water can be used in all sorts of dishes, try it in curries, sweet and sours, or add sugar and reduce it for a sweet pineapple sauce. It’s a great way to get the most from your organic pineapple.

gardening

When I was foraging food, doing the hunting / gathering thing, I was aware, of course, of seasons and availability. I knew I would have a glut of something as it came into season and then when it was done it would be done. Now that I’ve stepped into the farming epoch, I find my expectations to be very different. Firstly I have expectations. As a forager I was happy when I found something and skipped off merrily with an armful or bagful of bounty. As a gardener I do more work and have less produce. But I have control over what I can harvest. I expect to reap what I sow, I find I expect to reap a lot and quickly too. But this is not the case. Gardening is all about the future: I plant this seed and in two months, at the least, I can eat the casing the seed came in. In the meantime I can dream about my coming bounty, think of what I’ll do with the surplus and on and on. My garden was started slowly in January, at this moment I can harvest spinach and pumpkin (the bananas, cherries, ginger, chilis, turmeric and cilantro were here before). It will be another 2 months before I can harvest tomatoes, chayote, peppers, melon and pigeon peas and another 5 months, minimum, before I can harvest yucca, malanga, yampi, vine and sweet, potatoes. But when one is gardening, when one is grubby with sweat and dirt one isn’t thinking about the future, gardening can only happen in the present moment: there is a separation between the reality of gardening and the concept of produce. One gardens for the enjoyment of gardening, not for the harvest. The harvest is an added bonus, perhaps the initial motivation, but not necessarily the compelling force.
Is that true? I garden because I can, I have use of the land and the time. I want to have organic produce. I want to be self sustaining and minimize my consumption of store bought items. (This last is difficult, I still buy staples and these are rarely locally grown – lentils from Canada for example.) I want to recycle my ‘waste’ as much as possible and gardening is a great opportunity for this. I want to eat local and native foods. And I want to involved in the cycles of nature, to be outside, to be busy, to be in the dirt.
It needs more thought, and at the same time it requires no thinking. I’m off to water things.

Momentary beauty
A bug just landed on my keyboard. It looks like a leaf hopper, but so beautiful: a bright orange with iridescent squiggles of neon green and blue, red eyes. And it’s gone.

serpiente update

The snake was identified by the local snakeman as a Northern Cat Eyed Snake. Harmless, unless you’re a frog or a little lizard. I let him go yesterday and was a little alarmed by the way he looked at me as he raced off. I let him go by the river hoping he would find supper here rather than heading for my pond. I wonder. He was toxic, but rear-fanged which means he dribbles poison as he chews – so fairly safe for dog or human. The snakeman has a great book on Costa Rican snakes, it’s amazing the number of varieties here and within each variety the subtle differences in colour and patterns.
He thanked me for not killing the snake as he left and I was hit immediately by a pang of guilt, I was going to kill it. But better I felt this pang than the greater one I would have felt if I had killed it and then identified it as harmless. I like frogs and lizards, a great deal actually and I thought about this snake eating them as they emerge from my pond. Then I remembered the beautiful Laughing Falcon I saw at the edge of the garden, their diet is mainly snakes. This food chain business is beautifully complicated and simple. And it is sentimental of me to worry about any tier of it. We exist beside nature but are woefully removed from her cycles. Coming back from town I cycled past a terribly skinny dog picking through garbage, her teats were big and hanging, she had pups somewhere. She was a street dog and I wondered if she and her litter would survive. I had nothing to give her, nor could I bring her home. It makes me realize again how comfortable we are in our ‘developed’ nations: death and decay, even age, are hidden from us. We are soft, sheltered, unaware. Here we have the trappings of the developed nation which lie like a veneer over the life below. But the veneer cracks and peels in the sun and humidity and life shows through. Perhaps that’s why so many people leave. I realize as I write this how ignorant I am. I talk about animals and yet in the world people are suffering the same fates, starving, at war, operating from no more than survival. It’s too big for me to comprehend.

choice

I read a lot of gardening blogs, and for one reason or another, a lot of them are in England. Perhaps it’s the familiarity with the climate, the growing season, perhaps it’s because the English love their gardens and I can speak the language (the French love their gardens too). Whichever it is, I read a lot of them. And the thing I’m struck with over and again is the mention of the names of each vegetable or fruit. Everyone talks about the variety they are planting. I remember poring over seed catalogs comparing, contrasting, being overwhelmed by choices. The sense I get from the way these varieties are named is that these gardeners are also – or have been – overwhelmed by the choice presented to them. People don’t just grow tomatoes anymore, they grow the jee-whizz-bang, H4 Hybrid, and that means – what? I am absolutely for heirloom seeds, old varieties, strengthening the gene pool, but there’s something to this that seems, well that seems very much in keeping with modern life. Why do we need so much choice? In other times and in other places we would save the seeds from the previous year, or get them from neighbours, or we would know that the seeds we took from the tomato we bought at the shop would do just fine, because they were grown just around the corner. But of course, unless we are lucky and buy from a CSA or a local farm, that no longer applies: the tomato we buy may have been grown half way around the world in a greenhouse under specialized conditions, or who knows, may even be sterile. The jee-whizz-bang comes with statistics and quasi guarantees; anti disease, bug resistant, early bloomer – all things which alter the essential ‘plantness’ of the plant. Maybe I’m way out of touch (I most assuredly am), maybe once the tomato begins to grow and is tended and cared for it will taste as delicious as any other homegrown, straight from the garden tomato. Is it still basically simple under all its fancy names and proven ancestry?

?

