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.

into the forest, kinda

It’s an earlyish morning habit at the weekends to collect cacao shells and trim the trees. It has to be at the right time, after the daylight comes but before it gets too hot, around 8ish seems best. The timing has to be right because one doesn’t want to disturb any snakes on their way out or home. And the mosquitoes are worse at dawn and dusk, though in the forest they are a constant. I wear a sweatshirt, hood up and sleeves drawn over my hands, long trousers and my boots, so I need to go before it gets too hot: the smell of sweat draws even more mosquitoes. I go armed with my bucket and machete. It is always disorientating in the forest – getting in is easy, coming out is often a job as one giant tree or cacao is much like another and the light changes quite rapidly. Also walking in the forest is an exercise in consciousness – one has to be aware of where one is stepping and on what one is stepping and I am looking at trees and trimming and chopping or picking up old cacao as I go. And of course my direction changes like a butterfly’s as I see something interesting over there, or want to look at that tree, or inspect the cacao that was flowering last time . . . and so on until I fill my bucket, can’t take any more mosquitoes and head for home. Now what way did I come? It’s a lesson in careful observation while treading with equal care and usually combating a feeling of being lost in the jungle forever. The spiders I collect with the cacao are usually on their way up my arm at this point too, but they are only those stilt-walkers with the rust bobbin body and the long wobbly black legs and are harmless. Often the dogs will come to find me and look at me as if to say, just use your nose, it’s this way.
It’s not the real forest, it’s been transformed and farmed and then abandoned and slowly it’s reverting, there are no pumas, no wild pigs. But when you’re in there, surrounded by green and the wind doesn’t blow through and all you can hear is insect and bird noise and underfoot are ants and millipedes, frogs, spiders and scorpions and overhead are toucans, hawks and monkeys, it feels like the forest.
When I was a kid we would go into the highlands most weekends. We had a place beside one of the last forests, of pine and some birch. I spent many many hours in there enjoying its eery quiet, its darkness and stillness with sudden magical spots of bright sunlight where a tree had fallen. I lived by a redwood forest for several years, spending time with those giants who daunt you with their age and size and bring everything around them to their knees. The forest here is very different, it has none of the somber atmosphere, the mature trees are so high that you can’t tell what they are, looking up one sees only vines and creepers. Below is the shade loving cacao, twisted with age and transformed by the vines into great shaggy heaps with far too many shoots. Below this are the ferns, mosses and wild heliconias and the few saplings from the giants that have survived thus far. And below that the leaf litter which is the source of life in the forest. Layers of green life. I found a little hill and climbing it into the sunlight. On top I found myself in the lower canopy, how different the jungle looks from there, suddenly one is lifted into the active life, noise and bustle and movement.

early morning, easter sunday

The spider monkeys came through this morning as I was making pancakes. They travel in small troupes – the one I see the most often has 3 adults and one baby. They are very agile – almost running through the treetops, swinging and leaping with all limbs. This is very different from the Howlers who move slowly and steadily and seem to prefer to have two limbs connecting to branches, or to the white faced who jump and scurry paying attention to everything as they travel. The spiders have long thin limbs, almost gibbon-like, and a orange-red fur which backlit can look like an orange halo, especially along their torsos. They knocked the fruit from the cannonball tree as they went through and it bounced down the trunk exploding, sending seeds everywhere.

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visiting the cassava

river after storm

Garden Tour

The garden here is 8 years old with 4 much older trees. When the land was bought it was all lawn. We are steadily getting rid of the grass, replacing it with beds and trees. We are somewhere between 8 and 9 degrees north of the equator meaning we get roughly 12 hours of sunlight a day, though with our trees we have a lot of shade throughout. The garden runs roughly east west with the west end being ornamental, the middle the orchard and the east end the cottage garden.

Cottage Garden

The cottage garden is much younger, only three months. I began it this January and much of this writing will detail my experiences and experiments raising food in a tropical climate.

Orchard

This is probably the most stable part of the garden, short of taking care of the trees already here, not much changes.

Ornamental Garden

This is the most established and colorful part of the garden. The main pond is here and the space is beautifully rich and full of bright heliconias and stunning bromeliads. Two of the big trees define the space and their large twisting roots provide anchors for many of the bromeliads.

the mini and the mighty

Two different creatures caught my attention today. Two scarab beetles rolled a perfectly round ball of monkey scat amongst the bamboo leaves. They were a bronze color that shone green in the sunlight, about as big as my pinkie nail. When I moved a leaf out of the way to see them better they stopped for a few moments before restarting their journey. They looked identical but one was slightly larger and because of this doing most of the work. Such strong legs, thick and fairly long: the ball they rolled was at least 4 times as big as they were. I wonder where they were going?

