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.