I’m out. I’ve been out too long. I caught the 8:30 bus in this morning thinking to do email, blog and head home again on the 12:30. Trouble was there was no 12:30. So now I’m waiting for the 4:30. Yes I could have walked, but I bought about 10 kilos of groceries – rice, grain, milk, chicken, and it’s pouring down and the idea of walking 9 kilometers just doesn’t appeal. Taxis are too expensive – about $10, so that’s not possible either. But after spending so much time online and being incredibly frustrated by attempts to buy more skype credit, I’m done. You see I don’t have a credit card, or a debit card, or a paypal account that works, or means to get another paypal account. I make a tiny amount of money online through articles and the money for these goes into Jon’s paypal account which –theoretically- he can use to buy me skype credit, which I need to call my mum, Guy and the boys. But for some unfathomable reason it won’t go through. Either via skype or paypal which means I’m stuck. And thoroughly frustrated. I had plans for this afternoon. Okay so just tidying the place and making bread, but still there were plans. Now I’m sitting at EZ times having a coffee and watching the ocean. So not so hard. I like EZ times because they bring a little dish of dark chocolate chunks with your coffee.
There’s a website called I think downsizing.com it gives you hints and tips on simplifying life. I looked at another today which asked for pledges to ‘green your home’. None applied to me, my home falls way below their radar. I’m trying to simplify and it seems I do have a very simple life, but when I try to connect to the mainstream, outside world it all becomes so far from simple, how hard can it be to live without a credit card or a bank account? Very bloody hard. Try buying an airline ticket. When I had to leave the states it was so tricky getting a flight out, in the end I paid extra so I could pay in cash. Maybe I should have just let them deport me. And now even though somewhere out there in cyberspace I have funds, I can’t spend this electronic money. How crazy is that?
I feel outside. I look at green websites, gardening blogs and I feel outside. I think I should just give up on the idea of belonging to one community or another. While I may share the same ideals, the same hopes, I don’t live the same life. What connects people? What is connection? I have nothing really to say and yet I want to say so much, to share all this passion, this incredible beauty and wisdom that is all around me. But how, and why? A bus just went by – but it’s 40 minutes early, or 3 hours late. I hope to god there’s a bus at 4:30. There’s a song blaring from the speakers,
“no, there’s nowhere like Limon, it’s the land of freedom”
Must be a local. And yet there’s truth in it, freedom in all its forms good and bad. What the hell is this life business? I know I just want to be allowed to live quietly – and yet I fight this by wanting to share everything. I get caught in the middle, I feel like some great hull caught on a sandbank – neither on land or in water. Town makes me feel this way, the internet makes me feel this way. There’s no going back. How can I just accept where I am? All around me are tourists, people taking time out of ‘life’, blind – mostly- to the life that surrounds them. Does it matter? Okay, enough, I’m going to drink my coffee and enjoy my chocolate in peace – well, maybe.

food first

Support small farmers. Be aware of what you´re eating and where it grew and how it got to your mouth! Read food first and think. please.

serpiente

It was about 4pm and the clouds had covered the sky, I was moving my tray of seedlings from the lawn to the deck. I had just set it down and was considering watering them, when a snake slithered from between the half milk cartons that house my seedlings. It was brown and it had a big diamond shaped head – both these things are bad here. It was a baby – about 15 inches. I fetched my machete, wondering as I did so whether I was really going to kill it. It wondered too as it disappeared behind my steps. This was bad. So I waited. I sat and watched it wondering how bad it really was, almost convincing myself it would be okay if it lived under the house. But the dogs love being under the house. Brown and diamond headed means boa or viper. Boa isn’t bad, it wouldn’t be big enough to hurt the dogs for a long time, but a boa bite can be nasty: an expensive and unnecessary vet visit. Viper is really bad. Like deadly. There’s a pretty good chance that I would survive a bite, the clinic is not so far. But the dogs no, and I have to say that losing the dogs to a snake bite is probably my biggest fear here. So, there he or she was hanging out behind the steps and there was I sitting thinking all this trying to ignore the mosquitoes that were telling me it would be dark soon.
As I was sitting there, Frederick went by. Frederick is my neighbor, an old hippy from Berkeley, an acid casualty if ever there was one. At that moment I was convincing myself the snake wasn’t dangerous. I went out to the path and called Frederick asking him if he could identify snakes. The two questions he asked were colour and head shape. Yep it was bad. But Frederick, being the old hippy he is – somewhat dim sighted and believing in the good will of everything (except the US government and guard dogs), decided it wasn’t really a snake and while I was telling him it most assuredly was - having no legs and scales – he caught it in a nearby empty yogurt container and upended it on the deck. I was shocked, and actually quite disturbed, I was still holding the machete but now put it down and fetched a strong glass jar from the house – the kind with that metal latch that catches and locks the lid down. Frederick scooped the container over the jar and in it fell. I latched the lid while the snake was trying to work out what the hell was happening. “Boy oh boy”, said Frederick, “will you look at that, it is a snake”.
Yep, it was a snake. Now I had a snake in a jar. Frederick left and it’s sitting on the deck. I’ve looked at the reptile and amphibian guide to Costa Rica, which is the only one available, but certainly not conclusive. I don’t know what it is. I was worried that it was a Fer-de-Lance: the most feared snake in Central America (so says the book). The Fer-de-Lance is aggressive, deadly and reaches up to 8 foot in length, the females give birth to live young – up to 86 at a time. They are terrestrial snakes and several babies have been killed in the garden over the last 8 years. But while the snake in the jar is brown with a big head and patterned correctly, the snake in the picture has a lot more creamy white in its markings. Actually the snake in the jar is not the colour of any of the pictures in the book. Clearly it’s a juvenile but none of the descriptions mention colour variations. Maybe it’s a little boa. I like snakes. I have this horrible desire to touch it. Obviously I won’t, and indeed every 5 minutes or so I check that it’s still in the jar and hasn’t miraculously opened the lid. But the desire is still there. This is one of those lesson times.
It’s Saturday night. The local snake guy has a store in Playa Chiquita but it’s closed on Sundays. I’ll take the jar to him on Monday. He, she will be okay until then – it clearly ate something recently and the jar has condensation in it and a little mud. Whether I’ll be okay is another matter: I was opening the banana box and a lizard fell on my foot. It was cool and had weight and it slithered. Needless to say I did a little dance which involved flinging the bananas in all directions.

spider

And in my aloneness I lead a privileged life. This morning I was planting out some pumpkin starts and listening to monkey chatter. Normally I look, watch for a while and carry on working. But this morning I thought, what the hell, and fetched my new binoculars (a gift from a parting friend). I sat on the deck and watched a smallish troupe of spider monkeys pass through, galloping noisily below, above and in the midst of the canopy. Spider monkeys are a treat here though they are regular visitors to the garden. Some people call them Colorado Monkeys and insist they are extinct in this part of the world. Luckily no one has told the monkeys they are extinct, so they keep coming. Don’t tell anyone. At the end of the troupe was a very pregnant female. She took her time sitting around for long stretches and snacking on vine fruits. It was lovely to see a pregnant monkey – especially one who’s supposedly extinct. Spiders are named for their extremely long limbs. They have relatively small heads with big tufts of hair framing their face, they are pretty but also somehow out of proportion. To see a big belly made her look even more at odds with her frame. Their tails are really a fifth limb and they are perfectly happy hanging from them 50 feet up. She was eating the fruit of a Swiss Cheese plant (monstera deliciosa), I knew they were edible but never knew how to eat them. She ate it like corn on the cob, first biting off the green external part, and spitting it out, then holding it like a lollipop. Supposedly it tastes like a mix of pineapple and banana. She was about 30 feet from me hanging by her tail and supporting herself against a trunk with one foot while she held the vine in the other foot and used both hands for the fruit. She was about 30 foot away and incredibly close thanks to the binoculars. She caught up with the troupe and I continued with the pumpkins.

little me alone

I’m alone. Everyone has gone, even Frederick and Ida have gone somewhere. There is no one around. I feel conscious of this – I feel relaxed and very tired, also I feel heavy as though time stretches before me without conversation or interaction. I walked through the garden noting that now I have time to work on each space rather than always making sure it looks neat. This being alone is what I want and this is what I fear. I’m nervous about how I’ll do. I’m not really alone – I work of course and school is full of people all demanding attention and interaction. But it’s different: there the interaction is with children, limited with the Spanish speaking adults. No one to shoot the shit with.

