Island Farm: Organic Farming on the Caribbean

talking to trees

2011-09-18T17:42:00.000-07:00

Someone recently compared me to a fig tree. I, of course, immediately thought of the strangler fig, but was reassured that that wasn't quite what she meant. This and the fact that many of our trees are raining fruit this week, has left me pondering trees.

I love trees. I love their size, their quiet, their enduring nature. I find myself thanking them for their fruits, their seeds, their shade, their wood, for feeding the mushrooms when they rot, for feeding the birds and insects throughout the year, for providing habitat, protection, nourishment. For their beauty.

I think it makes a difference. The Rose of Venezuela throws out incredible oblong seeds that are prized here on the farm. The seeds take a year to form in their pods and are expelled with a crack and twist - easy to miss, and the reason we have a grove of saplings forming around the mother tree rather than a line of potted seedlings in the nursery. The days I walk with the dogs I talk with the Rose of Venezuela. I ask her for her seeds, and always, always if I ask she reveals them one by one half hidden, half buried in the grass and leaf litter around her. Today I found 14, one after the other. Just for the asking. And the thanking.

Rose of Venezuela pods and flower:

I like fig trees.

well, it's been some time . . .

2011-09-11T14:49:00.000-07:00

over a year in fact. I was thinking I would sneak an entry in at the beginning of August and maybe no one would notice, but really it's been over a year since I wrote on this blog. Shame on me. It's not that I haven't been writing - just elsewhere. Anyway, I'd like to reconnect. So for your viewing pleasure (if anyone is still out there!) here are some toucans:

The toucans are all in a tree planted especially for them, behind the workshop. The farmer doesn't know what the tree is, nor has he seen it anywhere else, but one happened to start by the house and he realized that the toucans loved the purple berries. After many attempts to start it from seed he finally tied a branch to the house and started a couple of air-layers, one made it. He planted it out in a prime viewing spot and this year it started producing fruit. What a treat to see the toucans visit! Three of them came and spent a few minutes picking through the small berries. The tree up at the house has much larger fruit so we have high hopes for the new addition to our landscape.

how green does your school garden grow?

2010-07-29T19:41:00.001-07:00

It's Summer vacation for the kindergarten right now and I've taken the opportunity to get in there and do a bit of creative re-evaluation. It's been a lot of fun. The garden is small, about 12 meters by 6 with a 5 by 3 shaded area between the buildings. When we started in February we wanted as much free running and playing space as possible, and we thought we might only have the site through July, so we just cleaned it up, planted a couple of small beds and started a loofah vine up the front of the building.

The loofah took over and though it was pretty against the bright yellow wooden building it started looking really raggy by the windows and covered one bed entirely. I like the shambling cottage look, but it was too much crazy wildness for the children and so it has been cut back to a trim central column climbing to the ridge of the roof then out across the yard on a narrow trellis and onto the front fence. Only now is it beginning to flower, we thought we would have loofahs by October but it looks like it'll be later if the flowers are only now starting. I was hoping we'd get enough to eat (loofahs are very edible when young), but I think we'll get just enough to make Christmas gifts for parents.

We had a couple of pineapples and they fruited, producing several suckers: we now have a fairly respectable pineapple patch with maybe 16 pineapples plus others in beds and lining the path to the bathroom.

Our sand box surrounds a dear old grapefruit tree. I've fenced the box off on one side with Nadera Negra which are leguminous short trees which give a pretty pink flower, edible when cooked. Madera Negra is grown from a stick, I planted 10 a foot apart and strung twine between them. I've planted Sorosi on the trellis, Sorosi is a very feathery, sweet delicate little vine with cheery yellow flowers and a knubbly yellow orange fruit. It's very bitter and a strong medicinal, all the children here know it and know that their neighbors and grandparents take it to "strengthen the blood".

Beside the door to the kindergarten I've planted Aloe Vera under the eaves where the rain won't reach, it's a tricky plant to grow in this humid climate, but worth it. On the other side I've put a Bandera de Espana, a pretty vine with olive leaves and creamy white flowers with a dark pink center.

Our tomatoes are doing well trellised up a wall with plenty of mid morning sun and protection from the rain. I've put another three papayas in bringing our count to 5 - necessary because one never can tell who'll be a boy! Our largest papaya has just come out as a boy, which we really don't mind as the flowers smell wonderful! But I'd like all the rest to be big strong fertile girls.

Our tea corner now contains Lemongrass, Ginger, a local Licorice and Orozuz (a local relative of Stevia), I'll add some Carpenter's Bush which gives a really nice subtle calming tea and makes a pretty groundcover.

Our coconut palm is coming along. It was a volunteer when we took over the school site and we kept it, it'll be 5 years before it fruits, who knows what will happen in that time?

In all I've added four more beds with mixes of edibles and ornamentals. I've tried to keep the colors in the purples, pinks and blues to tone down the brilliant yellow of the building and the sheer green of the garden. The beds sculpt the layout of the garden and give it a bit more definition and direction. The next thing I'd like to do is put in a very small, very shallow pond (about the size of our dishwashing bowl) purely to add some water hyacinth, tadpoles, duckweed and dragonflies. The newest ornamental additions all attract butterflies. How lucky these children are!

Let's see, so we have coconut, papaya, pineapple, grapefruit, tomato. I've still to put in a banana. For teas we have ginger, lemongrass and hibiscus sweetened with orozuz. For fresh greens I've planted katuk, camote, two types of wandering jew and culantro which can be prettied up with petals from the hibiscus and impatiens. I've still to add the carpenter's bush (tilo) and some purslane I found growing in a meadow neighboring the school. And there are two types of edible mushroom; oyster and wood ears, which we use in our Thursday soup.

That sounds like a pretty well rounded garden! More edibles than ornamentals and a good handful of medicinals. Plenty of scents, colors, textures and layers to stimulate the children's senses and imagination. And of course foster their love of plants and gardening!

Successful compost delivery!

snake day

2010-07-24T20:48:00.003-07:00

The farmer and I both dreamed of snakes last night, there was nothing snakey about yesterday, but today there certainly was.

On the way back from the farmers' market we paused on the driveway to let a boa cross our path. He was in no hurry and ambled slowly across the road, not so very big, maybe 5 foot, and beautiful. I have a 12 minute video of a boa eating a squirrel, or rather the second half of the squirrel, filmed one morning on the path below the house. The squirrel had been in a cacao tree and both had fallen onto the logs below. All I could do was wait, there was no way around. When she finished she scowled, raised herself up and flicked her tongue at me. I know it was rude to record her, but what else could I do there with a camera? (I was late for a meeting and hence had to show my reason.) We like and encourage boas in this area, great rodent control! And as soon as I work out how to upload the video I'll do it!

Back on the farm we heard that the workers had killed a terciopelo (Bothrops asper), or fer-de-lance in English. One of them had seen it yesterday near the public road that runs through the farm and all three had returned this morning to look for it. The fer-de-lance has a terrible reputation - the "ultimate pit viper", and is responsible for most of the venomous snake bites in Costa Rica. It's large and nervous / aggressive, and is almost always killed on site by the locals. Normally we do not like snakes being killed on the farm, but with this one we allow it. Having the Botanical Garden with its many visitors we can't take the risk. So it had been killed as quickly and as simply as the men could do it: they caught her with a forked stick and broke her skull.

We went over as soon as we could. She was a good size, beautiful and sleek. Her skin was the most scaly skin I've ever seen on a snake, not small close fitting mosaic style scales, but large diamond shaped ones which all seemed to move independently. Her belly looked almost like a shrimps the way the large rectangular scales overlapped each other. They were as smooth as glass and a wonderful creamy white. Terciopelo means velvet in Spanish, and her back did feel somewhat velvety with each scale having what seemed like a soft nap to it, but it was a hard sort of velvet. The skin was loose on her, probably to allow for its elastic nature. Her vertebrae were hard and raised in a ridge that ran the whole length of her body. I have never been so close to a fer de lance before and was surprised by how blunt and snubbed her nose was. The skull was broken so we couldn't save it for cleaning and we didn't open the mouth to look for her fangs - there are too many stories of venom leaving those fangs even after the snake is dead.

The farmer wanted to try the meat and so Evenor and I cleaned and dressed her. We slit the length of her back and removed the skin which came off easily. Very simple to dress, the ribs and meat wrap around the alimentary canal and organs which come away from the flesh easily just with pulling. It is a two person job, but not messy or difficult. It was in cleaning her we confirmed she was female (I had thought so due to her size and aggression): terciopelos give birth to live young and she had about 80 embryonic sacks with 3 inch, still transparent, snakes inside. Sad, always sad to see such beautiful creatures killed, but also lucky for us in that by killing one snake we had avoided the possibility of killing 80 others.

We buried the head and viscera and took the meat and skin home. The dogs sniffed cautiously at the skin and then retreated giving a wide berth - this I was very happy to see! I stretched and tacked the skin to a board, scraped it several times until it was soft and clean and then rubbed ash all over the inside and have left it propped up below the house where the breeze will reach it. The farmer oven roasted about 9 inches with black pepper. It was very tasty, a lot like chicken breast but more tender. The only issue is the bones which are fairly soft but not soft enough to eat. We'll use the rest for soup, I think the meat will come right off the bones. Eating her for me was the best way to respect and value and give gratitude for her life. Her beautiful skin will be used in the botanical garden to show visitors and to educate a little more about the types of snakes and creatures which make this area their home.

I did have a third snake experience today. I was going to the kindergarten to water our newest garden additions and a group of local kids and two youngish men were standing staring at something in the pasture. There was a lot of brandishing with sticks so I asked and they said it was a terciopleo. Having come freshly from the dressing, still with spots of blood on my leg, I wanted to see. Plus it was close to where we had spotted the boa earlier. Sure enough it was a boa, probably the same one. I had a hard time convincing the others it was not venomous, dangerous or anything to be feared. Most people kill all snakes on sight here and many crazy stories are wildly believed such as boas give birth to terciopelos once they reach a certain age, or that they have a venomous bite at night. Total baloney of course, but it's really hard to shake fear out of people. The kids wanted to start throwing stones at it and I had to use my sternest teacher voice to tell them absolutely not. Luckily for the snake and me (I was thinking I'd have to climb through the fence and pick him up to move him somewhere safe, and demonstrate he was in fact harmless), a local amphibian and reptile advocate walked by. He went in, picked up the boa - to the hysterical excitement of the kids - and took it away. Thank goodness.

markets in Mexico

2010-07-21T20:24:00.004-07:00

We are back from our trip to Mexico and the States. It was thoroughly enjoyable. It was my first time in Mexico and I loved it! The food, the places, the arts and crafts, the food, the music, the culture, the food, the people, the history, the food, the energy and the atmosphere. The food was great: fresh, simple, tasty and quick, we drove to Veracruz from Mexico City and it seemed that every roadside shack was either a cafe or a mechanics, and sometimes both.

We were in Veracruz visiting vanilla growers around Papantla, a nice little town perched on several hills with lots of trees, a wonderful local historical site, El Tajin, and a local indigenous tradition of dropping off the top of a very high pole suspended on a long rope while a musician dances atop the pole playing beautifully haunting simple pipe and drum tunes. Wonderful.

The markets were busy and bustling with great fresh produce and tons of character. Here are some pictures to whet the whistle:

cacao kills cockroaches

2010-06-17T08:16:00.000-07:00

I believe that every creature has a place and a role in the world. However there are certain creatures which I just don't want to share space with. I have various agreements with several species: scorpions, larger ants, spiders, biting flies, that if we share space we are purely courteous and harm no-one. It works: and on those rare instances when it doesn't then usually that creature is removed from our common space. Cockroaches too have a place and I can be fond of them, cleaning and clearing away our detritus, but somehow reviled more than all the flies, ants and wasps which share the same momentous task: they are the vultures of the insect world. They're actually quite cute up close.

However there is a point beyond tolerance and I reached it this week. They got into my chickpea flour.

I live in the jungle and I am fully aware that I am here as a guest and part of the honour is that I share the space with all the other inhabitants. Everything in my kitchen is double bagged and in tupperware boxes. I am oh so well aware of all the ants, flies, mites, weevils, grasshoppers, stink bugs, and endless strange looking 6 leggededs, as well as the myriad spores of yeasts, molds, fungi, plus all the bacteria, protozoa and multi formed parasites that live here too. I've played host to a number of the best of them. Oh yes. But when the roaches finally break through into my chickpea flour, take up residence in my traveling coffee mug and eat the onions in my veggie basket, I'm over it.

Cacao kills cockroaches. I imagine it's the same mixture of chemicals which pep us up, which causes a heartattack or overloads the cockroach to death, but the result is quick and final. But cacao is also rather an expensive - if all organic - way to go. So yesterday I made some special killer candy. Roaches love onion and orange juice, and chickpea flour, I blended chopped onion with just enough orange juice to wet it, added some chickpea flour and powdered boric acid. The mix I formed into patties and placed around the kitchen and bathroom on top of squares of old plastic bags (easy to move and a lot cleaner). The boric acid takes up to 10 days to work. It's a slow and nasty death of starvation and dehydration, and I'm sorry for that. Cacao would be better. When I get the population down I might switch to smaller amounts of cacao powder, or might mix cacao in with the borax.

It's a nasty business.

homemade coconut oil

2010-06-10T08:15:00.004-07:00

Anyone with access to a coconut, a grater, and a stove can make coconut oil. And I recommend anyone try it, it's time consuming but really educational in that it proves once and for all why coconut oil is such a luxury and so expensive.

Ideally you'll want fully mature coconuts, the heavy ones that don't sound full of liquid. Open, save the liquid, remove and grate the flesh. The easiest way to do this is by using a juicer like a Champion (we have a Jack LaLarres). If you don't have a juicer then a blender or food processor works too. We use a coconut grater from the south pacific which looks like a rising sun.

Grate the coconut. If you use a juicer it will separate the coconut cream from the meat. If you use anything else you will get a nice moist pile of shavings mixed with liquid. Mix this pile with a small amount of water, mix thoroughly and then squeeze the liquid from the flesh. I use an old pillowcase. You want to use the minimum amount of water as it will be cooked out later and will just lengthen the cooking time. Squeeze as hard as you can to get as much of that lovely milk out. Save the flesh for baking, or for curries, or for the dogs. It's important to have helpers clean the coconut shells:

Whichever method you use, let the milk sit for several hours, preferably overnight (in the fridge is fine too). This allows the milk to separate, skim the cream from the surface and put in a pot. If you get some of the milk too it's not a problem, you'll just make coconut cheese. I always skip this step as I am impatient and I love coconut cheese.

Bring the cream / milk to a slow boil stirring ALL the time. Reduce to a simmer and stir. Now you will wonder why you used so much water. Stir, stir, stir.

Gradually the water will evaporate, the cream will thicken to a slushy paste like consistency and you will be bathed in coconut steam. Keep stirring. Slowly the cream will begin to separate and you will see the beginnings of the oil, it will puddle around the edges at first. Keep stirring.

More and more of the coconut cream will become oil. Curds of coconut cheese will begin to form, these will be small separate chunks, almost the same shape as cottage cheese curds but less than half the size. At some point you will notice that there's no more oil forming and the cheese is beginning to change colour. Remove from heat, allow to cool and pour through a sieve to filter out the cheese. Store the coconut oil in a wide mouthed jar in the fridge, eat the cheese! The cheese is an excellent addition to baked potatoes, salads, actually anything savoury. It's the closest a vegetarian could get to crispy bacon. It's very good, the only place I've heard it being sold is Hawaii, but it must be available elsewhere. I do hope you make this and I do hope you enjoy it. If you do, please leave me a comment!

where are all the flowers?

2010-06-05T11:57:00.001-07:00

It's June already but something's missing. Where are all the flowers and all the developing fruit? There are no flowers on the mangosteen; the branches are bare of buds on the durian; there are no fallen petals below the champedak; no bees are buzzing round the rambutan; there's no early morning pollination of vanilla. There are no flowers. Which means there will be no fruit. Unless somehow it's all just late this year, but even if the farm is about to explode in blossom then that puts the fruit season back to November / December with the rains. Possible I guess.

It's very quiet. What about all those nectar loving insects, bats, birds and mammals? And what about those who rely on taking part of our harvest every year? All those oropendulas or iguanas for example, will there be enough fruit to share?

I hope so . . . I hope so.

volunteer opportunity

2010-05-26T07:11:00.000-07:00

We have a volunteer position available this Fall, to help with the harvest and processing of durian, mangosteen, rambutan, langsat, duku, keppel, kumquat, cacao and various other fruits, spices and herbs. The volunteer would be helping with the actual harvesting and then with the drying and preserving of the fruit. Ideally we would like someone for the duration of the season, which this year looks like early October through mid December. If anyone is interested please reply by comment!

pineapple scones

2010-05-25T08:37:00.000-07:00

The kitchen smelled wonderful yesterday, not only were the dehydrators full of papaya, pineapple, banana and jackfruit, but I was baking scones and an oat bar we've been enjoying for breakfast. A friend with an organic farm has a surplus of pineapples at the moment (he did something like we just did: plant 300 same age suckers at once!), and no electricity so he's selling a lot to us. This is great news. Not only have we been eating copious quantities of sweet and sour everything, and drying every day, I've also had enough to experiment with such frivolities as pineapple scones and pineapple jam.