The other creature was a magnificent male iguana, about 5 feet long with his tail. He was a gray silver orange colour with dark bands of orange and black on his tail. A living mosaic, each scale merging with the next to give him a skin as supple and as shimmering as – well I was going to say a mermaid’s, but who knows if their’s would be so beautiful? He had two larger perfectly round scales on his cheeks, just like the painted face of a clown, except his were a gray-green. His eyelids were scaled, the palms of his hands with their long black talons, his nose. He was on the ground, unusual they usually remain high in the canopy, and he was moving slowly his whole body swaying side to side, I guess he saw me. He disappeared into the brush behind the house.

soil

Went for a walk into the forest armed with my snake boots, long pants and sleeves and trusty machete, and my bucket. I’m slowly, slowly tending the cacao trees, removing water spouts and trimming ephiphytes and vines. The main harvest will be September and October, but there are fruits now here and there and none quite ripe yet. For now I’m watching and inspecting and gently clearing paths. My bucket is to gather last year’s pods which I use for compost. The soil here is a heavy clay and all life relies on a thin layer of leaf litter. This mulch is beautiful rich soil in the making. Tree roots spread out rather than dig deep making it quite a common thing to find fallen giants. These rot down over time and become soil. To find a fallen decomposing tree is exciting and allows us to harvest new compost and food for the garden. There is a fallen giant nearby and we have begun a serious mining operation to scoop out the beautiful dark organic matter from between seams of gray and red clay. I’ve taken about as much as I can just now and will have to wait for a bit more decay and a lot of weather and fungus before I can go further. Gardening takes time.

spring equinox

A big storm hit before dawn this morning. I woke at 4:30 to the Howlers, two troupes, one beside the house in the Fig tree, the other across the river, what a cacophony – they must have been heralding the storm, in the distance out over the ocean I could hear the thunder. After the monkeys came the loudest birdsong and most varied I’ve heard thus far. I was excited as yesterday I bought a field guide to Costa Rican birds and here they all were. Insect noise too, very strong and beautiful mixed with the birdsong. And then the rain came in, soft at first, I could hear it at the other end of the garden and then it hit my roof. It rained heavily for about 5 hours, overflowing the little pond, giving the tadpoles a rare opportunity to explore where they’ll soon be hopping.

We’re on rainwater here, altogether we have 9 tanks of various sizes and moss cover. The storm gave us overflow. It’s so nice to see that overflow – showers all around! I cleaned the gutter that feeds the giant tank yesterday – full of dead flowers and leaves and the odd millipede, it was only cleaned two weeks ago, but we’re in a dry month and the trees are dropping leaves: I moved 14 barrowloads to a new bed last week, this week another 10.

Now it’s early afternoon and I’m bottling some plum jam. I picked the coco plums yesterday at the beach. They are very pretty, round as round can be and a rosy shade of purple, not like the northern hemisphere plums at all. They grow on low scrub bushes with light green shiny leaves on the shade side of coconut palms, hence the name. Their flesh is white and spongy and astringent, it draws the moisture from your mouth, inducing you to eat more in a mistaken attempt to replace lost moisture. When they are really ripe they become sweet and less astringent, it was these I picked. It reminded me of picking blackberries – the same eager search and joy at finding a dense cluster of purple hiding amongst the green. Yet these are more fun to pick – no thorns, no snags, no bloody fingers. They are about the same size as gobstoppers and have one stone, much like a plum pit, the flesh clings to it the same way too. I chopped them and put the whole fruit

in, the nut inside the stone is edible and nicely nutty. The shell is hard, too hard to eat, we’ll just have to deal with spitting it out.

The ginger beer I started yesterday is slower than usual, the storm has kept the temperature in the 70s, now the sun is peeping through and it’s becoming rather humid. It’ll be ready tonight. Such a simple recipe – a cup of sugar, ¼ teaspoon of yeast, juice of one lime and as much ginger as you can handle – all mixed in a 2 liter soda bottle and left somewhere warm for 24 hours or so. Here it sits out on the deck for a full day and then it goes into the fridge to stop the yeast. Really delicious. I put tumeric in sometimes when I want it extra healthy. The ginger, tumeric and limes come from the garden and the sugar is the raw tapa dulce we can get here from minimally processed sugar cane.

revamping

I live in the far southwest corner of Costa Rica, by the Caribbean. I live on an acre of land carved from an abandoned cacao plantation. The rainforest is re-establishing itself, growing out and through the cacao: Almendro, Fig, Naked Indian, Bloodwood, Cannonball Tree, Cecropia and Breadfruit are among the original shade trees and interlopers which are pushing through the low cacao. Bananas and heliconias fill sunny spots where trees have fallen. The garden is bordered on one side by a slow moving river, turtles, otters, Basilisk lizards and fish inhabit its waters, crabs move readily between the forest floor and the river shore. Overhead three types of monkeys, Howlers, Spider and White-faced Capuchins eat leaves and flowers, Three-Toed sloths move slowly through the canopy. On the other side a 12 foot tall hibiscus hedge provides a barrier against the forest. A house sits at either end of the long roughly rectangular garden. This is where we live.