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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.

solitary path

The couple who are staying in the big house are thinking of leaving. They’re town folk and while they appreciate and enjoy the nature here, they are uncomfortable with the bugs and the life: the fridge isn’t to their liking, they want a tv and laundry facilities, the house and bathroom are too open. They have two months left in their rental agreement but are ready to go home. At some point everyone here feels this way. The Central American / developing nation / bureaucracy / difference gets to people, especially it seems people who have things or are trying to get things. One has to downsize and simplify everything when one moves here, not just in terms of material goods, but emotionally, spiritually, culturally. Costa Rica is an incredible place for showing you who you are. And it’s not easy, it can be frustrating, ugly, scary, harsh, extreme. I think everyone I know has gone through times of hating this place. Some move away, many move away. Some come here in small doses, a month, three months and then go back to where the distractions and problems are comfortable and known. There’s a lot of drug and alcohol use. The ex-pat stereotype has truth in it. But I don’t want the couple to go, I’d like them to stick it out. My reason is selfish: I talk to them almost daily. It’s not that we talk about anything in particular, maybe just share a video or talk about the mosquitoes, it doesn’t matter. It’s the common language and interaction that’s important. I have hermit tendencies and have pretty much stopped any outside social life, I’m very rarely out after 8pm. When they go I’ll be on my own. I know it’s coming and this solitary thing has to be explored fully, but I don’t quite feel ready for it yet. A tick just crawled out of my keyboard, bloody things. Yeah, maybe I’ll find enough external distractions to pretend I don’t need this lesson.

may morning

May morning
We didn’t have many rituals growing up, but every may 1st my mum would wake us up early so we could wash our faces in the dew. Later I loved the mayday celebrations in villages and towns all over England and it was wonderful to enjoy the morris in Oxford or at the stones in different places in Devon. May 1st has a special energy, rising sap and heat and froth of life: it’s a celebratory time in the cycle: spring is in full swing and summer not yet here, a time full of pleasure and promise. And the old ways will out: the day is a holiday – whether it be called political or not – and we have a time for enjoyment.

Those howlers were so close this morning I could hear them pee – well technically not, but I could hear the pee hit the leaves and scatter in a thousand yellow droplets – it must give those high bromiliads a nice nitrogen boost. It’s going to be a beautiful day, and thanks to the Caribbean attitude I have 2 days off school before the weekend. Time in the garden stretches before me. Lovely. The mosquitoes are still bad – this is day 4 of their mini plague, a couple more days, hopefully, and they’ll be gone. On my desk here, among the drying ginger, tomato babies, planner, books and coffee mugs, I have a little raised dias with some collected treasures: a howler skull washed up on the pacific side, a bird’s nest, some shells, a piece of coral and some tamarind seeds. There’s a sweet little female lizard living in one of the shells. She’s about 3,1/2 inches long and speckled dark brown and black – the males of her kind are black with orange heads. Each morning she darts around the table looking for breakfast, she comes to within a foot of my elbow but no closer. She just snagged a big juicy mosquito I knocked off my coffee mug. Ah, partnership. Out on the lawn a pair of buff rumped warblers hop around swishing their tails with their bright cream stripe, when it’s not yet fully light these spots shine with a yellow glow, every now and again they’ll pause and the male will sing. I can see the kingbirds leave and enter their nest in the grapefruit (which has not yet born fruit). This is the best time of the day for birds and for once the sound of insects is drowned out by that of birdsong. There goes a flock of tawny crested tanagers, noisy and fast. The long tailed hermit hasn’t visited yet, but I can hear him. The big nature news of the day has to be that – absolutely appropriate on the eve of may 1st - my tiny pond got it’s first frog. I’ve had tadpoles in there since I dug it, bringing them from the pond in the west garden, but that was two months ago and not one frog had arrived. I think the one I heard last night must be one of those tadpoles. He sounded quite lonely, but he was calling and now I’m sure others will come. Gosh I hope he’s big enough to eat grasshoppers.

morning again

It’s dusk and a small troupe of howlers has moved into the cecropia and guacimo trees for the night. I can see their silhouettes against the darkening sky. They’re hanging by their tails picking off the fluffy flowers of the guacimo and the large umbrella type cecropia leaves. The cecropia has nectaries at the base of each leaf to reward the ants who make the tree their home. I think this is what the monkeys like, they never seem to eat the whole leaf. I’m rather sorry they are in these trees – they got hit hard by a sloth last week and have only a few leaves left. One tree in particular seems to be constantly on the verge of being picked bare – it must produce more nectar, I wonder if it will learn? The guacimo has the most delicious scent, a truly floral smell, fresh and light and only arrives in pulses. The kind of scent you’d want to chase. The flowers are visited by streams of black butterflies in the morning. I like this tree, it has a very soft, fine feathery foliage but the trunk is bare and somewhat similar to eucalyptus. It reminds me of the marvelous Guanacaste tree. I lived in a Guanacaste tree for 9 months, I loved that tree. It’s too dark now to make out the monkeys, I can just see movement in the branches and hear the low chatter of mothers and infants. Ah yes, it’s too dark – the fireflies have just switched on their lights. Behind me a bat buzzes my green bananas. Some cheeky bat came into the kitchen two nights ago and ate big holes out of the ripe bananas I had foolishly left on the countertop. I do like them though, somehow I always feel comforted by their presence. Beside me two dogs lie sprawled on the deck, they’ve just stopped itching their mosquito bites and are patiently awaiting dinner.
I wish I could record the sounds I hear: in the background the steady crash of ocean against shore; somwhere to the east the occasional rumble of thunder; a low last call of a bird; crickets; katydids; geckoes; the buzzing of a mosquito; some rasping noise; another similar but higher pitched; the bark of a frog from the other end of the garden; the tweet of a tree frog somewhere nearby; rustling of branches . . . the list seems endless and loses a lot in the writing I’m afraid. I have a friend who tries to count all the different night noises when he can’t sleep, he has counted as high as 40. There is constant noise and when one tunes into it it is deafening.

time

Time is different. The actual hour becomes unimportant, instead other things take precedence. My days move through cycles of time. The fact that I wake somewhere near 5 is of no consequence. I wake when the howlers begin their dawn chorus. It changes from day to day. I leave for school when the sun hits my desk – somewhere around 7:15, but it varies, when it rains I may be late. Then again when it rains everyone is late for school, as we all wait in the hope the downpour will stop. I get home at different times depending on the day, but I like to be home before the sun hits my steps. Hopefully I’m home in time to move my nursery of potted plants from the desk to the gravel. I know I have an hour or so left before the sun sinks when the mosquitoes appear, and when they go I know it’s time to make dinner. Funnily enough it’s when they go in the morning that I know I’d better make breakfast. Time can be told by clothing, every day has its wardrobe: pajamas and long sleeves to keep off the mosquitoes in the early morning, by the time they go it’s hot and school clothes are appropriate: a skirt and strap top, coming home I change into my work skirt and wear this until the sun sinks and then back to pajamas to ward off biting nasties. Time is simple, cycles are dictated by the movement of the sun, once all time was told like this.