Hating to waste any of the fruit, I've been simmering the skin and cores (they are organic) in water for about 40 minutes, or until the water reduces by a third and then storing it in the fridge, or adding sugar and cooking it down into a syrup. In Nicaragua they make a delicious rice pudding with cooking pineapple peel along with the rice, and in Belize they make a great iced drink with this pineapple 'tea'. The tops have been going to the kindergarten: we've got quite the pineapple patch over there now!

The pineapple scones are the best so far of all the scone flavours I've tried, the farmer says they're up there with the durian scones, but in my mind they're better. Here's the recipe, it's the basic scone mix with extras:

2 cups wholewheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
pinch salt
about 1/4 cup sugar
about 3 tablespoons oil
1/3 cup dried pineapple chunks
about 1/4 cup crystallized ginger
about 2/3rds - 1 cup pineapple 'tea'

Mix dry ingredients, add oil and pour in about 2/3rds of the 'tea'. Mix lightly. For scones you want a soft dough, not much handled. Add remaining liquid until the dough comes together in a ball, you probably won't need it all. If it gets overwet add some flour. Turn out on a floured board and pat or gently roll to a thickness of 3/4 inch. Cut into rounds and bake on a cookie sheet in a 350F oven for about 30 minutes. Allow to rest for 5 minutes then enjoy warm.

rain stops play

2010-05-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

This is the month of thunderstorms and heavy rain showers. This morning I had planned on transplanting tomatoes and basil from here on the farm over to the kindergarten. But the rain is lashing down and would gladly smoosh any new transplants so I'm waiting it out cooking up dog food and browsing the web. The following is an extract from the Roots of Change site, from a report from the Kellogg Foundation Food and Community Conference:

"(T)he need for deeper research on the biological realities underlying health is clear and exciting. The research findings related to secondary plant metabolites (plant properties beyond the carbohydrates typically discussed for their impact on nutrition) provide a pathway for humans to understand the synergistic or relational nature of ecosystems, plants and human health. We need more variety in our diets from a diverse set of plants that emerge from deeply healthy ecosystems. Diets rich in plant diversity will ensure that our cells receive the full spectrum of nutrition that evolution has made available to us."

I feel especially inspired by the phrases "relational nature of ecosystems, plants and human health", and, "plants that emerge from deeply healthy ecosystems": it sounds like change is coming!

Thank you to all those who responded to the last post. The holes are slowly closing up, hurrah!

holey schmoley

2010-05-14T08:54:00.002-07:00

I'm sitting here with a pack of ice on my knee, the cold numbing my leg while drops of condensation run across my skin. A moment ago a hot pack was sitting in the exact same spot. I've got leishmaniasis, or papilamoya as it's known locally. I've had it for over a year now, one spot on my arm that we treated with injections which we thought had worked, but it came back in almost the same spot and two more places beside. I was using a silver cream which was keeping them more or less steady, but not making any improvement. Then I tried gavilana, known in Panama as tres puntas, and known in local English as jackass bitters. It seemed to work brilliantly and within two days the holes in my arms had gone. And the three on my knee, or so I thought. We went off to Panama and returned without putting anything on my knee. It began to look infected, the dogs and flies were showing interest, so I thought I had staph and we went to the clinic. The doctor seemed to delight in telling me that it was leishmaniasis and went on to explain how painful the injections were, how I would forget things, how I would taste metal as long as the injections lasted. I left the office horrified.

Leishmaniasis comes in various forms, the form here in Costa Rica is subcutaneous, which is a lot better than the other kinds. It's a protozoa which is introduced to the body via the bite of a sandflea or mosquito. I spend very little time on the beach, but I do live in the forest: sloths are carriers. No doubt some mosquito fed on a sloth before biting me. Now while I would normally find that a cute idea - sloths have thick fur, the only place a mosquito can bite is directly on the nose - in this case I'm not so enthralled.

The protozoa multiplies and gradually eats away a hole in the skin and then the flesh. It makes an ugly crater like wound with the surrounding skin raised and hard and red, falling away into a smooth or jagged edged hole with a thick whitish fluid at the center. Looks like a volcano. It isn't painful unless the area is touched directly, but it can itch. It seems that everybody who lives here gets it at some point. And there are as many cures are they are sufferers.

Hot banana peel, roasted lime juice, gavilana, hombre grande, silver, coralillo, tiger's paw, milk thistle, green clay, hot and cold - are a few of the recommendations I've heard. Each person has something that works well for them and will work repeatedly, it seems to be a case of finding the right thing. The other 'medical' option is to have a series of injections. If the papilamoya is small the injections can be given directly into the surrounding area. However if it is more serious the injections are given daily into the glutes. We have friends who have received up to 90 such injections day after day until the hole closes. The main active ingredient is antimony, a heavy metal. The treatment really thumps one's liver, as well as one's glutes. I REALLY don't want to go there.

The hot - cold seems to be working. I've been at it for 8 days now and the sides of the holes are lower and less angry. I was using tiger's paw too which is a beautifully shaggy philodendron, but the sap stung like crazy and hasn't made so much of a difference except to make my knee extremely sensitive to touch. Plus I wasn't keen on keeping the wound so wet all the time. I've been letting it air and dry out for the last two days and it seems so much better.

The thing about leishmaniasis is that it will eventually go away by itself, but the hole will be much bigger which brings greater risk of secondary infections, and larger scars. The scars I'm not so worried about, but the secondary infections I am. In this hot humid climate, living on the farm there's potential for all sorts of nastiness creeping in. Ah the rainforest. Alright, time to change to the hot pack.

browsing: food carbon

2010-05-03T09:03:00.001-07:00

It's my custom of a morning to spend a little time after breakfast browsing online. Oftentimes it's research into what we're doing on the farm, or in the kitchen, but I also read Mother Jones, Grist, Culinate and the Climate Desk. An article on Mother Jones led me this morning to a Carbon Calculator for food. Really for the US market (for example our coffee and sugar is local, our wheat is imported, but in the main this is reversed for the States), it can only serve as a very general guide, but it is interesting.

Seemingly 30 plus percent of all greenhouse gases generated in the States comes from food production, the premise of this calculator (and a number of other sites and articles I've seen recently), is to help reduce this percentage by reducing food waste, making conscious choices and cooking efficiently. There's a danger of becoming puritanical, or of stressing oneself out so much that one can no longer do anything, but taken as a starting point for a more conscious approach to how one takes one's food it seems like a good thing.

What's more this particular calculator has come from a company which manages many college and university on campus cafeterias: this in itself is heartening news.

According to their data, our breakfast of wholewheat oatmeal pancakes with orange syrup and coffee produced 700 grams of carbon. Now I need to find out what that means! How do I sequester that? Yesterday we planted two clove, 3 gnetum, a moringa and a jackfruit tree. We started some purslane cuttings, transplanted basil, sowed some papaya and sapote seeds. I weeded a couple of beds and thinned out tomato starts - what does that do to my carbon footprint?

To me, no matter how I cut it, it comes down to living simply and deriving a lot of pleasure from simple living. I'm truly blessed by being able to grow some of my own food and by having a good variety of local foods to buy. If I was living in the city I would be more frantic about growing as much as I could, or refusing to eat any other green but the sprouts I could grow on my windowledge.

Living lightly, living simply, practicing moderation has to become the way forward, or I have to stop reading the news completely.

visit to Bocas del Toro

2010-04-28T17:05:00.000-07:00

Just returned from a brief trip across the border to Panama and the lovely Bocas islands. We stayed with a friend who has a 100 acre farm there growing cacao, coconuts, bamboo, platanos, pineapples, greens and all sorts of new and wonderful things. What a project! Very inspiring.
The terribly sad part is that her partner just died suddenly and now the future of the farm is at this point uncertain. We would love to help out and bring this dream of Jim's to full fruition. Hopefully we can.

The produce from the farm is sold at the very young Farmers' market in Bocas Island. Very small as yet, and not well supported by the local population. The trouble is that Panama isn't a very agricultural nation. While there are miles and miles of cattle ranches, the people growing vegetables are few and far between: it's shocking to see how poor the selection and quality of fresh fruits and veggies is on the mainland, never mind the islands. Much of the 'fresh' stuff is imported. We have two great farming friends there: Up In The Hill Organic Farm and High Hopes South, they take their produce to market, but what they produce can never pull in the crowds like the onions - carrots - broccoli - garlic crowd can, and that stuff just doesn't grow on lowland tropical areas. For the market to survive change needs to happen - firstly the market must go from twice a month to weekly, and secondly a cold crops veggie vendor must appear, only then will the locals take the market seriously. There are talks afoot with an organic farmer in Boquete, but that's 4 hours away. We are about 4 hours away too, it seems unlikely any of our farmers would sell there.

So what to do? It seems to me a mammoth task of educating the populace to eat locally and healthily - very hard to do in a tourist town where most restaurants serve up hamburgers and fries with an iceberg lettuce side salad.

What does sell at the market is cacao in all forms: raw beans, roasted nibs, ground, sweetened, even turned into jam! Chocolate truffles and brownies are winners too, along with dried fruit and candied ginger. Almost all of these goodies go to tourists. Great, but a passing trade and not one that sustains in the long term. Platanos, pipa water, chaya and katuk are sold beside the fruits our friends have in season - but to make it work these have to become local staples.

It's a lot of work and requires commitment and strength from the growers, but it's a worthy path to tread. I hope somehow we can help.

the water costs hidden in everyday things

2010-04-18T20:43:00.000-07:00

Found an interesting article, very interesting article, on the bbc today: a report detailing how much water is used to produce various everyday items. Putting the link to the article here, but as a teaser;

70 liters of water needed to produce 1 apple
30 liters needed to produce enough tealeaves for a cup of tea
a staggering 140 liters to produce one cup of coffee
440 liters to produce one loaf of bread!
3,875 liters of water go into making a beef steak.

The quantities given are for "embedded" water - all the water needed to grow, harvest, prepare, ship and sell the product. The article comes from a report warning about western nations buying water 'rich' items from developing countries, such as Kenya which uses precious water resources to grow flowers for the European market.

Very interesting article, well worth reading, then pondering, then acting upon.

visit to the hen lady's farm

2010-04-11T10:20:00.002-07:00

Noity is the hen lady at the Farmers' Market. As plump and as lively as any mother hen she is a fixture of the market, selling out of her wonderful free range organic eggs an hour into market. She sells chickens too, and pork in the winter months. We are stall neighbours and it's a joy to talk with her and see her interact with her clients, her husband Timo and her other stall neighbour, the cheese man Miguel. I wouldn't miss the feria just for a chance to see Noity.

She's had a typical and yet not so typical life for a Talamancan campesino. Her father came from Panama and somehow secured some land which he still, well into his nineties, farms. Noity met Timo when he came to cut trees for her father, she had her first child with him when she was 15, he was 35. They moved to Timo's family land and slowly she has built up her own poulty business. Timo still cuts trees, specializing in difficult terrain, he has a team of two magnificent oxen he uses to haul lumber. They grow plantains and keep a small herd of beef cattle. Noity runs the chicken business herself, telling me it's "women's work".

They live in a small, basic, typical campesino house. Spotlessly clean, efficient and bare. There's no electricity and her cell phone won't work at the house. They bathe in a well carved out by a year round spring and cook staples over an open fire. Noity has a propane stovetop too for quick things. She has a milkcow which provides enough milk for the family each day and she makes a little cheese. She boils the milk to pasteurize it so it won't spoil so quickly in a house without refrigeration. They eat around 4pm and talk until dark - here never later than 6:30, then go to bed. Noity doesn't use lamps or candles, she says there's too much of a breeze at the house. Life takes place on the covered deck which extends to the kitchen, there are two old chairs with cushions, the children make do with wooden seats and sleep with their mattresses on the floor. Noity and Timo's room is tiny, just enough room for a bed, a plastic set of drawers and cartons and cartons of eggs.
In the kitchen, and the outside pila (a concrete sink with side areas for washing clothes or children), water is always running. It's a widely held belief that taps should not be turned off and that water is inexhaustible. A friend of ours installed a water system for a local indigenous village, he returned after two weeks to find that all the faucets had been removed so the water could constantly run. While this might be shocking to those of us who grew up or live in an increasingly water conscious world, it remains here almost a status symbol to have running water constantly. When Noity saw my raised eyebrows and asked she laughed at my reply and answered, but love, it rains here, there's plenty of water. She's right of course. There is here, right now.

She was so happy to show me her chickens. There are two areas kept far apart on the farm. The broilers are in a large open shed, 250 of them in each of two enclosures. She buys the chicks at 2 days old, they are ready for the table at 6 weeks, indeed if they get any older they can't walk: bred to have large breasts they get too heavy if they get too big. The broilers are also bred to have few feathers - they're not pretty birds, but Noity's seem happy enough for the few weeks of their lives with plenty of air, natural light, clean space, food and water. She feeds them corn and herbs with weekly meals of garlic and onion for parasite control. The killing shed is close by. Noity kills 80 chickens a week, her method is to hold the bird in a cut off 2 liter soda bottle, the neck of which has been removed. The chicken's head pokes through the opening and is quickly removed with a pair of shears. This method is taught in the local high school's animal program. It's highly efficient and quick. The feathers and heads are cooked up and fed to the pigs. The rest is sold with the bird. Noity charges 2,400 colones per kilo, that's about $5.40 at today's exchange rate. We're not sure if the corn she feeds is organic (she gets it from various sources), but it's certainly the best tasting chicken around here.

The layers live in a pretty hen house atop a hill close to her home. There's about 200 of them, all look like rhode island reds, but I'm not sure. Noity buys these as chicks too. They start laying at 17 weeks and she'll keep them as layers for 2 years then fatten them up and sell them live to locals for the soup pot. The chickens are free range, but are kept in the hen house until mid morning to ensure all eggs are laid where they can be found. Wandering around the farm with her clucking as softly and contentedly as any hen I fell in love with this way of life all over again. So beautiful, so peaceful. So simple.

And yet it's not really. Noity has weight issues and complains of symptoms that sound like early onset diabetes. She has had a recurring problem with ulcers on one leg and complains of stomach pains often. Sometimes she spends nights in the clinic with stomach issues. When I ask her how she's been in the week she explains it through food: lovely, I could eat everything, fried egg, fried plantain, pork, coffee. . . Salad isn't a regular feature of her diet. When she invited us to sit for a snack she handed us large glasses of dark liquid. I thought it was tamarind juice, it wasn't till my first sip I realized it was coke. I haven't had coke in years. We unwrapped plastic packets of cookies. Seems so incongruous, and yet it's only that way because of my ideals and my expectations. She was giving us what we as foreigners had brought her culture.

Noity drives a big black pick-up truck. Timo can't drive, nor can he read or work with numbers, Noity does all that. Both use their hands to speak, the many stories they tell are full of noises and gestures taking the listener right into the situation, they are great storytellers and funny with it. The plantains they grow are organic, some they bring to market, but most they sell to a local co-operative. We were surprised to see the fruits covered with the blue plastic bags the plantations use. Normally those bags are impregnated with pesticides. Seemingly however they are also sold 'clean' and are used to cover the fruit to keep the black bees away. The bees eat the immature fruit leaving marks on the surface of the peel. We have been talking to her about stopping the use of the bags - the gringos she sells to have bad associations with the bags, and the locals don't care about the peel. Noity has always looked surprised by our suggestion - she doesn't understand. We tell her the bags are very bad, they end up in the waterways and ocean and are responsible for the deaths of many turtles and sea birds. She says her bags never get into the ocean, she always burns them.

Noity stands spanning the chasm between two worlds. Whether she can bridge the gap might be the most important question of the decade.

salad bowl, the sequel

2010-04-08T10:29:00.001-07:00

A long time ago -or at least 18 months ago - I had the idea to grow salad greens for the market. The fresh, beautiful, flower scented salad greens I would buy in Calafornian Farmers' Markets would sustain me all the week, and I was sure we could provide the same pretty bowls of colour and taste down here.

It has been a slow process. With no lettuce and few local options it has been a treasure hunt finding suitable greens. In this last year of trial and error we have found that here in a year round growing cycle, some of our greens are annuals: the cranberry hibiscus dies after flowering in December, the wandering jew goes dormant through December and January, the Malabar spinach gives up in February and March. Our salad mixes change weekly as we watch for flowers on the hibiscus and fret over the gingers. It has been more a year of research and development than one of production.

However it has worked and now we are slowly but steadily increasing our options and our knowledge. We found winged bean seeds in Panama and moringa growing at Punta Mona, a dark purple wandering jew is thriving on the deck off the kitchen and a news article in the national paper turned us on to two local, near forgotten edibles: the zorillo and chinquispil. Slowly it's coming together. the new plants and varieties we've gathered are not at full production yet. It's not like buying a seed packet and sowing them, instead we are given or find one plant or a couple of seeds and have to grow it out ourselves in the nursery until it is ready to produce: all our salad greens are second generation plants each with their own history and path to us. If I count what we have, including those in the nursery the list is impressive:
cranberry hibiscus
katuk
malabar spinach
okinawa spinach
red spinach
winged bean
camote
chayote
moringa
gotu kola
purslane
basil
parsely
culantro
bolivian culantro
vietnamese cilantro
wandering jew
purple wandering jew
sorrel
zorillo
chinquispil
orchid tree
gnetum gnetum
garlic vine
mustard

In another year we should have a really beautiful salad bowl, full of superfoods, brimming with flowers (pansy, ginger, hibiscus, orchid tree, morninga. . .) and just delicious.

pineapples planted!