The garden falls into three sections: ornamental, orchard and cottage garden, we have two ponds with lotus and water lilies, and lots of frogs. In this blog I hope to share our garden, its inhabitants and something of the surrounding rainforest and nearby beaches. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

picking plums with Maria

On Thursday Maria returns to Japan for a year. I will miss her and her soft spoken mum who was always anxious to drop her and hurry away to meet her young lover. She would return smiling, late and wearing different clothes. Today was our last class. We went to the beach and picked coco plums, very tart round purple plums which grow on scrubby bushes on the shady side of the coconut palms. They are all around the point which this week is littered with people from the city camping under tarps for Semana Santa, Holy Week. It’s a tent city complete with SUVs, blaring music and babies, paddling pools and beach fires. We were the only ones picking plums. Maria is fearless in her search for new foodstuffs wanting to try as many tings as I let her. Luckily most of the plants by the beach are edible: papaya, coconut, almond, ginger, plums, sea grapes and noni (well one could debate whether the vomit fruit is actually edible). The herbs while not always so tasty won’t harm with a nibble: blue snakeweed, life everlasting, hibiscus, mimosa, zornia. We stopped at George’s for coconut and an extra big kiss, I think there’s a lot of drinking going on this week. His house has been repainted a sunny shade of blue, it looks good. His neighbors did it while he was off for a clandestine weekend in Bocas. I promised I would visit properly sometime this week. I like George. His last name is Hansel – the Hansels were a big family round here, one of the points is named after them. I think they came from Jamaica at the beginning of the last century. George hasn’t got back that far in his stories yet, but he will. I like George and Mister Eddie and ol’ John Brown, old time Jamaicans with strong hands and big smiles who speak a patois English that sings. They still work their gardens and we sit and sip ginger beer and swap gardening tips and I listen. And they tell me what the weather will do tomorrow and what plants are good for the kidneys and I pay attention and feel totally bathed in another life. I brought home some akee. It’s so good, tastes a bit like peas straight off the vine. It was brought from Africa via Jamaica and not many people here eat it. Perhaps something to do with it being poisonous when unripe and toxic when overripe. But at the right time it’s delicious. It’s fairly easy to tell the right time – the fruit opens by itself and when it turns brown it’s no longer edible. The local name is vegetable brain for fairly obvious reasons.

I feel a desire to learn again and to share too. This afternoon on the way home from the store, two girls cycled behind me, a vulture was picking through garbage at the side of the road and they saw it and stopped to take pictures of the big bird. Was it important for them to know what it was? I don’t know, probably not. When one is traveling what is important? That one spends money where it’s needed? That one broadens one’s own horizons? That one shares one’s culture and takes interest in another’s? This is such an incredible place. I would like to guide. Nothing big, just something low-key with some cultural history and natural history and maybe a little responsible, conscious living thrown in. I wonder if anyone would be interested?

ants

I feel a little awkward sitting at my table, in the same way I think I would be if I had a cleaner in: you know that kind of not comfortable in your own home, not really able to relax, wondering if you should go out – I have house cleaner ants swarming everywhere. They are on every surface – ceiling, walls, floor, countertop. I’m glad I cleaned yesterday. They won’t find so much to do. They are walking right over the flour I spilt earlier, skirting the coffee that dripped from my mug, avoiding the teabag that just missed the compost bucket. They’re here for the insects. Flushing everything out before them. The lizards have left, a couple of big ones even that I’ve not seen before. I hope they deal with the scorpion under the sink. They’ve been here about an hour and a half, roughly half way through their visit. Ants are such incredible creatures, constantly moving and never going at a leisurely pace, always galloping about. The leaf cutter ants have a mini road within my path and at night they use it to go deeper into the jungle bringing out sections of leaves like sails. They don’t come this way during the day. There must be two shifts who work around the clock feeding their farms. These house cleaner ants were over at the big house yesterday, last night as I walked along in the dark my trusty wind up torch humming with the crickets I jumped through the mass of them half way here. They arrived this morning at 10am. Where did they sleep? Did they sleep? Where do they live? Will they go home again or are they on an endless journey?

. . .

It’s been a while since I’ve written. Not just the blog, but letters, articles and the big old book I’ve been working on. There was a three month period there when I spent at least 2 hours writing a day, often more like 4. But one day I woke up and that was that, I found I had nothing to say. Why, and does it matter anyway? The second answer is easier, no it doesn’t matter. The why requires a bit of self reflection and that seems hard just now. I have to wrestle myself into a position where I can look and god, I seem to not want that at all and will squirm and twist myself free with a million distractions and thoughts and sudden desires to do something else. There seems to be a cloud between myself and my ability to think clearly for any length of time. My head is full of dross, cloudy, fluffy swelling stuff that does nothing. I have a couch potato living inside my skull. I can’t express myself or describe anything, I’m tongue tied in prose. My sentence structure irritates me.

And life continues.


But I want to write, it’s a way to process, to catch or snag moments in time, I forget so readily that without writing it all slips by like a great thick oily river full of experiences and observations and incidents. In writing I dip my net in and pull moments or thoughts and lay them on the bank spluttering back into life. So please excuse me while I haul myself out of these waters and try to shake off the passing of time long enough to pause and reflect something. It might be ugly, or it might be banal. I feel I have to learn again.