making beds

The soil here is thick clay, it needs to be seriously amended before I can use it. So I don’t use it, I make raised beds instead, trusting that by the time the plant’s roots are long enough to touch clay the plant will be strong and healthy enough to penetrate and draw strength from this heavy stuff. The beds are based on the permaculture / hegelculture / bleedingly obvious method.
- First a loose layer of broken up sticks which help with drainage and provide a nice habitat for beneficial microbes,
- A layer of cardboard and paper to help encourage worms and provide food – also good here as we can’t recycle paper,
- A good thick layer of dead leaves for nutrients and to attract worms,
- A layer of toilet paper (in Costa Rica we don’t flush paper and it’s better here than in a landfill or burned, plus it’s good for composting, and it’s most certainly a renewable resource),
- Another layer of leaves – both dried and green cuttings and prunings,
- A top layer of kitchen compost mixed with new soil from rotting logs.
The whole thing is edged with rotting logs (the best), coconut husks or stones. I’m also playing with planting a pumpkin in each and training the vine around the outside of the bed – giving shade and later mulch, and of course food. Beds are always mulched with a layer of dead leaves (I have lots of dead leaves), but cardboard, paper, sawdust work just as well (pine and softwood sawdust will make your soil acidic). The mulch keeps in the moisture and provides nutrients as it breaks down. Here it also offers some protection from the dreaded leaf cutter ants. I think slugs too maybe. I’d like to add wood ash, but haven’t been able to keep wood dry enough to burn.

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.

. . . and food sovereignty

I don’t read the news very often, it’s always the same. But I do read certain things, and read recently that food riots are on the increase. Food is becoming more expensive. Globally small farmers are failing through food hoarding, bad harvests and food ‘aide’. For a much better explanation than I can give read it yourself: www.foodsovereignty.org . It’s like that concept, you don’t give a man a fish, you give him a boat and clean water and teach him how to raise fish. I think I may have added to the concept there, but you get the idea. Remember when there was that big outcry in the 80s when Nestle was giving powdered milk to mothers in African nations and telling them it was better than breast milk? This seems to me the same thing but on an even larger and more catastrophic scale. My best source of information for growing vegetables in the tropics is a series of pamphlets issued by the Health Department in the south pacific islands. There are actually graphs comparing the nutritive value of a bag of cheetos to a half cup of cooked pumpkin. At some point I would like to work in the field of agricultural education. For now all the gardeners in the world, all of us planting seeds – hopefully organic and even more hopefully seeds we saved ourselves or got from friends, and hopefully heirloom seeds, not to be nostalgic but for diversity and increasing the gene pool rather than shrinking it – we are doing a tiny tiny bit to keep the world sane and green. It would be nice if we were also able to support subsistence and small farms on a global scale. How to do it? I don’t know: boycott the big chemical/seed internationals, the Monsantos and ADMs and Cargills of the world? Share seeds and ideas with other gardeners? Work with local schools on agricultural awareness and earth sensitivity? Look at the labels on your staples – cereals, legumes, coffee and be conscious of where and how these things are grown? Write to MPS and local government? Write to the big charities and ask them what their stance is on agriculture? Support charities like www.heiffer.org which give aide through donating animals and education to those in need? Think, question, be conscious. All food sovereignty is, is the right and freedom to grow food. It’s so simple.

self sufficiency . . .

I would really love to be self sufficient, and I know it’s possible here: the local indigenous population has survived for centuries without stores. I have and will have enough fruits and vegetables, the problem is starches and protein. I’d love chickens and have raised them in the past, but here I’d have a problem keeping them out of my beds and maybe even keeping them safe from snakes and marauding dogs. I don’t want them in a pen – there are too many insects I’d want them to enjoy. The starches are the bigger issue. Cereals, no I don’t have the space. I do have a lot of yams and yam type things coming, but not until October. The yampi and air potatoes are annuals, although my malanga and mantioc (taro and cassava elsewhere) can be harvested 9 months after they’re planted, year round. I need to find beans that will produce a good amount. The beans I’ve tried here grow very rapidly but not very productively – 6 weeks between sprout and bean, but not many beans and the plants are the favourite food of everything in the garden. One can’t walk into a store and buy seeds here. I can’t buy them on line and have them sent either: postal service is not reliable and I don’t have a credit card anyway. I have my gandul / pigeon peas, and I hope they will be my answer.
The trouble is not really me, it’s the dogs. They don’t eat dog food and have a diet of rice, corn, lentils, beans and greens and meat. If I had a goat and a couple of hens I would be personally self sufficient, I can even make chocolate here, but the dogs need a lot of food that I can’t grow. And their food – basically the staples – is becoming increasingly expensive. I spend more on theirs than mine.

sesame

Originally from Africa, sesame is grown commercially in most Central American countries, but not in Costa Rica. It’s a tall slender plant with dark green pointed leaves and foxglove like flowers which sit on the stem. I’m looking forward to seeing it. Foxgloves are one of the plants I miss most from more temperate climes and if I can grow something similar looking which I can also eat, I’ll be quite delighted.

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.

morning again

The variable seedeaters are right beside me in the hibiscus: a happy little family of four. Their light filled nest was in the pejabayes and I’m so happy to see that they will stay in the garden. The father is completely black but for a white dot on either shoulder, his partner and offspring are brown with speckled brown and fawn chests. I wonder if the plumage for juveniles is this brown or whether he has two female young? There are no seeds in the hibiscus, variable or otherwise, they must eat insects too. They have a pleasant family twitter going on – parents singing in that sweet rising melodious whistle and the little ones in that semi anxious babble of chips and tweets.
I’m sitting in an ugly cloud of mosquitoes. Big black nasty things. The heavy rains of last week resulted in a lot of puddles in forest leaves, old stumps and ditches. There has been rain since, but not enough to wash out the larvae, and just enough to keep the puddles filled. Now we have another 5 or 6 days of heavy mosquito presence. Yuck. I’m sitting with sweats on and a hoodie with the hood up. Fine at 6 in the morning on an overcast day, but in a couple of hours it’ll be hell.

dig for victory

waiting for the kettle to boil . . .