2010-04-08T10:01:00.001-07:00

After what seems a year of thinking about it, we've finally planted pineapples. Not that it's very difficult, it's just that it took time going back and forth and round and round discussing which to plant, where to plant and finally how to plant. In the end it took someone calling the farm and saying they had 300 suckers for sale. And so 3 days later we have a pineapple patch.

Pineapples reproduce in one of two ways - through seeds (rare these days, but possible through cross-pollination of different varieties), or through suckers. The suckers come three ways - the crown of the pineapple, from the base of the fruit and from the base of the plant itself. The basal suckers are the fastest producers, and can fruit in as little as 9 months, the suckers which grow from under the fruit take about a year to produce, and the crown takes around two years to give fruit. I always plant the crowns, usually as a hedge line or an unobtrusive part of a landscape, but the farmer is only interested in growing the basal suckers - sure, it's quicker.

We have planted the 300 on 'sun dog hill', a south-ish facing slope by the house. 300 plants don't take up much room: pineapples are planted closely together to provide support for each other. Their roots provide anchoring and stability, so there's no real competition for soil nutrients among the plants. The pineapple feeds like other bromeliads: obtaining its nutrients through the pools which form at the base of the leaves.

Now that we've started, the idea is to plant another 300 in 2 or 3 months time so that we can stagger the harvest somewhat (300 pineapples is a lot for one breakfast!).

self efficiency

2010-04-04T07:24:00.001-07:00

Does that make sense? I've been pondering this morning whether my ideal is self sufficiency or independent efficiency. Self sufficiency is to have enough, to have enough in oneself, or by oneself. This is of course the truth, the big picture, we are all of us enough in ourselves, without the need for outer confirmation or reward or justification. At least that's what I feel in my calmest, brightest, shiniest moments. Applying the big picture to my lifestyle 'choices' I find I am deficient, I cannot be totally self sufficient. We have a truck, we use electricity, we buy vegetables that don't grow here, we don't raise our own meat or dairy. I can make as much of our basics as possible: yoghurt, cheese, oil, bread - but none of the ingredients come from our farm.

So instead I'm thinking this morning of second generation homesteading.

Efficiency is another thing - it is more efficient for me to go to the store and buy oil, but that just isn't the same is it? I find myself equating efficiency with simplicity: the simpler I can make my kitchen and my plantings, pickings and workings, the more efficient and streamlined I feel, the smoother my days run. Efficiency only seems to come with experience, simplicity too. The more time and attention I spend in a task the more I see how to simplify it in the future. It's a question of maturity I guess, I'm slowly drifting from the ideal of pure self sufficiency into a more community based thinking: happy to buy from other local farmers that which I can't make or grow myself, it seems more sustainable.

Sustainable - now there's another word.

chocolate! or, lifestyle choices

2010-03-25T08:05:00.001-07:00

The farmer and I are making slow gradual changes in a way I like. The changes are to do with our eating habits, over the last year we have become somewhat complacent and indulgent with our food. The farmer is an excellent cook and appreciates encouragement and so meals have been getting more lavish. Recently we have become aware of changes associated with a year plus of rich food and plenty of it. It's time to cut back.

We've switched to cooking with coconut oil. There's plenty of information on the web about the benefits of using coconut oil, suffice to say here that it improves metabolic rate, strengthens the immune system and lowers blood pressure. Plus it's delicious. I have been making the oil myself - a time consuming process, but rewarding as the oil we use is completely organic, fresh and unbelievably rich and wonderful. There are two ways to make oil from coconuts in the kitchen (at least for food grade oil): cold pressed and stove-top. For cold pressed oil you need an oil expeller. We have the loan of a PITEBA oil mill. I like it, but it could do with some improvements, it's not the cleanest or easiest way to work. The other way is by grating the coconut, squeezing the milk out (easier with the addition of a little water), and then simmering the milk until it magically becomes oil. I prefer using the PITEBA, but it's easier using the stove.

I'm also making my own yoghurt and cream cheese. We had been buying 1/2 fat cream cheese, but I don't like the sound of the emulsifiers and gums and enhancers on the ingredients list, making one's own is very simple. (I will write up methods for yoghurt and cream cheese in another post.) It doesn't really take any time at all, and I know exactly what I'm eating. And of course it makes me so much happier to be making our food from scratch. If only we had a goat.

The sourdough starter is back on track and I've been making wholewheat sourdough biscuits daily for our lunch sandwiches. Served with cream cheese and greens from the garden.

And the chocolate? We've been researching cacao again and have read that cacao has a positive effect on lowering cholesterol and blood pressure, plus it balances moods and emotions, creates a sense of well being and suppresses appetite! We've been enjoying lightly toasted cacao beans with meals for the past few days. I really like it: anything that brings me closer to the land, the seasons and home scale food production fills me with such contentment and feelings of ease, yes, life is good.

Sourdough biscuits

2010-03-14T09:24:00.001-07:00

So the book I picked up is 'Lonesome Dove' by Larry McMurtry, seemingly a classic and definitely a good read. One of the main characters, Gus, takes much pleasure in making his sourdough biscuits before sunrise each morning. I was inspired to try myself, plus I needed to revive my sourdough starter. I'm really pleased with the biscuit; soft, light, tasty and very simple.

Sourdough is fabulous. Living in the Bay Area I was never impressed with it, that sour white bread in the hard brown crust just didn't do it for me. I began to work with it myself not because of the taste but out of a desire to play with wild yeasts. Just as people are different culturally, so are bacterias: Lactobacillis talamancais is very different from the Lactobacillus sanfranciscois! and I prefer the softer talamanca bacteria. I love the process, I love that these yeasts and bacterias are in the air, filling us as we breath, moving with us as we walk. Louis Pastuer said in the end that "microbes will win out". Thank goodness, who wants to live in a sterile environment?

Sourdough is easy. To begin a sourdough starter add a cup of flour to a cup of water (white flour works better than brown for this first stage). Stir thoroughly and leave in a glass jar in a warm place (75-85F) with a tea towel on top (to allow air in and air out). Stir twice or thrice a day for the next two to five days until you see bubbles form. This means the yeast is active. If you don't see bubbles you can cheat a little by putting in a pinch or two of store-bought yeast to get it started. Once you have bubbles you can begin to feed your starter, simply add two tablespoons of flour each day and enough water to keep your starter from becoming too thick / solid. At this point you can use your starter, or you can put her in the fridge to slow her down. Feed her whenever you use her, or every other day, or twice a week if she's in the fridge.

To make the biscuits, begin by making a sponge. Take 1/2 cup of the starter and add 1 cup flour and 1 cup milk (I also use soy milk, soy yogurt or regular buttermilk or yogurt). I throw a pinch of sugar in there to help the yeast. Mix and leave in a warm place overnight. Next day add 1 tablespoon of honey, beat, then add 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, a good pinch of salt and about a cup to cup and a half of flour. Add the first cup all all once and the rest little by little until you get a dough you can work with. Turn out on flour board, knead lightly for 5 minutes adding flour to stop stickiness. Roll out about a half inch thick, cut into 6cm rounds and dip in olive oil mixed with sunflower oil and black pepper (or other herbs) and place on a cooking tray. Cover with towel and allow to rise in warm place for 30 minutes. Cook at 375F for 18-20 minutes. Allow to rest for a few minutes before enjoying slathered with unsalted butter, Gus enjoyed his with honey.

tip: when cutting out the biscuits, don't twist the press, it seals the edges and creates an uneven rise!

comfort

2010-03-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

I felt back at home on Thursday and Friday, which is great as I've been feeling oddly unmotivated and out of sorts recently. Plus our internet has been having issues, which has kept me away from the computer and looking for books to read. But I think I'm coming back to myself.

Could be something to do with having fruit again. And getting my sourdough back together. The kitchen seems a little busier: instead of making one or two things a day I can keep busy with four or five.

On a recent trip to San Jose we stopped in at the Ark Herb Farm and picked up two more edible leaf plants: the zorillo and the divided leaf chaya. Both looked a little worse for wear in the nursey, and both were the only specimens for sale, but back on the farm under shade cloth and damp they have perked up and are looking good. We'll keep them in our nursery for a while, long enough at least to propagate more specimens and then we'll start planting out. Our edible leaf collection is growing - slowly - but it is growing. I feel a strange blend of nostalgia and wishing when I read northern gardening blogs and their morning coffee breaks pouring over seed catalogs, or pictures of gardens full of great heads of romaine or arugula. Sigh.

Yet I feel here a sense of pioneer pride in the slow acquisition of edibles: enforced self-sufficiency, trial and error, seed saving and worry mixed with the thrill of the hunt. It's not unusual for me to be chewing on things walking around the farm trying to find a new leaf for the salad mixes. I really must take a picture of the salad: full of green and purple leaves, pink, red and yellow flowers, shiny sprouts, succulent malabar spinach and tangy herbs, it's a beautiful thing.

I've left mung bean sprouts for a while, I like them but the weather is very hot just now and they seem to bolt and rot quickly. I'm sprouting lentils instead. I like sprouted lentils, they are much calmer and more docile than the mung, not as crisp or crunchy, but subtle and slightly chalky. And they fare better with the heat.

workshops

2010-02-25T18:49:00.001-07:00

We held the second of the farmer's permaculture workshops today. Well they'd better be called permaculture / natural farming in the tropics workshops: while we follow permaculture principles we don't adhere to many of the design elements; our climate, soil and conditions don't fit the classic model. Rather we follow a blend of Fukuoka's natural farming, permaculture and traditional (ie pre-chemical) local methods.

The first workshop held earlier this month, focused on tropical soils and how the rainforest creates its own environment. We looked at the natural components of soil, dug around under enormous forest trees, kicked at fallen logs, looked at fungi and the role of mycellium and worked on compost. We looked at mulching, forest floor technology, micro ecosystems and generally had a fun morning in the dirt.

Today's workshop focused on propagation techniques: collecting, cleaning, planting seeds; root, rhizome, stem and tip cuttings; root, rhizome and plant division; ground and air layering, and grafting. We worked with edibles, fruit trees and various ornamentals. It rained buckets and we were happy for the coffee and cookie break. It was great.

The farmer says he doesn't like giving workshops and now it's my turn, so next month we'll do a fermentation and a fruit processing workshop. Hopefully we'll have fruit! Yes, we'll have mangoes and guayabilla. Love it.

almendro pressing!

2010-02-21T20:25:00.000-07:00

Almendro almond almendro

2010-02-21T20:02:00.002-07:00

The Almendro de la Montana, (Dipteryx panamensis), is a beautiful emergent canopy tree, a mammoth thing, with lovely purple flowers and a yellowish bark. It is one of the giants and can reach 150 feet in height: we know several people who have bought their homes because of the view of an almendro. Two of these people (in different areas) were later devastated when the tree fell, but pleased by the milling of the wood, they both purchased as much as they could and it holds a special place in their homes as floors, banisters, furniture and facing. In this area it is illegal to cut down a large almendro, but the wood is very highly prized and so 'accidents' can happen.

The tree is food and home to the Great Green Macaw, unfortunately this stunning creature has basically disappeared from this part of Costa Rica, though there are efforts being made to return it to the wild, part of those efforts are the planting of almendros.

This post however is really about the fruit of the almendro. This is the season and as you may imagine we are busy harvesting - a 150 foot tall tree drops a lot of nuts. The almendro makes an almond like nut in a hard shell. This shell is wrapped with a soft fruit much beloved by various animals and birds. The tree is a great provider of food for several species of birds, night monkeys, pizotes, racoons, squirrels and forest floor dwelling agoutis, pacas and small wild pigs. Quite the party! We are visiting every other day to gather the fallen nuts whose fruit has been eaten: no point in taking the whole thing - we would rob the animals of their food and the fruit is of no use to us. The biggest almendro is in a far part of the farm, these are primarily forest and not fruit trees, so the hike prohibits too large a harvest in one go.

Back in the kitchen the first job is to boil the nuts for about 10 minutes or until the shell opens just a crack. A huge pot of boiling nuts reminds me a lot of my childhood and boiling mussels: the shells are covered in short green hairs that bear an uncanny resemblance to algae covered mussel or limpet shells. The water they boil in quickly becomes an olive green viscous soup not too dissimilar to the salty, sandy first boilings of crustaceans. When the water is poured off and one sits down with a small knife to open the shells it really feels like opening a mussel shell. Inside, the almendro nut is pale brown and about an inch and a half long, a tapered cylinder, slippy and held to the shell by something that looks just like that muscle (?) on a mussel. There's even some black fuzz along the edges of the shell. Strangely familiar. Shelling the nuts takes a while. Good time to chat with friends, we were lucky to have some friends staying with us last week who were happy to help, about 5 of us sat around shelling and talking while 3 others prepared the next step.

Actually there are several potential next steps. The easiest one is drying the nuts, we dry them for about 20 hours at 110F. Another method is to roast them as one would cacao, slowly over a low flame. I think I like the dried ones better though. The third option is by far the most work, and the one we seem to have chosen this past week: making oil.

Almendros almost drip oil. If they are stored in the fridge after boiling, one can find a small pool of yellow fat inside each nut. It seemed too good an opportunity, so we borrowed a friend's hand cranked oil expeller and set to work.

The oil expeller in question is a PITEBA, a small, relatively inexpensive, low tech, rather cute tool. The website talks about the tropics and different nuts and seeds, including cacao and coconut. It recommends drying the seeds first, so we did it twice, the first time with the fresh nuts (no patience), and the following day with the dried.

The first pressing with the fresh nuts was pretty much a no go. We thought we might get almendro butter, but no, what we made was meal. Dry meal (where did all the oil go?). I made cookies using the meal to replace just over 1/2 of the normal flour content. They were very tasty, strongly flavoured, reminded me of a very fresh marzipan cookie, with a little amaretto thrown in for good measure. Good, but no oil.

The second pressing was better. Harmony and I became terribly technical and measured everything so I can now say with some authority that one cup of dried whole almendros yields one packed cup of almendro meal and 5ml of almendro oil. One teaspoon. That's yer lot (as my mother would say). It's not much. It brought me to the realization of how much I take oil for granted. We processed about 1/2 cup of very pure, cold-pressed, organic virgin almendro oil before running out of nuts. It took us about 2 hours. We have yet to try the oil. It's sitting on a window ledge to be admired by everyone who passes. The meal on the other hand is being used with abandon, more cookies, a cake and a very interesting wild almond (almond in Spanish is almendro) pate. Mix ground almonds with chopped onion, garlic, parsley and sour cream, shape into a 'log' and chill. Tastes remarkably like liver pate (???).

back to work

2010-02-20T18:56:00.000-07:00

It's been a good long while since I last put digit to keyboard (yes I still hunt 'n' peck), mainly due to being overwhelmed by our recently opened kindergarten, but also because this is by far the quietest time on the farm.

There have however been events I could have written about; the vanilla processing; black pepper harvest; my continuing and grueling Spanish classes, to name just three, but school has taken over all my mental capacities plus my waking time. I think we might have settled down somewhat, enough at least for me to get back to my other passion: the farm.

January is without doubt the slowest month of the year. Bananas were the only fruit we harvested and our salads were looking a little weak too: our Cranberry Hibiscus died off after flowering in December and our Malabar Spinach lost most of its leaves. Everything slowed down in the garden. A time for pruning and mulching, repairing signs and propagating bromeliads in the nursery.

This is an el nino year which typically means it's dry here. January certainly was dry and almost all of the rain was dropped in a three day storm that delivered 12 inches in one go. This was also the three days we went to a hot springs resort - the only time we were warm those three days was when we were up to our necks in the hottest pool: we were never dry.

February has been a little different. The nutmeg harvest takes place in the early part of the month, though this year the harvest has been quite small, I haven't made more than 40 jars of nutmeg butter yet. Now we are in the Almendro time.

water apple blossom

2010-01-11T07:06:00.000-07:00

Manzana de Agua (water apple) blossom.

and I follow

2010-01-11T06:57:00.000-07:00

I wonder where we're going?

I'm off

2010-01-11T06:37:00.000-07:00

Red Poison Dart frog (Dendrobates pumilio) had enough of posing for the camera and headed off.

Happy New Year!

2009-12-30T20:34:00.001-07:00

May 2010 be a time of transformation, growth, abundance and beauty!

Happy New Year!

busy with life: Sea Heart School

2009-12-27T11:53:00.002-07:00

My posts have been somewhat erratic over the last month or so: I've been seriously distracted with a new project. Until this past year I was a Waldorf teacher, first in the UK, then the US and then here in Costa Rica. This year, 2009, I left teaching for what I thought would be for good. Throughout the year people have asked me to start a little school and I've resisted, but it's been gnawing at me. Events have happened, the stars have aligned properly, things have just seemed to slip into place and so I find myself about to embark on a new school project.

