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