I glance out the kitchen window – there’s the lilac blue crab below the orange tree, tottering at an off-road angle part in and out of his burrow. For once he doesn’t bolt when he sees me. Close by a very successful female flycatcher – not sure what type – swoops from her perch scooping up flies who are glad of the sun. Were glad of the sun. A short tailed hermit hummingbird feeds from those red salvia like flowers I can’t find in the books. Below him two red and black butterflies flit between scrubby growth. There’s a movement in the cannonball tree: it’s the lone male howler monkey noisily crossing the little stream on his way to the big river trees. All around is the song of birds and the constant hum, throb, twitter of insects. Kettle’s boiled.

musings

I just finished a book called ‘French Dirt’ about a garden in the south of France. The author was full of enthusiasm and really wanted to express his relationship with his land, yet struggled with his prose. I have the same experience, it is difficult to convey what a garden is, what it does. Yes, of course on the surface things grow and one waters and weeds. But below that how does one say what being in the garden is? I find my fingers typing superlative after superlative, yet it’s not enough and my writing becomes so light and fluffy it’s candy and gives me toothache. I think of the gardeners I know, my grandfathers especially: calm men, patient, still.
Gardening is life, it’s experience and I don’t have the words to describe it. I can say what I did, what worked, what didn’t, how rich and abundant and wonderful it is, what a sense of loss and lack of control I endure when it doesn’t do what I think it should. All this experience which cannot be taken personally. The gardener provides – no; the gardener serves the needs – no; the gardener is there while the garden grows. Because, weather permitting, the garden will grow, what it will grow and how it will grow may be what the gardener wishes or not, but it will grow. We are there to help and direct and be present. Be present.
People say that I am a calm, patient sort. But underneath I’m a raging impatient control freak. I take things personally, I worry. With my garden I can’t do these things. Yes I can worry and I have been known to get up in the middle of the night with the rain lashing the roof to put umbrellas over young plants, or get distracted at school if I remember I didn’t shade the transplants when the sun is beating down. But while I can say I am responsible for the garden, it’s not me who makes it grow. You’d think being a teacher for all these years would have taught me this lesson already. My garden is only 4 months old but it’s a wonderful teacher, and it teaches constantly, subtly and thoroughly.
So what is this gardening thing? It’s a big long lesson. Ach, that still isn’t enough to say what it is. Some poet said, ‘you are closer to god in a garden than anywhere else on earth’, maybe that’s what I’m trying to describe, and perhaps that’s why it’s beyond words.

Gardening is still new for me, this is really the first piece of land I’ve worked, have had time to work. There has always been herbs and salvias and small pickings, but this is the largest garden I’ve had, and the most commitment I’ve been able to give. I’m blessed with a year round growing climate, 12 hours of light a day, rain, sun, humidity – I’m living in a greenhouse. There are still issues – too much rain, too hot a sun, too many insects, fungus, lack of rich topsoil . . . and not much knowledge or available resources.
The other foreign gardeners I know struggle to produce familiar fruit and vegetables, cucumbers, hybrid tomatoes, carrots, onions, even lettuce. They bring the seeds from visits home. I don’t want that kind of garden, I’m enough of an interloper without bringing foreign plant species – which are also far more susceptible to fungus and insect damage. The local gardeners I know are Caribbean and have a diet far more exotic and tasty than the normal rice and beans. The plants in their gardens come from Africa via Jamaica: aki, gandul, mantioc, Jamaican rose, cinnamon. My garden is as much a mix of natives and non natives as this region. It’s all trial and error, all up for grabs. What ties it together is that it’s tropical.
In the whole garden, I have counted 56 different edible and medicinal plants and trees, and the list is growing.

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).

orange spider with her babies

caterpillar on bean leaf

morning gift

Last weekend working in the garden I happened upon a thin nest about 8 feet up in the pejabaye palms. It was a family of variable seedeaters – one of my favourite birds in the garden. These small finches have such a pretty song and are happy to come close. The male is all black except for a white dot on each wing near the shoulder, the females are a greenish brown. There were two babies in the nest, big ones. In fact when I checked the nest later in the day they had left. But today, Friday, I saw the family in a cherry tree, the babies close and still calling their parents for food. They are the colour of the mother. I’m glad the family has decided to stay close.
I thought to go check the hummingbird nest. I disturbed an iguana in the hibiscus as I approached and he slipped into the river and swam below the surface with strong strokes for about 15 yards before raising his head and swimming periscope style further downstream. The water is a milky coffee brown just now after all the rain and has quite a current to it. The sand bank on the beach must have burst. One of the hummers was making a terrible racket and I thought it must be my presence, I couldn’t see any movement in the nest. I was wondering why she was not trying to distract me away from the nest when suddenly my eyes adjusted and I saw a good sized male basilisk sitting on the branch about 2 feet from her babies. She was darting at him and screaming furiously but he was paying no attention, though his crest was raised. I began to throw some pieces of dry stick at him but he ignored those too. Then I made a lucky throw and a piece hit him on the back – it wouldn’t have hurt, but it was enough to make him jump from the branch into the water and swim upstream. The hummer continued to buzz the area where he had been and it took a few moments for her to assure herself the threat was gone. I felt good, superhero style, but he knows where the nest is, I wonder if he’ll come back? She fed her young, a leaf was in the way so I couldn’t see how big they are, but last week they seemed to be a fair size, I hope they make it.

bronze tailed plumeteers - the hummingbird parents with the river nest

heliconia

watermelon sprout

male pumpkin flower

pumpkin flowers for dinner

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.