The Sea Heart School will begin January 20th (the Costa Rican school year runs beginning of February to mid December). We will begin with a kindergarten and a homeschool support group for older children. We chose our name for the sea heart vine (Entada gigas), wishing to have our symbol be something which would connect the forest and the ocean. Sea heart vines grow up through the canopy, they are leguminous and form the longest seed pods in the world. When ripe the pods drop and shatter sending the seeds in all directions. The seeds are very beautiful: a deep brown polished looking woody heart, often they make their way down streams to the ocean where they become one of the most common and attractive drift seeds. Carried across oceans or around the world in currents they wash up on shores as far away as Ireland to be carried home as gifts from the sea. The sea heart connects forest and shore in a wonderful way - as a living and beautiful and heart shaped seed, ready to grow into a thriving, climbing, nitrogen fixing plant! As a world traveler it also symbolizes our children who come from Central, South and North America and Europe. We hope our children will also grow and thrive and be at home in the forest, and the oceans, and are flexible and willing to travel to new destinations and make new discoveries on all levels of their being.

Our school house is very close to the farm, and almost as close to the ocean. It's a small traditional house with a yard that is ready to be painted, planted and loved. Right now it needs work - two walls, a rainwater collection system, repairs, paint, plumbing in the kitchen . . . but I love it, it's full of potential and crying out for the laughter of children. It has a grapefruit tree in the yard full of fruit - perfectly delicious pink fruits.

Christmas Gluten Free, Liver and Oat Dog Treats!

2009-12-24T16:52:00.006-07:00

How would the dogs do on christmas morning without something in their stockings? Not so well I fear.

Here's a nice healthy dog treat to tickle their fancy while everyone else is exchanging gifts. This recipe is gluten free for the sake of our shepherd, Hoss, who has wheat allergies. Any flour can be substituted, I sold these made with wholewheat flour at the farmers' market last week!

1/2 kilo liver (any variety, we use local pig as Hoss is somewhat sensitive to beef)
1 egg
1 grated carrot
1/4 cup oil
3 drops oregano oil or 1 teaspoon dried or 1 tablespoon fresh oregano (good for coats, bad for fleas)
2 cups chickpea flour (or substitute)
1 cup rolled oats

Blend liver into puree with water. Mix in other ingredients, you may need extra flour depending on the amount of water used. Drop cookie dough onto baking sheets. Bake at 350F for 15 - 20 minutes. Store in the fridge. Enjoy!!!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

christmas

2009-12-14T09:32:00.001-07:00

Christmas is almost upon us. One has to try pretty hard to muster christmas in the tropics. Growing up in Scotland I was intensely aware of the dark and the cold and the weight of the year. The solstice and the lights of the christmas tree, the burning fires and candelight, the feeling of anticipation for something more than gifts, the deepness and stillness that comes with snow, the strength of the quietness of those nights. . .

All the things that bring on a mood of reverence and awareness of what is beyond the small things of life have to be sought for anew here where the weather is as always, the light is it's typical 12ish hours and there's no snow for miles and miles and miles.

I'm getting there. I've found an online radio channel that plays what I want to hear for this time (Accu radio). I've made my first batch of mincemeat pies, and today will work on the second. I've made an advent nature table with the 4 kingdoms represented (figuring that the 5th, fungus, is present in all). I'm playing carols on my flute, and yesterday we decorated the tree.

Our christmas tree is a living one, a Norfolk Pine. Norfolk Pines don't grow here, but the farmer has a way with plants and has coaxed this one through several christmases now. It's not your typical christmas tree, the lower branches have been dropped and the bare trunk is decorated with lights and a couple of growing vines. It looks somewhat like a palm with its long slender (very slender) branches radiating out, each set making a 5 pointed star. The set it put out this past year make the tree about 7 foot tall, but luckily the branches sweep down and out, each is lightly festooned with old and handmade decorations.

I'm making several gifts, of wood, glass and wool, trusting that they'll all come together in time. The dogs biscuits will get done today and I've got an order in for pigs' ears with Noity, hopefully they'll have that treat too on the 25th.

We have a big party for friends and neighbours on the 25th and the invitations went out this weekend, we'll have rondon (recipe soon, a traditional dish of coconut fish stew), salads from the garden, christmas pudding and mincemeat pies, plus whatever else is brought to share.

It's all good. I'm slowing sinking into that peaceful center of joy and connection with the greater. All good.

ah

2009-12-07T07:24:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I last blogged, it seems I'm otherwise occupied with many varied but hard to pinpoint thoughts, tasks and activities. The farm is entering a more dormant period with the rains and change of light. Here, being 9 degrees north of the equator, we don't experience such dramatic solstices, we still have close to 12 hours a day, but the quality of light is different.

My pumpkins while still flowering will not set. The cranberry hibiscus having put all its energy into flowering is dying back, the malabar spinach is dropping leaves. It's a time to back down, weather the wet and take a moment out of the crazy growing spiral that is the rainforest.

In the orchards the mondu (Garcinia dulcis) is still fruiting, the araza has dwindled to one or two malformed fruits and my beloved champedak is almost done: each harvested fruit smaller and lighter than the last.

We are harvesting vanilla for the first time and I will post about that. And our salak is strong too, today in the kitchen I'll be drying the salak and making mondu jam.

Otherwise we've been busy going back and forth to San Jose for various appointments. We took part in a 'Sustainable and Fair' faire last weekend, it was very good. We were the only vendor there selling dried fruits and cacao and we sold out of everything but jam. It was also a good opportunity to connect with others and we have a couple of new clients from it. There were a lot of craft and artisan vendors selling some really nice things from shoes to masks, and several indigenous vendors selling heirloom grains and medicinals. And all of it fair trade and 'sustainable' (whatever that means). The faire is bi-annual and is by invitation only. I hope we are invited to the next one in May. Oh one more thing, the President was there and bought some jam and fruit from us. Does that make us by presidential appointment?

things to do - really?

2009-11-24T11:54:00.002-07:00

time goes by quickly here, and there's always something else ahead of us . . . to just take a moment out to sit and be takes planning - incredible. That needs to change. I need to learn from my surroundings, not get so caught up in rush of fruit and market and visitors and newsletters and ideas and and and . . .

but allow myself, gift myself, a moment to do nothing, but to be. Learn from my neighbours:

rain

2009-11-17T08:27:00.000-07:00

The rains have come. Great sheets of water slicing from the sky, thundering on the tin roof, overflowing the rain barrels, forming great muddy puddles, washing away leaves, twigs, branches and boughs, snarling clumps of debris below the bridge. Sounds like winter, and it would be fun if we could bundle up, close the doors and snuggle into a cozy fireside with mugs of hot cocoa. But no, we live in an open house, barely screened - ideal in the sunshine or showers but wet and damp and chill in these drenching seasons. The two of us and the dogs huddle in corners seeking solace from the drafts and the drifting rain, the floor wet and muddy from dogs who must go outside every once in a while, hardly able to hear ourselves from the noise of the rain on the roof. When the phone rings we must go below the house to where it's quieter.

rain through the flat windows, click to see the streams pouring from the roof.

The flat where my work kitchen is, is cozier, it has 4 full walls, all the way from floor to roof. The windows are screened, the tin roof is lined with wood. The oven is there. Soon I'll brave the 400 steps down the sodden, slippery hill through wet jungle foliage slapping my face and dripping down my neck, watching my every move as the wooden steps are like ice in this weather, squelching and squishing through the mud. Rain.

Paper making workshop

2009-11-15T19:51:00.002-07:00

There's more to our farm than just the farmer and myself. Anyone who has visited the website will quickly see that there are others. The others are the farmer's son and his very capable partner, and our 3 and a 1/2 workers. Together we are able to run the farm, garden and some more besides.

One of the besides is CARTS. CARTS is a joint venture between ATEC and the Botanical Garden. CARTS stands for Colectivo Artistico Reciclando en Talamanca por la Sostenibilidad, a Recycled Arts Collective for a Sustainable Talamanca (our area of Costa Rica), and is a collective of women artists working with recycled materials producing unique, useful, artistic pieces.

CARTS is sponsoring free workshops at the farmers' market the second Saturday of each month. Each workshop focuses on an art project with recycled materials. This past Saturday it was paper making with the very capable partner.

Paper making is simple, and it's fun. Take used paper - for example newsprint, old notes, yellow pages, receipts, whatever, and tear into strips then 1 to 2 inch squares. Soak for at least an hour, then whizz in a blender 'til it's the consistency of oatmeal. Pour into a tub with more water and agitate (small leaves, petals, other decorations can be added at this point). Take your screen and deckle and in a smooth movement lower at an angle into the tub, level off and bring up horizontally. Allow the water to drain. Remove the deckle and in another smooth movement invert the screen with the paper pulp onto a waiting piece of felt. Press the paper through the screen to ensure separation then lift the screen. Use a sponge to press - gently - to remove excess water. If you have enough space, the paper can be left to dry further on the felt. If not transfer to newsprint and place in the sun or somewhere airy to dry. For best results place weights on the paper to improve writing texture and form.

The workshop took place in the middle of the market space to a good sized audience of adults, a child or two, and stall holders. The participants ranged from complete novices to those who had experience and were there for the fun of helping and making. Some of the locals had never seen paper made before and were impressed at how easy it was with recycled paper - part of the purpose of these workshops is to encourage re-use and recycling (two concepts oddly new to this culture which is quickly becoming as throwaway as the US and Europe ever was). It was a successful workshop with people proudly leaving supporting freshly made sheets decorated with petals, leaves and coloured print.

December's workshop will be baskets made from tetrabrik, January I'll give a workshop on purses crotcheted from plastic rice and sugar bags. CARTS is putting together a catalogue of products, I'll try to link it to this blog.

butterfly

2009-11-12T07:18:00.005-07:00

I'm drying papaya seeds so that I can sprout them for salad mixes. The fermenting fruit attracts butterflies, wasps, bees, all sorts of visitors. Here's an owl (thanks Mike) butterfly from the side you rarely see.

My new guide book!

2009-11-09T20:10:00.005-07:00

Here's a few sample pages from my guide book to growing and gathering food in lowland Costa Rica. There's 68 pages of information and recipes on what grows here and what to do with it. It was really fun to write and I'd like to do some more, perhaps leaflets on cacao, black pepper, nutmeg - things that grow here on the farm, maybe a medicinal guide to very local plants, maybe a plant lore book . . . the list goes on of all the things I can do with all the free time I have (?). I want to print the book for sale at the farmers' market and in town, and also offer it online as a pdf file. Quite pleased with it!
click the photos for a closer look

jammin', with fudge

2009-11-04T19:48:00.005-07:00

After a long hiatus I made some araza jam this morning. There's a small season starting and I was able to pick 2/3rds of a bucket of fruit to make 11 jars of what has become our signature jam. I also found just enough nutmeg to make two jars of nutmeg butter. What incredible smells filled the kitchen! Especially as we were also slicing ginger and processing black pepper.

I've been trying to make fudge these last two days. Back in the US, my class would make and sell fudge by the caseload for Christmas fairs. We could knock out fudge like no-one else and had all the packaging and presentation - and sales talk - down to a tee. But this is the first time I've tried it in three years and the recipes from up north don't work so well due to temperature and humidity differences, plus the farmer won't eat butter (!). And there's the caveat that everything we offer at the farmers' market comes from the farm. So. Here's my new recipe:

Coconut Chocolate Fudge
one serving (enough for 4 people after dinner treat)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/4 cup coconut oil
2/3 cup coconut milk
1/2 cup powdered cacao
1/4 teaspoon vanilla

Melt oil, milk and sugar together in heavy bottomed pan, bring to boil and boil until it reaches the soft ball stage. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla. Wait for 5 minutes then stir in powdered cacao. Wait 5 more minutes then beat until mixture loses its glossiness. Pour into silicon mold (or onto greased parchment paper). Allow to cool before eating (if possible). The cacao and coconut milk comes from the farm, the oil came from Bastimentos Island, the vanilla from Mexico (but soon from our farm) and the sugar from the store. No photos, we ate it before I had the chance to bring out the camera.

'making' black pepper

2009-11-04T18:41:00.004-07:00

The farmer has been producing organic black pepper for over twenty years here on the farm. Pepper was introduced as an alternative cash crop for cacao plantation farmers after the cacao blight destroyed farm incomes throughout this region. We are the only people still producing black pepper in this area. The pepper is marvelous: we sell to tourists at the garden and to locals and restaurants alike, the farmer receives emails regularly from all over the world asking for more of that "wonderful pepper we bought on holiday". People living here take it as a gift on their journeys and those who visit regularly stock up on pepper for their time back home. We mill just enough each Friday night to sell at the market on Saturday mornings, and we always sell out. It's just so good: fresh, hot, bright, clean, crisp, pure . . . organic, excellent!

The black pepper plant (Piper nigrum) is a flowering vine native to India. Once the most expensive spice on earth, once more expensive weight for weight than gold, it was the main push behind the sea race to India (and hence responsible for the discovery of the Americas!).

The plant is grown on trees, stakes or trellises, here we use Madera Negra sticks which root and sprout branches giving some shade and protection. Madera Negra is leguminous and fixes nitrogen in the soil, thereby providing a nitrogen source for the pepper vines. We propagate through air-layers, production of fruit begins within a year, but for solid production we wait two years. pepper can be harvested throughout the year, though the main harvest comes in September through November.

Black (and green) peppercorns are produced from the unripe whole berries of the pepper plant. Each berry contains a single seed, covered by a very thin layer of pulp and skin. It is the skin and pulp which gives the colour and the special taste to black pepper. We pick our pepper when the seed is developed and cannot be squished flat between the finger and thumb. Berries ripen from the top of the stalk down, so we always try to squish the bottom berries to check for readiness.

White peppercorns are produced from the ripe berries. Ripe berries are red in colour, to produce white peppercorns the berries are soaked in water for a week until the flesh ferments and falls from the seed. the seed is then dried - this dried seed is a white peppercorn. We don't produce white peppercorns, just the black (although for our French and Italian clients we sometimes supply fresh green peppercorns).

To make black pepper first pick the perfect pepper.

Boil in water for 4 minutes, or thereabouts. The boiling cleans the pepper and begins to break down cell walls allowing the pepper to change colour from green to black.

After boiling, the hot pepper is rubbed across a mesh to separate the berries from the stems.

The stems are used as mulch.

The blackening berries are left to dry in the sun.

frog in the washtub

2009-11-03T20:19:00.003-07:00

cacao harvest time

2009-11-02T08:23:00.004-07:00

roasted cacao beans

We're in the middle of our cacao harvest. It takes a while, spread out over a course of maybe 5 weeks as we wait for pods to ripen. The cacao pods grow from the trunk and branches of the tree and change from a pale green to a darker yellow or red before they are ripe.
This farm used to be a cacao plantation, but was abandoned in the 1970s due to the Monila blight which took out almost all the cacao farms in this area. The blight attacks the fruit, not the tree, so there are still many many hundreds of trees around which produce fruit. The harvest is a spotty thing, as we do not treat the trees or fight the blight, we harvest what we can: the rest the squirrels or blight takes. It's not a huge harvest, just enough to last us the year.

The pods are hand picked with a curved blade on a strong stick - cacao pods rarely fall by themselves and last years blackened, eaten out pods can still be seen on the trees. They do make an excellent mulch though, so we like to see them on the ground. After picking they are cut open with a machete and the insides scooped out into a bucket. I've written about cacao several times on this blog (search for cacao in the search tool), so won't go into too much detail herte about how it all looks. When the bucket is full it is emptied into a gunny sack - in our case old rice sacks, and hung in a cool covered area, for 5 days or so. In the past the cacao was piled onto banana leaves and covered with more leaves.

Inside the sack the beans ferment in their white gloopy pulp: fruit flies, beetles, earwigs are all part of the process. The bag smells like fairly bad and oozes a sticky transparent juice. Not really what one would associate with chocolate.

After 5 days the beans look like beans - the white pulp covering is gone and they look like smooth plump almonds in a tawny covered skin. Now they are sun dried for 3 or 4 days or until they snap cleanly when broken in two. At this stage they are ready for storage - the major chocolate producers buy them at this point and roast them as needed. We roast ours just before we use them for the best flavour.