mama tarantula

lizard king

heliconia madness

Heliconia madness
The east garden is almost purely ornamental, mostly bromeliads and heliconias, a delightful pond with lilies and lotus, two big trees draped with epiphytes, bromeliads and orchids. The weather in the last 10 days has wrecked havoc on the land – a week of hot sun with no rain then a night and day of heavy rain with wind. Half the heliconias are bent over under the weight of flowers and leaves, beaten down with rain. I spent 6 hours working through the beds with my clippers removing leaves, cutting stalks, trying to decide which flowers to leave for the hummingbirds. The flowers last for weeks and weeks gradually turning into mini ecosystems of their own as each flower fills with water and old vegetation and becomes home to mosquito larvae and tadpoles. Further down, or up, the stalk the younger flowers still provide nectar for hummers and bees. I hate to cut a flower which is still active and productive. And yet they were in a sorry state. Each stalk produces a flower, once the flower finishes the stalk dies – when one cuts the flower one should cut the stalk. The flower lies below three or four leaves and oftentimes we cut the leaves above – both to alleviate the weight on the stalk and to see the flower. Usually there is only one leaf below the flower. In my cutting yesterday I removed so many leaves to reduce the weight on the stalks that in some places they no longer look like plants but a storage area for Chinese lanterns. From a distance it’s spectacular, but up close looks shorn and sad. I will have to pay more attention to the beds here. It’s interesting, I enjoy the beauty and the openness of this garden but I haven’t really connected with the plants here. I spend most of my work time raking and weeding and presuming the flowers will take care of themselves, but yesterday showed me otherwise.
I was rewarded in my work with three beautiful encounters. There’s a hummingbird nest in a young guabo tree on a limb which reaches out over the river. One day I’ll have a camera that can take good pictures from a distance. The nest is immaculate, 2/3rds the size of my fist and very round. It’s so well put together it looks like a growth on the tree as though a limb had fallen off and lichen and moss had covered the stump. It’s a patchwork of liverwort and bright moss. So pretty. I watched as a parent (I think a Bronze-tailed Plumeleteer) fed two young. The little ones were ½ the size of my thumb and had orange beaks. It’s quite something to maneuver those long beaks in a small nest.
The second experience was with a lizard in the smallest cherry tree. I saw his tail from the corner of my eye and thought it was a snake, so long, perhaps 3 times as long as his body. I’ve never seen his kind before – he had eye sockets like a chameleon, but the eyes were smaller and heavily lidded. He had no back crest or ridge, but a frill between his jaw and chest. He was striped like an iguana, but subtly in lichen and green. He had 5 regular lizard toes, long and thin. When I first saw him his body was long and sleek but when I approached him he seemed to swell up, become shorter and extended his crest. I say he though I have no proof, I could see no sex, just a flap below his tail, but he did have a nice frill, so I think he was male. He moved like a mantis – slowly back and forth mimicking the movement of wind amongst leaves. Oftentimes he did not use his back legs but allowed them to hang there while he pulled himself forwards with the front. I couldn’t see any muscles moving as he went with those two skinny forearms pulling all his weight. His tail was grey unlike the green of his body. Looking in the book later I think he was a canopy lizard, but can’t say for sure, the book isn’t so very thorough.
The third was in the bed behind the pond and I almost cut him in two seeing him just at the last minute before I closed my clippers. He was a tree frog but not the spectacularly coloured varieties of the postcards. He was like a dead leaf, his body so flat yet textured with ridges and crinkles. His feet were camouflaged so well that I could barely tell what was him and what was heliconia stem. He had bumps and points on his head and the most startling eyes, big cream and marbled with dark brown. The slits were vertical. He was fairly broad but very flat, almost rectangular shaped and so still – the only movement was a very rapid and visible heartbeat below his ample jaw. He wasn’t in the book, no matter he was wonderful.

shaman

Shaman
The whole grade school went camping this week, to a finca in the mountains, attending part of a workshop on traditional building. The local indigenous people here are the Bribris and their shaman came to begin the ceremony for the construction of the casa cosmico, a traditional scared space. The shaman and his apprentice are quiet men with an energy like trees standing beside a clearcut. All around them was western hustle and bustle: the people who live on the finca and those attending the workshop are foreigners: Italian, Argentinean, German, Spanish, Canadian. The finca workers are Bribri. The Bribri worked while we went fluttering from one activity to another. It feels awkward to me this life I lead when I see it from this perspective. We have workshops to preserve indigenous culture only because we have destroyed it with our presence. They are a beautiful people, small and compact, strong and serious. They work hard and steadily and with respect for what they do. I worked with them as much as I could, learning the thatching process and spending time with the women in the kitchen. I’m an outsider here no matter who I’m with, with the Bribri I’m so starkly different it isn’t even an issue and there was peace in our working together. They were surprised and amused by my wanting to work.
The shaman had 3 sanyasin women fluttering around him trying to attend to his every need. He had no needs and looked strange amidst these 3 taller thinner women in their flowing white clothes and sanyasin malas . The image disturbed me. Even on a spiritual level we westerners can’t leave it alone. Of course the missionaries did so much harm, but even now these hippy style spiritual seekers on their individual paths were laying their own beliefs on the shaman’s. Perhaps it’s not so important, we are all free in our own beliefs and faiths, and development and evolution will happen one way or another, perhaps this is my own issue, my love affair with a different, older, simpler way of life that causes me to squirm.
The ceremony was brief and simple: a fire, herbs cast into the fire, a quiet song welcoming the spirits of the fire, the place, the plants which would be used in the construction. He left after talking with the Bribri.

After 4 months of sitting on a stool in the kitchen watching the world through my open door and window, this morning I tried stretching my extension cables outside, and lo and behold it works, I can’t believe it! It feels so much better to be sitting outside and writing, without the time pressures of battery. My computer came back better but not fully well: seemingly I need more memory, too much stuff on the mind. Isn’t that the truth?
It’s so difficult to rest from the endless internal babble about nothing, it’s like a box of mixed jigsaw pieces that I flick through – school, garden, future, past, family, friends, lovers, animals, work, worries, memories, plans, ideas . . . once in a great while I see the big picture having somehow managed to put the right pieces together, but no sooner does it come than it breaks apart again and I am full of small thoughts about nothing.
I only know this to be a true phenomenon because I have experienced otherwise. I’ve had moments of stillness devoid of babble and it’s incredibly beautiful, floating in an ocean of eternity where everything is light. Fleeting moments before one sinks again below the waters and finds oneself in the midst of shoals of darting, turning small thoughts.
The most I can do is to stand back and watch what’s happening in my mind, not allow myself to be caught in the current, because I know that in a flash it will change and flow another direction.

a dish of flowers

15-20 male pumpkin flowers
Oil or butter for frying
Soy sauce
Garlic
Gather flowers late in the day, this way you can be more certain that all the trapped pollinating bees have chewed their way out of their golden prisons. Pumpkin flowers open before dawn and close by midday but do seem to trap the occasional visitor in their petals.
Rinse flowers in water (save this pollen suffused water for the plants), shake out and chop. You can also chop the long flower stems, just chop these finely, they can be stringy.
Chop the garlic (today I also used some male papaya flowers – aromatic and peppery), heat the oil or butter and throw everything in. cook for about 7 minutes stirring fairly frequently. Serve with soy sauce. The closest taste I can think of is bok choy. The flowers contain vitamin A, C, some calcium, iron and protein. You can steam also but vit A is fat-soluble you can always add fat later.
Another lovely way to prepare pumpkin flowers is to dip whole flower heads in tempura batter and fry. The dogs like them too.

nomadic ants

The red assed ants are on the move again, every week another horde rampage through the garden flushing all the insects and lizards before them arousing the interest of flycatchers, warblers, even hawks. I guard my stairs with a broom ready to fight them off. I’m sure they’re passing through, but just what if they wanted to stay? While I was picking cherries I accidentally stood in their haphazard path. They bite hard. So, I wasn’t paying attention and now the ants are on the deck inspecting the laundry that’s hanging to dry. I watch a spider get excited. He’s out of his hiding place, a pale green gold and he’s made himself look very much like a grasshopper. The ants are nearby but not close enogh. I wonder if he’s preying or prey? Ah, another lapse of attention, gathering supper, both ants and spider have gone.

lizard day

Watering the pumpkins I could hear a rustling noise by the house. No movement in the trees so it wasn’t monkeys, the dogs didn’t come when I called, so it had to be something else, a fair size by the sounds of it too. Took a break and no sooner had I sat down than 2, 4 feet iguanas came thundering towards me. They saw me and took off in two different directions so I was forced to just watch one: a big black iguana with rust red orange sides and an orange and black striped tail. They seem to use their tails for propulsion as they run, swishing them actively behind them. their limbs branch out at right angles as they go and their feet / paws / claws (none are right) turn slightly in giving them a butch bulldog look. And they run fast. It’s a day for lizards: I saw a female basilisk run across the river as I was fetching water, the jesus lizard who’s large hind legs enable them to run – paddlesteamer fashion across water, with their legs seeming to turn a full circle as they go. They make such a great noise a flap flap flap on water. Nearby I saw a big blue tail of someone disappear into the ginger. Behind me a house geckoe barks.

fear and dependency

My computer’s not working. I switched it on and nothing and I was suddenly overwhelmed with a sickening heaviness. Everything is on there – all my music, photos, documentation, blogs, letters, 2 books I’m writing, articles for suite101, lesson plans, notes, research for school, recipes, gardening notes – everything. I took it to the only place in town where someone might be able to help and left it there – without a receipt, a phone number, a name. nothing. Just left it there and felt like I was leaving a sick puppy at a pet shop. I called when I was told to and they hadn’t looked at it. I called again and was told it had issues and a virus and they couldn’t save my data. I felt oddly alone and vulnerable. Losing my computer has been my biggest nightmare. Not having my music or a way to write brings out pangs of isolation. It’s an interesting addiction. Without music I am alone with myself . . . it makes me realize that I provide myself with lots of distractions to avoid this feeling. I look at this sideways, not quite prepared to examine it fully or get to the bottom of it. Clearly I’m afraid of it. I’m going to have to deal with it. Costa Rica is such an incredible place for bringing up one’s shit. Perhaps it’s the lack of distractions which force one to just be. Obviously I’ve found a way around this. I better deal with it before I lose my computer for real.
Postscript
My computer’s back home and speaking Spanish, they were able to clean it but when they re-installed the programs they installed the Spanish versions. My Spanish sucks, my technical Spanish sucks wad, but I have my computer . . .

buy buy green

Buy buy green
I joined a blog directory and as usual looked around to see who’s company I was in. There were over 1000 listed as “green”. As usual I didn’t have the luxury of surfing for hours (I was paying by the minute), but was surprised to see that the majority of sites I looked at were trying to sell me something. Why are people buying green? I mean, why are people buying at all? There’s trickery here – basically these sites are saying it’s still okay to consume, just consume differently. Somehow this doesn’t seem to fit. Last week I got my hands on an actual hard copy of Mother Jones magazine. Of course I read it cover to cover, literally, and was more struck and amazed at the advertising than the articles: visa cards, investment plans, cell phones – all touting their eco-friendliness, even saying (credit card and cell phone) that using them more would help the environment. How cynical. But it must work, given the number of ‘green’ sell sites I saw. Is it possible we can think this one through?

bye bye banana

Outside my kitchen window is jungle. But behind my cabin is a clearing and in this clearing are some bananas, a bitter orange and some infant papayas. The tallest banana has had fruit on it since I moved here, winter solstice last year. I’ve opened my shutters to those bananas every morning since, watching them grow and the flower shrink. Today I cut them. they’re not ripe, but they’re ready. They’ll ripen on the deck over the next week or so , everything will get covered in bat shit as they come to check on their ripeness. My view is different now, ah, it’ll never be the same. What an odd idea, nature is eternal yet never the same. How marvelous is that?

patangas, the Surinam Cherry

It’s best not to look too closely when eating cherries. Especially at the moment. It seems a colony of ants have taken up residence and they make tiny holes in ripe cherries and do what in there? Last week I was eating around the holes – the surrounding flesh was softer and a deeper red. Then – as must happen – I popped one in forgetting the ants and discovered it was so much sweeter than all the others. Somehow the ants do something to make sugar – or maybe it’s the air and sunlight penetrating the hole? Whichever, the cherries with the ants taste better. So now my cherry picking involves picking, shaking, a cursory glance and then popping. Maybe it’s the ants which taste sugary?

april 1st

It’s a bright, bright sunny day with a good breeze – perfect beach weather. Not so good for the gandul transplants. They’ll make it I’m sure but this sun will set them back. I hung a sarong over them to offer some shade, but I think they’ll lose their leaves.
The watermelons seem to be taking such a long time. I read 80 – 85 days from shoot to harvest, we are over a third of the way through but they only have 7 leaves.
The white spots I thought were mold from all the wet humid weather we had last week turn out to be aphid abodes, white aphids, I’ve been removing them whenever I see them, the grasshoppers are much more dangerous.
It looks like there’s new growth on the wild spinach in the leaf bed. It’s been 12 days since I put them there. That’s great! I’d like to move more. I put some beans on the leaf bed too and they sprouted and sent out growth but the 4 days of strong sun this week has fried them. I’ll wait for more rainy weather and try again. There are enough leaves to rake and add to the bed too. It is now just under ½ of its original size, inside it’s mulching down nicely and we haven’t had much rain.
Yesterday I picked some perennial peanut for transplanting. It’s a pretty groundcover, a legume with a nice yellow pea flower and clover like leaves. It can withstand flooding and droughts and can be mowed. I was thinking of putting it in the low land under the mangos and using it as a nitrogen fixer and longterm soil builder, and of course it will look better than the sparse grass that’s there now.
Coming along the drive last night there was a sound like rain coming from the pejabayes. I thought it was pissing monkeys but why would a monkey sit in a spine covered pejabaye palm? Then in the garden I was collecting guavas and got hit by many small round hard white flowers – like hail. Pejabayes are flowering and drop their flowers at dusk. I wonder if we’ll get the fruit? The pejabayes in the garden are 30 feet tall and impossible to climb, the fruit hangs in clusters at the top. I think the toucans will be lucky. The fruit is very popular here, a starchy nutty vegetable which is steamed and eaten with mayonnaise. All over San Jose street vendors sell them straight out of great steaming cookpots. the pejabaye is also a great source of palmitas – the white heart of palm that’s eaten fresh or in brine. We cut down a young palm, about 12 feet tall and got about 2 feet of palmitas, so good we stood there over the fallen tree, machetes in hand, gorging ourselves.