The beans are edible at every stage, raw in their pulp they are bitter and 'green', taste nothing like chocolate. Dried they are still bitter and smell a little chocolately but have no real taste. After roasting they begin to have the wonderful aroma of chocolate. We use our in granola bars, in granola, in dried fruit mixes and to munch on when we need an energy boost.

cacao pods on the tree

pile of pods, each pod contains 20-50 beans

the gunny sack with beans and pulp

inside the gunny sack, day 2

getting ready for Christmas, caribbean style

2009-10-30T19:50:00.003-07:00

Bastimentos

2009-10-30T19:22:00.006-07:00

Bastimentos is a small island about 10 minutes by water taxi from Isla Colon. We went there to visit a friend who manages an incredibly beautiful 24 hectare farm. The island is really lovely, there are no cars and the only 'road' is a concrete path about 7 foot wide by maybe 1/2 a mile long. Most people live on or just off this main street. The houses are quite tightly cluttered and almost all are wooden Caribbean style with gingerbread trim - in various states of repair. Kids played baseball, a rather narrow type of baseball, on the street. The restaurants and houses on the ocean side stand out over the water, on the other side they rise up a low hill. The islanders are a mix of indigenous natives who still live traditionally (again to a greater or lesser degree), afro-Caribbeans, Chinese (who came for the canal and settled), latinos and foreigners. It's low season here and we only saw two other tourists.
After a great fish lunch we hiked up the hill to views of beautiful beaches on the other side of the island, to visit another organic farm: up in the hill. This farm is owned by a Scottish girl and her Argentinian husband. For some odd reason there are very few Scots in this part of the world, and I had heard of this girl for a couple of years. Jeanette and Javier and their two kids are really lovely and working very hard making their farm a beautiful place to be. They have a cabin for rent with great views and Jeanette makes excellent brownies with coconut oil and deliciously light teas. She has her own line of organic coconut based oils, lotions and creams and sells home produced chocolate. And Javier is a carpenter and built their house and the cabin. Very nice. She sells online and at the new farmers' market on Isla Colon, and to shops around Panama. I'm hoping we can trade some things!

squall

2009-10-30T19:02:00.002-07:00

Sitting eating delicious battered fish on the deck of a shabby looking restaurant standing on stilts out over the water, a few raindrops begin to fall. Not too worried, we continue to eat. The rain becomes a little more persistent so we pick up our plates and move back under semi cover and continue. Five minutes later, with steady rain we move under the tarpaulin roof. Two minutes later we, and everyone else, retreat to the bar which has a tin roof. By now the rain is falling hard and the wind has really picked up: the paper lantern lights are now banging wildly against the roof, and the Panamanian flags on the bar are behaving like proud wind socks. The lights are flickering, the rain is coming straight in, sideways. They move the TV. Now the wind which is in turns warm and cold is really blowing. The street behind us is flooding as the waves begin to schloop over the deck and hit the road between the buildings. Then the power goes. The wind feels colder, or perhaps it's because we're wet. The staff are wearing trash bags with holes torn for head and arms. They have given up on the customers and are talking loudly into their cell phones crouched down out of the rain and wind behind the bar. The only light comes from taxis which are ploughing through water on the street. In the lights of one a dog is swimming across the road. Someone in the bar lights a cigarette and the wind does strange things to the glowing ember tip, making it look as if it is 3 or 4 lights instead of one. The lightning illuminates us from time to time: grey, wet, hair plastered to heads, sodden meals, a child still eating dark pink ice-cream. We wonder how to find the hotel and try to estimate the wind speed. The farmer, who was a sailor, estimates 70 miles an hour, with gusts of 80. Coconut palm fronds are lashing buildings and each other. It looks like a newsreel.
And then slowly the wind lessens. The lanterns cease their crazy dance, the flags hang down, we can hear ourselves speak. The rain drops a little, not stopping but mellow enough for us to pay the bill by cell phone light and head out into the flooded street. The road has holes and we bump up and down, sometimes ankle deep in water, sometimes knee deep. We've been on the island 2 hours and we find our hotel by chance. Inside the dark room we discover we have no towels, no water and no fan. But it's okay, this is the Caribbean and all will be good in the morning.

trip to Bocas del Toro, Panama

2009-10-30T17:38:00.004-07:00

Just returned from a great little trip down to Panama. The Caribbean islands of Bocas del Toro are 3 1/2 hours from here, including crossing the terrifying border between Costa Rica and Panama.

Terrifying because the Sixaola river lies between the Costa Rican and Panamanian borders. The river itself isn't so scary, though it does have alligators I hear, what is scary is the old, old, rusty, old wobbly iron and metal 200 yard bridge that spans the river. It's best not to look down as one can clearly see the river (a good 30 feet below) between the ancient wooden railroad tyes, some are rotten and there's places where the boards are missing. At one point officials laid planks perpendicular to the tyes to help support traffic. And by traffic, I'm not talking foot passengers: enormous 18 wheelers thunder across the bridge and when they do the folk on foot have to squeeze themselves against the railings (those old, old, rusty railings) to avoid being squished somewhere on a Central American no man's land. It's enough to make one want to go to Nicaragua instead.

Almost. Because after that ordeal, and an hour in a nervous taxi over a beautiful mountain landscape, and 1/2 an hour by water taxi across a marvelously calm sea, one arrives at Isla Colon, the largest and most developed of the islands.

christmas pudding

2009-10-22T19:18:00.006-07:00

Today I made the christmas pudding. It's always a fun thing to do, partly because the list of ingredients is long but simple, partly because it's so much a part of tradition, partly because the end result is so, so good. I'm not sure of the tradition of Christmas Puddings, and anyway there are plenty of sites explaining it, even a site or two dedicated to this institution, but I do enjoy them. As a child we would have at least two puddings each Christmas - one made by my gran, the other, a more traditional Scottish pudding, made by my great aunt. The Clootie dumpling was, alas, always shunned by my sisters and myself. It was perfectly round and had to be cut to stand on the plate, but the skin was spongy and gooey-slimy at the same time, and it gave me the dry heave - literally. Too bad, because inside it was like the other pudding - delicious. But we weren't allowed to just pick at the inside, no we had to take the skin too. Now as an adult, I would like to try it again, just to see if it really is as dreadful as I remember. I somehow doubt it.

I have made christmas puddings on and off for the last few years, this year I even made one for my birthday cake in August. They are so delicious because they are basically a combination of fruit, spices and alcohol held together by a tiny bit of flour, some breadcrumbs and good will. Once made they sit for a minimum of 2 months gathering flavour and texture, aided by the regular addition of more alcohol. They are twice cooked: steamed for 6 hours initially, then a further 2 hours on the day of serving.

Very very rich, and most often served with brandy butter or whipped cream: a perfect companion to an already dangerously heavy Christmas dinner. But that is what Boxing Day is for - recovery time for all the over-indulgences. It was traditional in my house, and many others in Scotland, to slice left over pudding and fry it for breakfast, served with a fried egg on top. Never mention cholesterol.

Christmas Pudding
4 oz suet (or vegetable shortening)
2 oz wholewheat flour
4 oz brown breadcrumbs, fresh
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon clove
1 whole nutmeg freshly grated
2 oz chopped crystallized ginger
8 oz brown sugar
24 oz mixed dry fruit - I used 10 oz prunes, 10 oz raisins, 4 oz mango, but as long as you use plenty of raisins you can add whatever you like - figs would be great, dates too, I used bananas in my birthday version.
1 grated apple
zest of one lemon or lime, or orange
2 eggs
5 fl oz dark beer
2 tablespoons port or other rich alcohol. I use whiskey or rum.

Mix all ingredients except eggs and alcohol. Blend eggs and alcohol and add to mix. Mix should be sloppy, not sticky. Leave overnight then steam, tightly covered in pudding bowl for 6 hours. Wrap in wax paper then cloth (traditionally, but here in the tropics I put it in the fridge), and leave in cool place for at least two months. Every 3 weeks make holes on top of pudding and add 1/4 cup of whiskey, brandy or rum.

To serve, steam for further 2 hours, remove gently from bowl, douse in alcohol and set alight. Serve with brandy butter, heavy cream or ice-cream.

Oh and another tradition - wrap a penny in foil or wax paper and add to the mix. Whoever finds the penny in their serving has a prize. For my birthday pudding, the prize was a massage, this time it might be dinner at Loco Natural, my favourite restaurant in town.

One of the great things about the pudding is the anticipation and the ritual. When I made this with the kids in my classes we always read Truman Capote's 'A Christmas Memory' the day before we began. It's a wonderful story about Truman making Christmas fruit cakes with his ancient cousin, so touching and so beautifully written. I didn't read it this time, but I know the story so well now, "It's fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat.". Superb.

what happens when we're not at home

2009-10-20T20:20:00.002-07:00

This is Hoss, our shepherd mix, enjoying time out with the 'Edible Austin' magazine, sometimes life is just too hard . . .

kumquat in rambutan syrup

2009-10-19T17:44:00.006-07:00

This is delicious over pancakes and probably good with ice-cream. It also works with chicken dishes. Another recycling recipe from the farm kitchen!

The kumquat part:
Kumquats (Citrus fortunella), are a member of the citrus family. They grow on a small tree with sparse branches and highly glossy leaves: kumquats are often used as an ornamental because of their leaves. The kumquat is unusual for a citrus in that the whole fruit is eaten, in fact the peel is much sweeter than the flesh. The tree originated in China but can be found throughout Asia, the tropics and subtropical regions, Japan, California and Florida. Traditionally kumquats are eaten raw or preserved in sugar syrup, pickled, or dried.

preparing the kumquats:
wash, prick with a sharp knife and boil in water for 30 - 40 minutes or until soft. Set aside to cool. Reserve the cooking water.

preparing the rambutan syrup:
This is the recycling part. I was peeling rambutans to dry and throwing the peeled ones in a large bowl. After shelling a bowlful, I found I had a good 2 cups of rambutan juice in the bottom of the bowl. Rambutans are juicy little fellows - it would be possible to extract more juice by placing a heavy weight on top of the peeled fruit and leaving overnight in the fridge or on the countertop for a few hours. This way you get to enjoy the fruit too! Actually rambutans freeze very well, and make a delicious ice cold nibble - instant sorbet.

to make:
Add the rambutan juice to the kumquat's cooking water, add sugar to taste and bring to a boil. Taste again for sweetness (if you overdid it, add a drop of lime juice), and simmer until the syrup reduces in volume by a half. Add the cooked and drained kumquats, cook for another 5 minutes, then can appropriately in sterilized glass jars.

Drying kumquats is also fun - slice thinly and lay on drying trays. I dry ours until they are quite crunchy, then use them as a sweet citrus chip!

fruit porn

2009-10-19T08:29:00.002-07:00

the website at Island Farm

2009-10-15T07:35:00.002-07:00

The website is up at last! The link to this blog is on there too, check us out!

Finca la Isla

writing

2009-10-15T07:13:00.001-07:00

I've been spending the last week or so writing a brief guide to gathering and growing food in this area, although I think it would be applicable to all low lying humid zones in Costa Rica. I am quite pleased with it, though at this point I haven't printed it out: need to take pictures and I have been waiting for my new camera to arrive. It came this morning, so I should be busy all the day snapping vegetables and plants. Not sure what to do with the guide, whether it's something to sell at the Farmers' Market, or make available on the website. It's been fun, and I'm already thinking of new additions and possible inclusions.

Got a new mini laptop too! Love it, will be so useful for carrying between home and the kitchen.

back in the dirt . . . for a moment

2009-10-09T17:47:00.004-07:00

Somehow I found myself with time yesterday. It was a wet pleasantly cool day and I took the opportunity to check the pumpkin that's threatening to take over the farm. I had planted 12 seeds back in late July and of the 12, 5 had come up, 2 of which got inadvertently chopped by Sandro on his weed whacking rounds. I was sorely disappointed. However those 3 have done me proud and now I'm out there gingerly lifting the thick hairy vines off the heliconias, and unwrapping tendrils from young citrus. Oh I do love a pumpkin plant.

Still with time on my hands I went to work on our covered raised beds. It was so good to have my hands in the soil again, even if it was full of ants. The smell of the fresh compost and the decaying broccoli that never worked, was just so good. We have such a hard time getting seeds here that we now try everything we can find, just to see what works. At the moment we have a large stack of seed packets from the Asian stores in San Jose - there's not a letter on the packet that I can decipher, so we just try it all. The broccoli didn't work, nor did the one that looks like a radish. The parsley came up and withered after about 3 weeks, the eggplant sprouted and did nothing. What has worked is some variety of bok choy which works well as a salad green, and a flat leafed parsley. We have cherry tomatoes from seed we saved and chili peppers from seed smuggled out of Cuba.

So today I had the pleasant task of pulling up everything that wasn't happening. I say pleasant because so many of the gardening blogs I read are full of fall chores and bemoan the demise of harvests and summer gardens: it was nice to share some of that experience. But I'm not bemoaning because I get to plant again. After pulling the dead and dying I covered the soil with fresh compost, watered a little and left it to settle in - and give the ants an opportunity to disperse. I think we'll plant more of the bok choy and some incredible mustard greens that taste like wasabi. Perhaps tomorrow after the market I'll have another spare moment to get dirty again.

self sufficient propaganda!

2009-10-06T20:17:00.001-07:00

kitchen thoughts

2009-10-06T18:58:00.004-07:00

I was considering today how different my life is from anything I could have expected even 10 years ago. Back then I had just split from my partner, was teaching a third grade class, living in Oregon and making apple butter and dried figs from two friendly trees in a nearby park. My class had a wonderful allotment growing so many things I couldn't have imagined being able to grow back in Scotland: peppers, chilies, tomatoes, pumpkin, cucumber, beans, squash, corn and sunflowers. There were so many new experiences and so much I couldn't do.

I'm still having new experiences and there's still so much I can't do, but so much has happened too. It's incredible to think how 10 years have passed by so quickly and yet that time seems very long ago.

I was thinking about this today for two reasons: firstly it's almost time to make our Christmas Pudding. The first time I made it outside the UK was with that third grade class. What fun they had when we lit it on the last day of school before Christmas. I'm still in touch with a few of those kids, it's hard to believe they are 19 going on 20!

And secondly, I was sharpening my favourite knife. This knife is now my current oldest possession. It was given to me by a mother in that class when I first moved to the US in 1997. It's the only material thing I have left from that period. It has remained with me through relationships, jobs, over a dozen house moves, climates, environments, emotional and physical upheavals, times of peace and times of chaos. It has served me well, and it's only in this last year that I've learned how to sharpen it with a stone. It's a soothing experience this sharpening: the sound of the blade against the stone, the rhythmic circling, the feel of the slurry as spit mixes with stonedust. Something ancient and absolutely human: connection with all the cooks, butchers, barbers, sailors, warriors, scribes, woodchoppers, gosh just about everybody who ever wielded a knife since man first worked with metal.

Time flies. But back to the present. I needed a sharp knife to slice kumquat. I'm making kumquat marmalade and the fruits need to be cut thinly. Kumquats are a small citrus, orange in colour, with a good tasting rind and not much flesh. They are somewhere between a sweet and a sour orange in flavour and acidity and make a very nice marmalade with good flavour, colour and presentation. We have two trees and they are heavy with fruit. I also want to candy some kumquats for the Christmas pudding I'll start making in about 2 weeks time. Lots to do, isn't it great?

eating locally

2009-10-05T10:10:00.004-07:00

The Farmers' Market is becoming increasingly important to me, not simply the social enjoyment I get from sharing time and space with the other stallholders and our friends and customers, but the whole ideology behind the market: eating fresh local foods produced by fresh local farmers who know their dirt and love their land. (long sentence)
I've long been an advocate of harvesting my own food, whether it's something I've grown or something I've foraged, the simple joy never fades. I'm lucky and blessed to be able to make a living from this joy now.
Our first newsletter focused on support of the farmers' market and enthused about eating locally. Now I'm excited to be putting together the second with editorials continuing the theme and gardening info on which edibles work best in this area: I hope this becomes a series with each newsletter talking about a specific fruit, vegetable, medicinal or spice. I'm an avid reader of websites like Sustainable Table, Via Campesina/ Food First,Slow Food, which brings me to this post.

December 10th is Terra Madre Day - a day to celebrate local foods, sustainable and fair agriculture and the abundance the earth is prepared to offer us day after day:

"Slow Food is launching Terra Madre Day around the world, to be held for the first time on December 10 this year. Slow Food convivia, Terra Madre food communities and all people supportive of our ideals are invited to organize an event, however small or symbolic, in your local area.

By taking this opportunity with passion and inclusiveness, we can achieve one of the largest collective occasions celebrating food diversity ever achieved on a global scale,

A global revolution can only grow from local roots, and together our community actions will help build opposition to the misguided approach of agribusiness.

We invite you to let loose your creativity and make December 10 a memorable day, encouraging and supporting sustainable food in your corner of the world. It will give us all a boost and renewed pride in what we are doing locally, while knowing that we are part of a world network for change."

We'll be doing something here to celebrate, not sure what yet, but I'll let you know. Have a look at what's happening near you!

a corner of our farmers' market stall

2009-10-02T19:58:00.002-07:00

From left to right: kombucha, durian, marang, dried fruit mixes, crystallized ginger, fruit leather roll ups, mangosteen, salak, rambutan, langsat.

three burners, three pots, three jams . . . oh my!

2009-10-02T19:45:00.007-07:00

Today was a jam day. A lovely, bubbling, boiling, sugary, syrupy, fruity day. With a massage at the end (thanks Maria!).

I have a three burner gas stove in the kitchen. I love this stove, it has a black glass top, automatic ignition and there's space around the burners for all sorts of spoons, spatulas, jar lids and measuring/pouring devices. It's wonderfully easy to clean and looks good.

Today, as most days, it was busy. I had jam orders to fill and just about enough fruit to do it. We have a client who wants to sell our products in a health food store in San Jose, she wants a sample jar of every jam we make. I've explained to her a couple of times that our jams are seasonal - I use what's on the trees until there's no more left, and then I use what's coming into fruit next, and on it goes. She understands what I say, but the gap between understanding and understanding can be large at times - especially when we live in a world where everything is always available (so it seems even for those in Costa Rica). Seasonal is an empty word for most of us.

But that's the beauty of my work - I can never get bored of making the same thing - two months or less and that fruit I thought I'd always have is gone and something new has to be created for what's up next.

Having said that, there are fruits which have seasons throughout the year - and these were the ones I concentrated on today. Taking the beagle, I set off looking for nutmegs. The main harvest comes in the spring, but most of the time one can find 2 or 3 or 5 or 6 ready and open. Today I found 5 - just enough for 2 pots of jam.

Next we headed to the araza - a tiny gathering of 12 fruit, enough for about 4 pots. We had more luck with the cas, but the season is winding down after 2 glorious months.

By the kitchen I picked up half a box of mangosteen, and a couple of limes. The mangosteen has maybe another 3 weeks to go, I'll be sorry to see it go, for a whole year too.

Back in the kitchen I peeled, chopped and simmered the nutmegs while I opened the mangosteen and slipped the seedless segments into the blender. The seeded segments have to be squeezed - the seeds add too strong a flavour to the jam. I blended the mangosteen pulp and began to cook it down in a pot while I pureed the nutmegs. The araza had to be washed, halved and the seeds and goop scooped (think overripe pumpkin), then chopped, put in a pot and cooked down also. Then came the adding of sugar - white cane sugar for the mangosteen and araza, and raw brown cane sugar for the nutmeg. Grate some more nutmeg and sprinkle some cinnamon into the nutmeg butter, add lime juice to the mangosteen, and try to stir three pots simultaneously while telling the beagle he had better not chew my baskets for the market. Think about coffee and wish the farmer would appear and make some.

The nutmeg has a tendency to sputter and spit, but today no, thankfully. The mangosteen came out a beautiful pink, and has the best flavour so far (2 limes to 1/2 a box of mangosteen, about 3 handfuls of sugar). The araza behaved impeccably as usual and set up first. And the cas? Well that was scooped, strained and is sitting in the fridge waiting to become fruit leather tomorrow. After all I had my massage to go to.

Chinampas and Camellones

2009-09-28T10:04:00.003-07:00

More people arrive at this blog through Chinampas than anything else. This is very encouraging and I would like to give more information sources on this incredible and pertinent method of farming.

In brief this method of low technology, high intensity farming is as old as agriculture. The ancient civilizations of the Americas as well as those in south east Asia and parts of Europe used canals or terraces with raised beds and waterways to produce enough food for their population centers with relative ease and efficient use of mostly marginal land. Rather than hashing together a long entry here myself, I'm listing links to various other sites and research which say it better. Happy and enthusiastic reading! And please leave a comment if this works for you!

http://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/02_4/plachetka16.htm

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~cerickso/fishweir/articles/Erickson1986AgriculturaEnCamellones.pdf (in Spanish)

http://theislandfarm.blogspot.com/2009/08/camellones-chinampas-in-bolivia-from.html

http://theislandfarm.blogspot.com/2009/06/chinampas.html

http://books.google.co.cr/books?id=RzVcmreO-zgC&pg=PA83&lpg=PA83&dq=chinampas&source=bl&ots=X1cVa-FpKk&sig=tJTt4jBGoSaKvxk2KYbCBT8oJYU&hl=en&ei=XvDASorbN4_SjAfIzqBI&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=13#v=onepage&q=&f=false

http://books.google.co.cr/books?id=23RuM8OUngEC&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=chinampas+xochimilco&source=bl&ots=UzbHynDetZ&sig=v3-S7DPqO3bytpaKHItzFKlrK3I&hl=en&ei=I_LASpeOCOOOjAfux71O&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3#v=onepage&q=chinampas%20xochimilco&f=false

Cahuita market

2009-09-28T09:11:00.002-07:00

For the last three Sundays, we've been taking our fruits and products to sell at the Cahuita Farmers' Market. Cahuita is a small town with one main road and a lot of hotels and restaurants hidden along the beach or back in the forest. It used to be the end of the road and very popular for backpackers, but then the road was pushed through all the way to Manzanillo and Cahuita became a bit of a backwater.

The farmers' market started maybe 2 months ago. It's in the basketball court behind the casa de cultura at the end of the main street, almost at the beach. There's no roof over the stalls, but morning shade is provided by a large almond and even larger caimito tree. A mature mango soaks up the sun across the court from where we set up our stall. It seems fitting that fruit trees surround the market, they are certainly beautiful to look at. Our spot is under the almond and yesterday we were graced by a soft rain of tiny yellow white flowers.

While the setting is more beautiful and bigger than the Puerto market, there are fewer vendors and a little less energy. Claudio the market manager is trying to change that. Yesterday he had a good calypso / reggae band perform - he even sang a couple of numbers himself - until a heavy downpour shorted out the speakers. It was good, although the band set up behind the stalls and all the customers left the market to be near the music. But we enjoyed it. And there's a raffle: each vendor donates one or two items to make up two baskets to be raffled off. Every time someone spends 3000 colones (about $5) they receive a raffle ticket. It doesn't matter if you spend a dollar here, another there - for every 3000 spent you get a ticket. The draw is called at noon and one has to be present to win. It's a great idea and the raffle draws people. I think the market will continue to grow. Five vendors, including us, come from the Puerto market. Cahuita is far more mellow, with people drifting in and out, there's time to share a little bit or visit with the other stallholders.

We're there not because we don't enjoy a restful Sunday morning, but because we have a lot of fruit right now. Our harvest will last for another 6 weeks or so and then I don't know if we'll continue at Cahuita. I would like to - to support the market and I like the atmosphere, but it makes for a long weekend. Our plants go down very well and slowly people are buying our jams and dried fruits. I haven't taken tempeh or kombucha there yet - that's a whole education and I don't know that there's so many people familiar with them, or interested in learning. It works in Puerto because of the large number of north Americans who already know or have heard of them. The foreigners in Cahuita are mostly Swiss - we sometimes hear more Swiss German spoken than Spanish - and seem a bit more cautious in their eating habits. We'll see, if they can erect a roof of sorts for the rain and more people come it will be hard to give it up. Support your local Farmers' Market!!!

day out

2009-09-25T19:32:00.007-07:00

Yesterday we went out for the morning to run errands, nothing special in that but I thought it might be interesting to share a somewhat typical day on the Caribbean.

We left the house running only 20 minutes late, but 15 minutes along the road had to turn back because I forgot my passport. We needed the passport for the police checkpoint. The police stop traffic and check mostly for illegals from Columbia, but it depends . . . usually on the time of month and whether there's been any recent trouble. We sailed through the checkpoint without a policeman in sight, ah well.

Our first port of call was the wonderful Aviarios Sloth Rescue Center. This is really a unique place, the only one in the world. They have over 130 sloths which have been rescued and are now living at the center, many because they were brought in as abandoned babies and have grown up there. It's an incredible organization run on love and respect for these amazing creatures. They have an "Adopt a Sloth" program which I would highly recommend for birthday or Christmas gifts to all those people who already have enough. We were there because they want the farmer to work on their gardens. A long time ago, when they were just starting out, the farmer helped them with their initial gardens, now they are so much bigger. I'm excited, it means we get to see more of this:

The center is seeing more and more abandoned babies. Sloths are pregnant for 11 months and they keep their babies with them for up to a year. The babies ride on their mum's belly and then her back. If the mum doesn't think the baby will make it, she'll drop it to save herself. Sloths have a terribly slow metabolism and need to conserve as much energy as possible: a sickly baby is just too much. The fact that more babies are making it to the center could mean that the sloth population is having a harder time environmentally OR it could mean that the people are more responsive to animals in need and know that they can be saved at the rescue center. I choose to believe the second option.

We left and headed for Limon, the regional city. The road runs along the ocean for much of the way and over a few rivers where I always look for caimans, never seen one yet though. We pass houses on stilts with wooden walls in pastel shades of mostly peeling paint and rusted tin roofs. Homemade hammocks are strung between trees and the sign for 'dos-pinos', the large co-operative selling dairy and juice products, has its round green metal presence on the telephone poles. We rounded a corner to see a recently killed German Shepherd dog in the road being mauled and fought over by vultures. To come from the Sloth Center to this was very ugly, but re-enforced how close life and death are. The Caribbean is good for that - everything here is sharper, more real, life and death are bigger and bolder. We have a German Shepherd at home and I was struck by how familiar and awful the sight was.

Limon is a pirate town. Just offshore is the island where Columbus landed claiming Costa Rica - rich coast - for Spain. It's a port, with all that entails and has been the center for shipping enormous quantities of bananas and pineapples, coffee and cacao out, and who knows what in. It's far more Caribbean than Costa Rican and has an energy that's a little raw and buzzed. Most of the stores we had business in were run by descendants of the Chinese workers who built the railway, but I wouldn't say it is a very cosmopolitan place. We had good cold fresh pipa (young coconuts) as we walked through the crowded, dirty center. We walked through the Central Market between stores selling plastic pots and offal, cheap Panamanian clothes and imitation electric goods. There are herb stalls which have odd colored liquids in old soda bottles and great wads of dried grasses; vegetable stands offering piles of mango, carambola, avocados; fish shops with great heads of snapper and chunks of marlin, and everywhere the pungent aroma of trash left out. We snacked on roasted peanuts with salt and lemon. Limon is always hot and we are always in a hurry to leave. We hit the road home stopping for a pati - the local corn pastry with spicy meat filling, and frozen jobo juice. Both were delicious.

It took us an hour to get home, sailed through the checkpoint with no questions, my passport tucked safely in my bag.

making chocolate

2009-09-22T06:55:00.003-07:00

I was asked how cacao beans became chocolate. Here's the simple answer, demonstrated by Flori, who helps me in the kitchen twice a week (and who is showing me her method for 'milk' chocolate here), and Luca, my nephew visiting from Scotland.

First the beans must be harvested, fermented, dried, roasted and the shells removed. (See earlier post, Cacao.)

Grind the beans in a mill with the finest tooth possible, you want the beans to become a paste, keep passing it through the mill until a thick paste consistency is obtained.

Make coconut milk by grating the flesh of two coconuts, putting in blender with either the water from the coconuts or a cup of regular water, blending then straining. Save a little of the grated coconut for later.
Put the cacao paste in a pot and add a little of the coconut milk, stir and cook over medium heat until the mixture dries out a little. Stirring all the time!!!

Add more coconut milk add stir again - you want the mixture to almost dry out, the liquid from the milk to evaporate but the flavour to remain. The consistency of the paste will become smoother.

Keep adding the coconut milk little by little until the paste becomes more 'plastic'. Taste and add some sugar if you need it (evaporated cane sugar would have been the sweetener used traditionally).

Remove the pan from the heat, dollop the contents onto a work surface and allow to cool a little. Roll into sausages or truffle sized balls and coat in the grated coconut, or leave as is. Put in fridge to set up.

Enjoy!!!!!

working with the king (of fruit)

2009-09-20T05:23:00.006-07:00

We have an abundance of durian. Last year I dried the pieces, but they were a bit strong for my mixes and truth to tell I hoarded them eating them myself until I couldn't eat any more. This year with more durian my situation is different and I have tried something a little more interesting. I know durian candy is made in south east Asia and I've seen a loose recipe or two for durian jam. I've made something somewhat in between: durian chews.

(For those of you unfamiliar with durian I have an earlier post, Durians are here.)

It's a fairly basic recipe. Take some durian:

open, and remove the flesh and seeds:

take the shells to the compost:

separate the flesh from the seeds, keep the seeds for planting. Remember the seeds must not dry out!!

Put the flesh in a pot, add a little bit of raw sugar and cook down til thick and a dark green/yellow:

Then my camera broke. But spread it on a sheet, about 1/2 inch thick and dry for about 24 hours, turning every few hours. Cut and store between wax paper in a sealed airtight container.

A lovely, chewy, sweet, not so sticky, not so smelly way to enjoy durian. Long live the King!

Chempedak - heaven, with a hint of something rather more sensual

2009-09-15T08:50:00.003-07:00

It's hard to describe the chempedak, it's my all time favourite fruit, possibly favourite food. I have 1/2 a chempedak drying just now and the smell is driving me crazy: it's like walking into a candy store as a kid with a pocketful of change, buying a mix and cramming it all at once into my mouth - that's the heaven part, the hell part - well it's not so much hell, but I don't think the heady sensuality, the tactility, the heavy warmth of the aroma or the enveloping nature of the taste is something that goes so well with the traditional take on heaven. It's so decadent a fruit. I found myself face first in the remains of it, after I had extracted all those golden lobes and had scraped as much as I could with my fingers I buried my face in what was left trying to savour as much from the outer flesh as I could. Finally I somehow awoke from my reverie somewhat embarrassed and very sticky, face and hands covered in sweet goo. . . Oh chempedak.

Artocarpus integer is closely related to breadfruit (Artocapus altilis), marang(Artocarpus odoratissimus) and jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus). It's native to Malaysia where it's eaten young as a vegetable, mature as a fruit: fresh, fried in batter or made into ice-cream. The fruit has a strong smell when ready, stronger even than durian and can be mistaken for natural gas - the first time I smelled one I hunted all over the kitchen for the gas leak. It's not such a large tree, at least those I've seen growing in this area aren't very large, although they are all still in their 20s at most. The fruits grow in clusters straight out of the trunk and larger branches, just like the jackfruit. The trees begin to produce between 3 and 6 years and can produce twice a year, with one harvest being heavier than the other.

The fruits take about 6 months to mature and are somewhat cylindrical shaped with a green, yellow skin covered in flat or slightly raised hexagons, each with a dot at its center. They soften as they ripen. Each fruit, between 8 and 12 inches perhaps, breaks apart to reveal around 25 to 30 seeds, large like the durian and fatter than jackfruit seeds. The seeds are wrapped in golden yellow sweeter than honey envelopes of flesh. It's sticky, but nothing like the jackfruit, not as much as the marang either, and the seeds are easy to remove. The flesh is far more like jackfruit than durian and has a firmness which becomes deliciously chewy (like taffy) when dried.

In 'The Fruit Hunters', Adam Leith Gollner describes sneaking his chempedak round the back of his hotel and gorging on it, he compares the taste to his childhood favourite - Fruit Loops. I've never had Fruit Loops, but would be delighted to find they tasted the same. It's that kind of fruit - it becomes in an instant a treasure, a somewhat secret joy to be taken quickly, all at once and in hiding, while one is lost in the very pleasure of it. Something primal about it. It's wonderful, I'm planting a field of them!

Chempedaks are what's termed 'ultratropical' - they won't grow below a certain temperature, they like to be in warm, humid climates, preferably with shade and out of the wind. Definitely a forest tree, so maybe I won't plant a field, maybe I'll search out secret hidden spots in the jungle for my secret, hidden fruit.

up to my neck in fruit

2009-09-15T06:40:00.002-07:00

I haven't had time, or energy in the evening, to write anything remotely interesting, let alone grammatically correct. I've been immersed in fruit. My hands are sore and cut from opening durian and removing the flesh; they're stained purple brown from breaking into mangosteens; puckered and lined from squeezing cas pulp through colanders. I'm happy. And tired.

toucan

2009-09-06T17:50:00.001-07:00

hot jobos cause explosion

2009-09-06T17:07:00.002-07:00

I knew it would happen. It was like the day I learned to ride my bike: I cycled over broken glass and it didn't harm my tires, so I turned back and did it again - 2 flat tires and no more bike riding. It was the same with the jobos.

I knew I wasn't supposed to put hot things in my plastic jugged blender, but the day before I had been impatient and had done it anyway without any ill effects. So I reasoned that I could do it again, being careful not to put too many in. But wrong. Within a few seconds the plastic exploded sending shards all over the kitchen, spraying walls and counter tops with hot jobo juice and sending the scalding pits flying everywhere. The blade continued to whir, effectively cleaning out all of the hot sticky mess, until I could reach behind it and yank the plug out the wall.

That was the end of that experiment.

We have three large jobo trees which have been dropping copious quantities of thumb length, fat, yellow brown fruit for weeks now. The jobo is related to the jocote and the june plum, both of which give larger fruits than this smaller cousin, and both of which are sold in markets and by roadsides all around Costa Rica. I like the taste - very apricot like in a sour kind of way, and strongly flavoured. However the pit is large and the fruit fibrous: not so practical for my purpose.

And yet . . . well we have three large trees dropping fruit I'm stepping on as I harvest carambolas. What to do? I'm giving vinegar a go - fill a bucket, cover, shake periodically, strain a month later, bottle for several more months. The fruit is somewhat sweet, it should make vinegar. And jam? Well the taste tells me yes, but scraping that 1/8th inch flesh from round the seed - is a little crazy making, especially when I've got ALL this other fruit piling up in the kitchen. So I thought I'd simmer it a little to soften and extract as much of the juice, then throw it in the blender and strain it.

So now I've had to just stick with the juice - not a lot to work with, but we'll see. If I can make a syrup that would be fine. A long time ago I made sloe gin. I think jobo gin might be quite nice . . .

Mangosteens are in!

2009-09-03T07:50:00.004-07:00

Eric Mjöberg, a Swedish explorer, zoologist and ethnographer, wrote of the mangosteen:

"...an abundant white, juicy pulp, soft, sweet, slightly acidulated, and with a delicate, delicious flavour, which recalls that of a fine peach, muscatel grapes, and something peculiar and indescribable which no other fruit has."

"The mangosteen has only one fault; it is impossible to eat enough of it, but, strictly speaking, perhaps that is a defect in the eater rather than in the fruit."

and;

"It would be mere blasphemy to attempt to describe its wonderful taste, the very culmination of culinary art for any unspoilt palate."

The Mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana), is a beautiful evergreen tree with good sized dark glossy green leaves. Size ranges from 7 to 25 meters, although most of the trees we have are around 12 meters. The branches run fairly straight out from the trunk making climbing the tree about as simple as walking up a spiral staircase. The fruit vary in size from a little larger than a ping pong ball, to a little smaller than a tennis ball. When ripe they are an incredible royal purple colour.