garden notes

I notice another katuk is sprouting, this one was a stem cutting, not a tip – that blows my theory. Should they all survive it’ll be a good start to a salad. My lentil sprouts are about 4 inches tall and delicious. I’ve tried over and over to sprout things here and they start well and then usually dry out between rinsings or rot if I try to keep them wet. These ones I soaked overnight and then partly planted in a sandy compost mix. They are doing really well, must be time for me to start a bigger batch. These lentils grew in Canada, I’m going to keep a couple of sprouts to grow, see how far they get anyway, I have no idea what a lentil plant looks like.
Been thinking about new beds. Which is better – to produce enough food for me or to grow surplus and store? Subsistence or what – materialism, plenty, abundance . . . what would one call it? I am following the development of humankind: I was happy as a hunter/gatherer/forager and then I became a farmer and now I’m thinking about the next step, growing more than it takes to feed me. It’s an interesting feeling this, where does the desire for more spring from? Is it fear based, natural. I’ll sit with it for a while longer.
I would like to try other plants; sesame which grows commercially in every other Central American country but this one, chickpeas, cucumber . . . I need more bed space to do this. Excuse?
But where? Behind the datura cresent bed is a possibility it gets morning sun. I was picturing the garden differently – the carambola and the soursop in the orchard and all this space for veggies.
There are 13 types of hummingbird in this area, I’ve seen 5 thus far in the garden, the boys say they’ve seen all of them.

scarface

I was sitting on the deck having my morning coffee, frowning at the pumpkin patch and wondering why I haven’t seen any white faced capuchins for two weeks, when I heard a commotion in the bamboo. There they were, the same old troupe, my good friends the banana rustlers. And who should be grimacing at me from the mango tree but Scarface himself. Of course I crossed the deck to say hello and was greeted with such a wonderful display of threatening behavior from these tiny gargoyles it made me laugh. Bouncing up and down, baring their teeth and widening their eyes, banging thin branches against the trunk. Oh how I’ve missed these mini rebels. I wonder if they miss this sort of thing in the forest, they do seem to enjoy it. There’s really no need to taunt the dogs or myself, but they come so close deliberately just to send a shower of leaves at us and hurl facial insults. They are so beautiful in their way, such perfectly rounded tails, such glossy black fur – not straggly or uneven in colour like the howlers or spiders. These monkeys are perfect in their black coats and white cowls. Their naked faces look skeletal and oddly human. They have certain expressions which remind me of my grandfather. But with their pointed canines and maori-like poses they look quite scary too (which of course is their point), like a Japanese No mask. They are foresters too, purposefully breaking dead and weak branches as they go. Sometimes I think they are looking for insects, other times I think they must be taking care of their pathways through the trees – who knows when they’ll come through in a hurry and won’t have time to check the strength of a limb. The capuchins are noisy in the trees, not like the others here, they crash through like noisy teenagers, making faces and posing when they see more threatening creatures.
Scarface came closest as usual. It’s not so much a scar he has as a disfigurement, there’s something misshapen to the area between his nose and upper lip. I’ve been told that some previous occupants rescued a young white face and cared for him until old enough to cope for himself, I can’t help but think Scarface is the same monkey.

crabs

There are holes in the banks and the ground, not in the lawns, but below hedges and tucked away in corners. I thought they were crab burrows. The crabs at the beach are very bright with purple brown bodies, yellow legs and red claws with dashes of blue below, there are also brown crabs with red claws. I’ve also seen them around here, but the one who just left his burrow below the orange tree was different. A big round liliac blue creature with white spectacles around his eyes, his claws are fairly small and look more like legs and his body is disk shaped and smooth, not with the bumps and raised portions of the others. He looks like a child’s drawing of a crab. I really would like a camera with a lens.

afternoon show

When I was a kid I never, ever, in my wildest dreams for one moment thought this would be my life. I’m sitting drinking my afternoon coffee, winding down after a day at school. It’s overcast and rained about 2 hours ago. There’s noises everywhere. To my left in the trees by the river a mother sloth hangs from a limb, clinging to her back is her baby. They are watching a small group of howlers in the branches above them, a baby comes down very close to me, about 8 feet away and poops on my laundry line. To my right two hummingbirds chase each other through the hibiscus. A morpho flits below me through the pumpkins. The coffee tastes good. I won’t have to water the garden tonight.

dinner

I’ve been eating from the garden for a few weeks now, I’m still buying basics – lentils, garbanzo beans, brown flour, tapa dulce, oil, eggs, milk, cream cheese, chocolate and coffee, and some spices, but everything else is grown here. Tonight I made some curried lentil soup with pumpkin and papaya leaves and my new favourite: pan fried male papaya and pumpkin flowers. I’m eating the male flowers which have completed their task of supplying pollen: the female flowers will become fruit so are not for eating until they too finish their task. The flowers are surprisingly good just sautéed with some salt and pepper. And they keep their color and look so very pretty on the plate. The papaya flowers taste peppery and have a beautiful scent (while raw), they can be eaten raw just as well. I have quite a few edible flowers in the garden: banana, hibiscus, ginger, Madera negra, papaya and pumpkin – pinks, reds, yellows and whites. I could also use the bean flowers and the chayote, but would miss out on the fruits, I don’t know that they have male and female flowers. It would be something to make a whole dish from flowers alone. I’d feel like a big bee. The other day when I took some pumpkin flowers from the fridge to prepare them, I released a black bee, poor thing was quite chilled. The flowers open at dawn and close again by 11am, he must have been sleeping inside and got caught. We have lotus in the pond and I hear the flowers are delicious. Unfortunately the black bees think so too and they ate the last one completely.

muscle rub

It seems that age does take its toll on a body, I awoke the other day sore from working and in need of a good massage. Finding a serious lack of available masseuses in my cabin, I settled on the idea of making a muscle rub. We have plenty of tumeric and ginger in the garden, both are excellent for sprains, bruises, aches, muscle pain, inflammation and just about everything else. I added some lemongrass for scent and its relaxing properties and then ventured out of the garden to find two local plants. Redhead or firebush or zorillo real is a small pretty tree with orange red tubular flowers and reddish leaves, it’s one of those crush and apply to insect bites type of plant and is good for easing aching muscles and relieving tiredness. Hoja de estrella is a small, bat pollinated tree with short upright wands covered in tiny non-descript flowers. The leaves can be rubbed directly on sprains or bruises or stiffness for near instant relief. Both grow right outside my gate. The whole lot got chopped and mashed and added to a jar of sunflower oil (available and inexpensive). It looks like a really good green salsa, and if the last two plants were not for external use only it’d be a great oil for cooking. I have to shake it when I think of it for a week and strain before I can use it. In the meantime I’m still looking for a masseuse. . .

cacao mulch

I tip my bucket onto one of the new beds I’m preparing. It’s a wide mound of paper, sticks, rotting wood, leaves, decomposed kitchen compost, cacao and more leaves. No actual soil as such, my supply is running out so I’m experimenting to see if I can create a bed without. So far it looks good, I don’t know how long I’ll leave it before planting. I think it would be best to plant creepers that will spread over and sink roots down rather than planting directly. Leaf vegetables would probably be better suited. I have another similar bed and I stuck in some wild spinach yesterday. This variety grows on a spongy sick that will resprout very easily, if it takes I’ll be delighted.