Breaking open a mangosteen is - for the first timer - (and for the first time each season thereafter), an opportunity for rapture: the denseness and richness of the purple, possibly streaked through with bright green fibers; the mound of juicy, soft white flesh, ready to fall into segments; the light floral fruity scent and the rising levels of salivia in the mouth as one knows just how good it's going to taste. The taste, especially if the mangosteen isn't quite as ripe as it could be - is at first sour like an unripe strawberry can be (but lighter than that), then just as your wincing from the acidity, the most mellow subtle sweetness hits. Simply wonderful.

The mangosteen (the Queen of Fruit, Durian incidentally is regarded as the King of Fruit) has some interesting peculiarities: firstly the fruit does not require fertilization; secondly the 'shell' or husk becomes harder the older the fruit is - old mangosteens can lie on the ground for 2 years or so before they'll begin to break down (even in this climate); there was an import ban on fresh mangosteens into mainland USA until 2007; Queen Victoria supposedly offered rich rewards to anyone who could bring her the fruit.

Mangosteens are also enjoying something like star status in the world of 'superfoods' - seemingly the xanthones found only in the inedible shell fix just about every ill. Too bad the husk is far far far too bitter to eat.

But I'll settle for that unbearably good almost painful first bite where the balance between sweet and sour is enough to drive one to madness. Say it again Mr Mjoberg!

In the office

2009-08-31T07:49:00.003-07:00

I've spent much of this weekend sitting at the computer writing and researching and generally thinking. We have a lot going on just now: creating a website for the Farm and Botanical Garden, making our first newsletter for distribution at the market and garden, putting together a series of workshops for January and February. A lot of head work about physical work.

And in the near distance I can hear howler monkeys while beside me in the Akee tree, Montezuma Oropendulas are chattering, clacking and making that odd sound like branches breaking.

2009-08-29T05:01:00.001-07:00

It's my birthday today. All day.

2009-08-28T20:19:00.002-07:00

The 'Alliance for Community Trees' looks like a great place to get involved with urban forestry. This is what they say about themselves:

"The Alliance for Community Trees (ACT) is dedicated to improving the environment where 83% of Americans live - cities, towns and metropolitan areas. Together, local ACT member organizations have planted 7.8 million trees with help from 450,000 volunteers nationwide.

Mission Statement

To support grassroots, citizen-based nonprofit organizations dedicated to urban and community tree planting, care, conservation, and education."

Go guerrillas!!! (see post below).

Guerrilla mulching and composting campaign !!!!!!!

2009-08-28T19:50:00.003-07:00

Let's launch a new challenge, or campaign, or call it what you will, to give something back to our urban trees!

The trees which decorate and beautify our urban landscape, whether they be in parking lots, along pavements, in tubs in malls or growing wild through cracks and in abandoned lots deserve care and attention. These trees provide local shade, mitigate the heat generated by acres of concrete, enhance and mediate urban water systems, create micro-environments and give habitat to other plant, insect, bird and mammal species. They bring life to otherwise drab scenes: who hasn't sought some solace or protection below a tree in the city?

It's time for action! All you composters, gardeners, wild harvesters, green-eco-sustainable-vegetarian-homesteader-permaculture-biodynamic-organic types - carry compost with you. Or failing that, carry mulch with you.

Challenge yourself to compost and/or mulch an urban tree each time you go to that parking lot, or railway station or mall or library, or wherever you may go. Where there's a tree, there's an opportunity to give!

Compost may be kitchen scraps, grass cuttings, tree trimmings, pulled weeds . . .
Mulch may be dried leaves/plant matter, newsprint, cardboard, the sawdust from your child's rabbit / hamster cage, the lint from the dryer, straw . . .

Go guerrillas!

trees

2009-08-28T08:34:00.007-07:00

A nearby construction and hardware store has a large parking lot and in this parking lot stands a lone tree. The farmer and I have had conversations about this tree. I don't remember offhand what type of tree she is, she doesn't drop noticeable fruits or seeds, but she's a good size, maybe 12 metres tall with a fairly broad canopy. A handsome tree with nice spreading branches. She's slightly raised above ground level and there's a low wall around her to hold in her dirt. Her trunk is maybe 60 cm in diameter.

I wonder about this tree. She stands alone without interaction from other trees, her roots are bound somewhat under concrete which must reflect a lot of heat back on her underside leaves and branches. The rain that falls around her is taken off to drains and doesn't penetrate the soil around her. Vibration from passing cars and exhaust fumes must stress her.

But the farmer wonders differently. He sees that she has no competition from other trees, that she's free to grow as she likes, without the stress of reaching for light or dropping lower branches to conserve strength. Her roots are protected by the concrete and always cool. The rain that falls will get to her through drains but she'll never be waterlogged.

The tree looks good, she seems to be doing well. She makes a resting place, a point of shade for birds and insects in an otherwise barren area. She brings beauty to drabness.

We use trees for shade, decoration, camouflage in our urban and not so urban areas. They grace us with micro-environments of shade, protection, focal points of beauty and peace. Their green offers a resting place for our eyes in fields of gray; if we stop to listen we might hear the wind in their leaves or a bird or insect or squirrel in their branches. They offer habitat for smaller species of plants and animals. They show us what nature is. Next time you are driving along a freeway, or pulling into a parking lot for a big store or mall look for the trees there, and thank them.

Let's start a guerrilla composting campaign. Each time you see a tree in a parking lot drop some compost or vegetable scraps or leaf cuttings by it. Feed the trees!!!!

In looking for the photo I came across a couple of interesting sites on trees in parking lots. This one discusses the best trees to use (albeit for the southwestern US, but interesting nevertheless). This one discusses how best to maintain tree health in urban environments. And this one talks about the importance of trees for urban water systems. Happy browsing!

Today in the kitchen

2009-08-28T08:12:00.003-07:00

It's Friday which means baking for the market. I have some araza (yes, it's back again!), some ginger and some very strong lime marmalade which needs to be transformed. This will probably mean that the oven will be busy with ginger araza cookies and a marmalade cake. The ginger araza cookies are a favourite at the market and very easy to make.

The brilliant thing with all these self concocted recipes is that they are infinitely adaptable. I use the same basic recipe for all sorts of different fruits and spices. However the araza / ginger combo is the most popular. I think it's because of the acidity of the araza, the gentle heat of the ginger and the sweetness of the cookie. With no araza I would substitute something like rhubarb, sour plum or cherry.

Araza Ginger Cookies

1/2 cup oil
1 egg
1 cup ginger sugar (the sugar and ginger pieces left over after making crystallized ginger (recipe on this blog). Substitute plain brown sugar, white sugar, sugar spiced by adding dried ginger, cinnamon, vanilla pods, orange peel . . . imagine)
2 cups wholewheat flour
1 cup rolled oats
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 to 1 cup fruit (with araza (acidic fruits) I cook first with sugar as though I were making jam, just enough to soften, with non acidic fruits, like apples, I cook a little to soften)

Beat oil, egg and sugar. Add dry ingredients, mix in fruit. Bake at 350F for 15-20 minutes. Enjoy.

Planting trees again

2009-08-24T16:37:00.004-07:00

We're back at the reforestation project. This will probably be the last planting time this year - next month begins the real rainy season on the pacific coast and it will be too much for the small trees we're planting. So we're finishing up this phase with three days planting around two natural springs.

Today we worked with a mix of forest and fruit trees. The fruit trees are planted along paths down to the main spring and close by the access road. It's really a beautiful piece of land, a hillside looking back towards mountains or out over the Gulf of Nicoya with the Pacific beyond. We're working with a good crew of Nicaraguans, all from the northern zone of Nicaragua. Nicas work in Costa Rica like Mexicans work in California - they do the work the nationals don't want to do. Working here they earn 3 - 5 times as much as they do at home, so they come for the jobs and send money home. I enjoy working with them, they are bright and motivated and easy going at the same time. I expect they like working with us too, we're not so 'normal' for gringos around here, but work just as much as they do, in other words we get our hands dirty and we clearly enjoy it. So the atmosphere is good with whistling or singing and laughing, and the trees get planted and they're happier for being placed by happy workers in beautiful spots.

We're planting for birds and animals too so our trees are chosen for their fruits or habitat potential. The land is hilly with gullies and we're trying to create a good mix of native trees, though there are some non natives thrown in for special reasons: mango, ylang-ylang, neem.

Today we planted Cenizaro, Cipres, Ron-ron, Cedro Amargo, Espavel, Guachipelin, Guanacaste, Aceituna, Carao. For fruit we planted Cas, Caimito, Carambola, Biriba, Agua de Manzana, Calamondin and Mango. It was fun.

There's something special about planting a tree, and something even more delightful about planting a forest. Standing at the edge of a slope looking down with a bag of 10 to 14 trees (the forest trees are small when we plant them) and a clear expanse of sky above and green below, one has to imagine how the land will look in 5, 10, 15, 30 years time. Where to put the smaller cipres, or the fine leafy ron ron or the huge and majestic guanacaste. How will the monkeys come from the forests on the mountain to this part by the spring, what trees will make the best canopy for their path? How will the macaws pass from this already towering espavel to a new cluster of almendros? It's all interesting and joyful work.

the majestic Guanacaste

The process is simple: we lay out each tree, mark it, plant it, stake it and mulch it. Simple, repetitive, logical work. Beautiful. We checked the trees we planted in June and they look great and happy. I would be too planted here: sun, cool mists, nice showers, peace and quiet and fine company (and a great view - d'you think this makes a difference to a tree?).

Camellones - Chinampas in Bolivia, from the BBC

2009-08-18T19:11:00.001-07:00

Bolivians look to ancient farming

The project may help to cut down on the need to clear forests

By James Painter
BBC News, Trinidad, Bolivia

Poor farmers in the heart of Bolivia's Amazon are being encouraged to embrace the annual floods - by using a centuries-old irrigation system for their crops.

They are experimenting with a sustainable way of growing food crops that their ancestors used. It could provide them with better protection against the extremes of climate change, reduce deforestation, improve food security and even promise a better diet.

These are the bold aims of a two-year-old project being carried out by a non-governmental organisation near Trinidad, the capital of the department of Beni.

The system is based on building "camellones" - raised earth platforms of anything up to 2m high, surrounded by canals. Constructed above the height of flood waters, the camellones can protect seeds and crops from being washed away. The water in the canals provide irrigation and nutrients during the dry season.

Pre-Columbian cultures in Beni from about 1000BC to AD1400 used a similar system.

"One of the many extraordinary aspects of our camellones project is that poor communities living in the Beni today are using a similar technology to that developed by indigenous pre-Columbian cultures in the same region to solve a similar range of problems," says Oscar Saavedra, the director of the Kenneth Lee foundation.

He experimented for six years in his own garden to develop the complex system of hydrology.

Ancient and modern communities face the same problems - regular flooding followed by drought.

"The floods were the basis for development and the flourishing of a great civilisation," says Mr Saavedra.

There were bad floods in 2006 and 2007, but last year the region saw the worst flooding in at least 50 years. The floods affected some 120,000 people - a quarter of Beni's population - and caused more than $200m (£119m) of damage.

That experience prompted many local women to enlist in the camellones project.

"I had planted rice, maize, bananas and onions on my plot of land. But the water left nothing," explains Dunia Rivero Mayaco, a 44-year-old mother of three from Puerto Almacen near Trinidad.

"I lost my house too. We had to live three months in temporary accommodation on the main road. The children got ill there. So that's why I am working here on the camellones. I didn't want to lose everything again."

The canals remain full after the floods recede

About 400 families are now enrolled in the project in five locations, growing mainly maize, cassava and rice.

Many of the sites are still in an experimental phase, but the early signs are promising. Productivity appears to be on the increase.

"These camellones will help us when the floods come," says Maira Salas from the village of Copacabana, a 20-minute boat ride down the river Ibare.

"Crops like bananas that die easily have a better chance of survival. We are only just now learning how our ancestors lived and survived. They did not have tractors to build the camellones, and they survived for years. It's incredible."

Villagers are encouraged to embrace the floods and see them as a blessing, not a curse.

During the rainy season, large expanses of land in Beni are under water for several months - except for the raised areas. When the water recedes into the tributaries that run into the Amazon, it takes nutrients with it leaving a sandy brown soil in which it is difficult to grow crops.

But in the camellones project, the water left by the floods is harnessed to bring fertility to the soil and irrigation during times of drought.

In short, from being victims of the floods, poor people could become masters by turning the excess water to their advantage.

International charity Oxfam is supporting the project in part because it offers poor people the possibility of adapting to climate change.

If, as predicted by many experts, the cycles of El Nino/La Nina are going to increase in intensity and frequency, then the project has the capacity to help poor families cope better with the extreme weather events and unpredictable rainfall that are to come.

"It should not matter when the rains come as the water can still be managed at whatever time of the year," says Mr Saavedra.

Other potential advantages of the scheme include:

* The system uses natural fertilizers, and in particular an aquatic plant in the canals called tarope which both purifies the water and acts as a fertilizer when spread over the soil
* The canals can also provide fish stock, animal fodder and nutrients for the soil
* The camellones can act as a natural seed bank which can survive flooding
* The system can reduce the need to cut down the forested areas around the communities. This is because the soil on traditional plots of land is often exhausted after two to three years. This forces the farmers to clear more land for planting by cutting down the forest.

All this seems too good to be true.

Some of the women say the real test will come when there is a bad year of flooding or a severe drought. So far, 2009 has not been one of the worst.

There are other huge challenges ahead. One is to try to provide the families with an income from tomatoes or garden produce. Another is to overcome the scepticism from some local people about the time and physical effort invested in the camellones compared to other sources of local employment.

Mr Saavedra is convinced the camellones project can be expanded, even to other countries.

"This process could be repeated in various parts of the world with similar conditions to the Beni like parts of Bangladesh, India and China.

"It could help to reduce world hunger and combat climate change," he says.

Mabolo wowzolo

2009-08-17T18:52:00.002-07:00

Well I dried the mabolo and the taste is quite nice, the fruit is a little chewy though, I'll save it for my fruit lovers mix. I also made a butter with it which is delicious, I think: the farmer is not keen. It has a strong floral taste, somewhat like rose (bear in mind I haven't been close to a rose for 3 years), very nice would make a lovely meringue filling, or perhaps whipped up into a fool or syllabub. However the drawback is the texture. It's grainy. I think this is because I scrubbed the fine hairs off and left the beautiful red pink peel on. I was hoping the colour would bleed into the butter, it did a little but not enough to make up for adding the graininess. Tomorrow I'll make it again without the peel. Here's the recipe just in case:

Velvet Apple Butter
3 cups chopped, peeled mabolo
1 lime halved
1/2 cup sugar

Simmer chopped fruit and halved lime in enough water to cover until fruit is soft. Remove from heat, take out lime halves and blend with sugar. Return to pot (add limes again if you wish) and simmer until thickens, it took me about another 15 minutes. Can appropriately (I put the lime halves in two of the jars). Enjoy on warm crumpets or with plain yogurt.

wowolo! Mabolo!

2009-08-16T20:16:00.004-07:00

The harvests are coming in thick and fast. Today the Mabolos started to drop. The Mabolo or Velvet Apple is one of my favourites.

I gathered a 5 gallon bucket of the fruit below the tree and all down the little hill which the tree tops. The fruit are easy to find, a low russet red among the brown leaves. So pretty. They look like a firm white peach - a russet pink skin with a downy pinkish green fuzz topped by a simple 4 lobed green crown which hugs the fruit and turns red-black with age. Inside the skin the fruit is pink tinged but changes rapidly to a white cream. It's hard like an unripe peach, but not crunchy, the texture is dry and a tiny bit grainy. There's no real bite to the fruit but it's firm and pleasant. The taste is subtly floral, and I know there's something it reminds me of, just can't remember what. Inside there are between 4 and 7 seeds each about the size of a brazil nut: I don't think they're edible.

The fruit is ready when it falls, sometimes it bruises a little in the drop and if bruised, or if left for a day or two it will start to become mushy and soft. Not a long shelf life. Best to eat when found.

Tonight I put some in the dehydrator to see if they'll work in the dried fruit mix. I hope they do, the floral taste will be a nice addition, and because they are so dry to start they should dry quickly. I've put them in at a lower temperature, we'll see in the morning . . . I also cooked a little in some lime juice and sugar to see how they might hold up as a preserve: not sure yet, need to test more tomorrow, but first impressions are quite good - close to pear in both texture and taste, so might make a good butter with a little added vanilla, or a great pie or crumble.

I first tasted Mabolo last year and am very excited and happy to be able to use it this season. The seeds i planted from last years fruits look about ready to graft too. Oh it's such a nice busy happy time.

Just read that the skin is supposed to smell like rotten cheese, ours seem not to, just smell fruity.

Durians are here!

2009-08-15T17:52:00.003-07:00

Our durian harvest has begun. We have two trees, an older one of about 15 years which is roughly 18 meters tall, and a 5 year old which is maybe 6 meters in height. The young tree has her first fruiting this year, last year she gave flowers but they all dropped. I'm happy she's fruiting.

Durians are beautiful trees large yet somehow delicate with smaller leaves which are a mossy green above and a subtle golden bronze below. The flowers are fist sized and shaped rather like a bell with a ping pong ball stuck in the opening. They grow straight from the branches, and we had hundreds, if not thousands this year. If the flower is pollinated it drops the petals and looks a little like a bean pod sticking out from a tiny ball, this takes 3 months or so to grow into the most incredible geometrical wonder, full of sharp green spikes in a pattern that must correspond to the Fibonacci sequence, it seems so perfect. As the fruit grows and swells we worried about fruit set, sure enough many of the young fruits dropped and we had to cull several more for fear of branches breaking with the weight.

It's been 3 months now and the fruit are ripe. They have to fall by themselves and will lie on the ground for a day or so before they open. One can tell from some distance when the fruit splits along its 5 seams: the smell is intense and unmistakable. One can smell it from a good distance, maybe 25 yards. It's an unusual smell, heady, rich, strong, perhaps unpleasant. I've been interested in this fruit since I was a child watching David Attenburgh on the BBC wincing and retching as he sat beside a large open durian in the rainforests of Burma. It took a long time before I was able to smell what all the fuss was about.

Inside there are pockets of fruit, sometimes more than 5 segments with fruit hidden away in secret chambers which one has to find cautiously as the spikes are very sharp: one has to feel through the thick ridges within to see if there is hidden treasure. The fruit is white or yellow and dense and is shaped, to me, (and this may well sound strange), like the embryo of a manatee. The fruit is soft and tastes - well it's a matter of opinion. Some say it's divine, others that it's like rotten fish in condensed milk, others say carmelised garlic and onions in custard. It's a very personal thing. I love it.

The seeds are simple and carmel coloured and can be roasted and eaten or cooked in asian style dishes. Some say it's wise not to eat too many at one time, but with the average durian size being about a kilo and a half, there's not so many seeds to share around.

Recipes for durian include cakes, ice-cream, candies and savoury dishes with unripe fruits. Here it never gets as far as the kitchen, we scoop it right out of its beautiful shell. The dogs love it too. Today we took 3 to market and for those in the know it was the first durian of the season. The three were gone within 5 minutes. Last year I dried some fruit and added it to a connoissuer's mix. It was rather good mixed with jackfruit, champadeck and bananas.

Durians can be found in most Asian markets either fresh, dried, frozen or in cans. I'd recommend a sampling . . .

getting business like

2009-08-14T14:33:00.004-07:00

My sister is a business woman and while she was here took my "marketing strategy" in hand. I had no marketing strategy, but now I have a wonderful new label and logo. Having made our old labels on appleworks and being quite pleased with them, this new label making thing was a whole new process and one I really enjoyed. After discussing what my market startegy was, who my "target market" were and what our "vision, goals and values" are, we went outside and took a lot of photos which were then sent to the designer. Euan Gallacher, the very talented, then took us through a series of steps to create the finished design. It was a bit like going to the hairdressers - you enter having no idea what you want, look at some magazines, come up with some idea that has no resemblance to your hair / face / lifestyle, and then slowly the professional leads you through to something that looks great and makes you feel good about yourself. Lots of communication and processing, but with Euan it was all very mellow and comfortable. We wanted an image related to the salak fruit and Euan chose a single flower from the composite male flower to work with. This was a stroke of genius as it also looks like an opened ripe fruit. He tried out several designs and we chose the one we liked and the process of refining began. I really liked the process and I love the label. We haven't finished yet, and there are a couple of tweaks needed here and there, but I want to show it off here, and thank Euan for all his greatness! And my sister for being a mastermind.

Oops, my technical knowhow has failed me, but you can see the logo on Euan's site. I'll work it out . . .

Breadfruit

2009-08-14T13:38:00.003-07:00

We lost our biggest breadfruit tree last week. I think it was a good thing, the fruits were too high for us to harvest and with it gone it allows a lot more light to fall on two smaller breadfruits. We have decided to toppar these trees. It goes against our no pruning belief, but by removing their tops and selective pruning we can keep the trees small enough to manage the fruit.

I love breadfruit. Firstly the tree is beautiful, graceful with large palmate leaves in a dark glossy green. The fruit hangs from the branches, heavy, dense and round. It's a lighter shade of green and covered with small hexagonal shaped - not scales - but markings, that, as the fruit ripens, become stretched and full promising abundance within. Cutting it it bleeds thick white latex that sticks fingers and lips together. The breadfruit can be roasted, boiled, baked or, my favourite, fried in thick slices. It's delicious. It's cooked with the thin skin attached and can be eaten as is, no need to peel. The flesh is solid and seedless, though it must have had seeds at some point as there is a denser core which is surrounded by a beautiful lacy star pattern of holes about a millimeter in length and elliptical. It's a very filling carbohydrate with more nutritional value than potatoes, it makes excellent chips, here it is roasted or boiled in stews.

The tree propagates itself through root shoots and is quite difficult to manage, the ones we have in the nursery and on the farm appeared by themselves, sometimes quite far from the mother plant. When I lived by the river breadfruit trees could be found at some distance from each other along the banks, I think pieces of root must have broken off and were carried to new resting places.

The Breadfruit is native to Polynesia. In the 1800s the British decided it would be the perfect food for slaves on their plantations in South America and the Caribbean. They sent Captain Bligh to Tahiti to gather hundreds of seedlings. It took Bligh and his team of botanists 6 months to establish trees strong enough to make the journey. When the returning ship got caught in the Doldrums and Bligh began giving the crews' water rations to the plants the men started their infamous mutiny. Bligh survived and was sent once again to Tahiti - the second time he succeeded. I'm glad he did.

. . . and I'm back

2009-08-14T13:05:00.002-07:00

Been offline for a bit with family visiting. Out of the kitchen, off the farm and into the big world of children on vacation. Phew, my respect to all mothers. This Sunday is Mothers' Day in Costa Rica and I wish all of you who have taken on the enormous task a happy, peaceful and sane day.

But now it's back to the farm, my beloved kitchen and all those lovely things I get to do with my days. Araza and Ginger cookies are in the oven, some Carambola sweet and sour sauce is setting up and I'm waiting for the limes to arrive. The weather has been very wet for the last two weeks (sorry visiting family members) and it's taken its toll on the forest. We have lost several large trees, and the farmer has been busy planting new ones. Amongst the forest trees he has planted a new curry tree, a champudeck and a jackfruit - yippee!!! There's something wonderfully settling about planting fruit trees, a soft anticipation of future wealth and abundance, a reminder that all good things come with time, a nod to the seasons and cycles of time. Storing up for the future means there is trust and faith that there will be a future, a time to come. And that that time will be full of fruit. Love it.

Back in the present our latest tree casualty is one of our key limes. A large branch sheared to the ground, laden with fruit. What to do? I can think of a couple of things . . .

I've been looking at lime marmalade recipes and have discovered several lovely blogs in the process:

Feeding Maybelle
Pastry Heaven
Through my Kitchen Window

I'm off to make a cup of tea and check on the cookies.

covered raised bed

2009-07-26T20:56:00.000-07:00

new greens for salad bowl

2009-07-26T20:06:00.004-07:00

In an effort to increase our salad greens we've built two experimental covered raised beds. They're rather fancy. They have a clear plastic roof which is sloped to allow more direst sun in and to allow us to harvest rainwater. The roof is high - again to allow more direct sun to hit the plants, and stands about 8.5 foot at the higher end, about 7.5 foot at the lower end. We plan to make use of this space by using baskets or trellis for vertical growth.

The beds are built on a very slight slope and run across the slope to give the most exposure to sun. We have a lot of big trees on the farm and finding an area which has full sun is no longer a simple matter, hence we plant with the direction the sun takes, in both summer and winter months, in mind.

The roof allows us to control how much water the plants receive: meaning we can try to grow varieties which typically won't stand our rainfall.

The frames are constructed of kasha wood from a tree that fell on the upper farm. It's a beautiful hard wood from a beautiful leguminous forest tree. We put down a thick layer of coconut fiber for drainage. Coconut fiber takes a long time to break down and will help create a decent environment for worms and beneficial microbes. For the lower bed we mixed coarse sand, compost and new earth dug up from beneath a rotting tree trunk. For the upper bed we used a mix of coarse sand and soil made by mixing coconut fiber, compost and aged chicken manure. (This soil came from a local company who also make coconut oil and noni juice, they buy their chicken manure from a friend of ours who raises organic chickens, the compost is made from restaurant food scraps.)We put a fine layer of coarse sand on top and then treated the beds with EM, leaving them to settle in for 5 days or so.

I've been pulling weeds from the lower bed for the last 8 days, it looks like seeds from our own composting: tomato, chili, squash. I've saved some of these seedlings and the others I've composted. The upper bed has been weed free, making us wonder if the soil was sterilized.

We sowed eggplant, broccoli, bok choy and radish. We also have a few tomato starts, some rooted cuttings of mint and purple basil, some purslane, chilis we brought back from Cuba and some cranberry hibiscus sticks.

At the far end of the beds we have a large basin with water hyacinth. This is our mulch material, we currently have some drying out under the roof almost ready to add to the soil. Water hyacinth makes excellent mulch, composts rapidly and is a prolific grower. This one tub will provide us with as much mulch as we'll need for this project. Beside it is a tub with watercress, rooted from cuttings. Actually rooted from some watercress we bought at the farmers' market (the mint and basil also came from stalks we bought at the ferria).

The seeds came up in 5 days and are looking good. I thinned them, transplanting some and harvesting the rest for salad mixes. The tomatoes and chilis look fine, and the mint and basil seem to be rooting out given their colour and vigour. The tomatoes and chilis I expect to do well, they grow here without special attention. The brassicas, well we'll see. The eggplant - would be wonderful, it's my favourite vegetable. I think the mint and basil will make it with a roof, especially if we are careful with not letting them get leggy. We'll continue to use EM to keep molds and fungus at bay. I'm excited. It seems funny having to water in the midst of all this rain, but it's easy enough to do. And it would be so worth it to add to our salad options.

dinner time help

2009-07-25T18:45:00.000-07:00

jungle living

2009-07-24T20:56:00.002-07:00

You know you're living in a jungle house when:
~ a 4 inch rhinoceros beetle crashes into your plate during dinner
~ a rat runs up the wall from behind the fridge, across a rafter and disappears into a crevice above the bathroom, watched by 4 lazy dogs
~ you find a scorpion under your laptop
~ there's an orange-kneed tarantula living behind the extra toothpaste in the medicine cabinet
~ each morning you step over bat poop on the way to the bathroom
~ an anole jumps on your leg to catch a mosquito
~ the hummingbirds take a short cut through the kitchen

It's wonderful.

views of the upper farm

2009-07-24T20:43:00.005-07:00

tour of the farm, part one: the upper farm

2009-07-24T07:25:00.003-07:00

Our farm sits about 300 meters from the ocean, as the crow flies, by road it's about 400 meters. The lower farm is level and rises back into the hills which dip and rise to create perfect pockets of rich soil and mulch filled runoff for the upper farm. The name Island Farm is the original name and was given because the land is bordered by creeks. The borders have been extended beyond those creeks in some places, but the name, Finca la Isla, remains.

Much of the upper farm is forest. When this land was first settled the workable land was cleared and converted to pasture or cacao plantation. The parts which are steeper or difficult to access are primary rainforest. The pasture was abandoned many years ago and is reverting beautifully to secondary forest. You can tell it's going well by the quality of the upper canopy trees. The cacao was abandoned when the blight came about 30 years ago. Cacao is an understory tree and so the big forest trees were never cut: hence it's a fairly simple process for the forest to return. On first sight it all looks like jungle: hanging vines as thick as my arm, roots running rampant in some places as high as my thigh, animals, insects, birds and reptiles everywhere should one be still enough to see and hear them. But to someone more familiar it is possible to tell what was original forest, what was pasture and what was plantation by the types and forms of the trees present.

Within the upper farm lies growing areas for salak, greens, vanilla and fruit orchard. Another slope is dotted with black pepper. The farm plants are interspersed with forest which makes for a very beautiful farm. The forest trees act as windbreak, create micro-climate, help with pest control by supplying habitat and diversion for beneficial insects and animals as well as pests. Their falling leaves, fruits and branches become compost and mulch, and when a big tree falls it creates more space and light for possible new farm plants, or forest trees. Our farm plants are mixed together though we do tend to group species, hence the vanilla is separated from the salak by edible ferns, katuk, passion fruit, curry tree and several citrus, and separating two salak areas are more fruit trees, yampi and several great mushrooming stumps. Only the vanilla is in rows, everything else is planted at will.

workshops

2009-07-21T20:31:00.005-07:00

I'm giving workshops to students interested in sustainable food production. For me that means taking what grows on the farm and making the very most out of it, preserving abundance and appreciating just how much beauty and joy and taste and energy a (fruit) tree creates.

For the student it means spending a day on the farm, in the kitchen and orchards watching, experiencing and learning how to do the things I learned from my grandmothers and from my own trials and errors. The students are all North American or European college students or freshly graduated who are down in Costa Rica to learn more about sustainable development or environmental issues or organic farming. They are fun to work with, armed with notebooks and pens, bright eyed and eager, and surprised and grateful at discovering how easy things can actually be.

We start with harvesting whatever is available in the orchards, it might be charichuelo, carambola, araza, cas, nutmeg - depends. While we gather I talk about the farm, cacao production, what happened when the cacao blight hit, monocultures, big plantations. We walk through rainforest back to the kitchen: perfect opportunity to talk about biodiversity, permaculture and tropical farming. We stop to look for edible mushrooms or pick some edible leaves.

Back in the kitchen we make sourdough bread and talk about making the culture. I have them take care of any sprouts that might be growing: both are such easy excellent ways to begin bringing consciousness into one's eating and living, as well as slowing down one's pace by engaging with one's food. I start soybeans for tempeh while they prepare the fruit we harvested.

It's good to see processes through in their entirety so after the fruit is washed and trimmed we make fruit leather and jam, or blend it to make frozen yogurt, or use it in cookies. Or usually all of the above. It helps when students can see different ways to use the fruit and sample the simplicity of each, basically it's just variation on the theme of banana for example, or pineapple. What I want them to experience is that there is absolutely enough and that with a little imagination and creativity, life can be very simple.

We drink kombucha and talk about cultures, ferments and microbes. So many North Americans are raised being afraid of 'dirt' that they don't know just how good it can be! I talk them around my microbe wall, electromicroscope images of lactobacillus, aspergillus, mycelium, rhizopus - all incredibly beautiful and bursting with energy.

Lunch is our sourdough bread with homemade hummus, tempeh or Miguel's cheese, served with whatever we found on our walk, and fruit. After lunch the tempeh is ready to incubate and there's jam to be bottled, dried fruit to be packaged, and sprouts to be watered again. And cookies to look forward to.

The students have an experience of every part of production, from harvest through preparation, drying, baking or preserving, to packaging and labeling. This is a working farm and we sell what we produce. Sustainable means taking heed of livelihood as well as the environment, and I believe it is important to show that one can live well by living simply with one's environment and making the best of what one can find.

Usually by the time afternoon coffee and cookies rolls around the students are so immersed in jams and jars, molds and yeasts, that I'm the only one eating. My small library of books is well thumbed and recipes and addresses are scribbled down on floury pages, while the talk is all about sustainable agriculture and the future of food.

Tomorrow I have two young women coming, one from France working on her masters in Sustainable Development and the other from the States who's thesis is on Food Security. We'll be making bread, tempeh, carambola chutney, lovi-lovi and carambola jam, cas fruit leather, dried bananas and candied ginger. Oh and cookies.

salad bowl

2009-07-19T17:15:00.000-07:00

The area of our farm where most of the edible greens are gathered is called the salad bowl: it sits at the bottom of two gentle slopes with a wall of cycads to one side and a passion flower arbor to the other. The slopes are covered with black pepper plants and fruit trees, pejabaye palms line the edge and form borders throughout as we harvested the heart of palm the same time we planted the salad bowl. The fallen palm trunks have gradually rotted down and are in various states of decay depending on their age when harvested. They have provided us with great mulch and help form mini microclimates, especially at the beginning when we covered the ground with chopped palm fronds and bark. At the moment they are brightly decorated with several mushroom species: pycnoporus sanguineus (good for teas), schizophyllum commune (the world's most common mushroom), and even a fine though small oyster strain, pleurotus ostreatus, and home to numerous colonies of ants and beetles.

We decided to plant the salad bowl in the most natural, least invasive of styles, simply clearing a small patch of mulch, digging a small hole and planting on top of a mix of compost and bat guano harvested from a nearby tree. We then mulched heavily and watered, and on to the next. The plants are not in rows but rather spaced in groups which we think would allow them the most sunlight. We ran tomatoes by an old bean trellis and planted leguminous living stakes (madera negra) by everything we added to the area.

What we have discovered thus far is that Malabar and Okinawa spinach do better in the shade, cranberry hibiscus does not like a lot of rain, cherry tomatoes (local strain) do not like to reseed themselves and everyone enjoys eating camote (sweet potato) leaves.

The salad bowl is an interesting experiment. It's a small area and in total there are probably less than 30 plants, enough to harvest salad greens for ourselves and to sell a few bags at the farmers market, but not nearly enough for any real commercial venture. Our intention was to see what worked and then expand into something we could harvest and sell to local restaurants each week.

We are at the point where we are ready to expand.

edible landscape, looking for help!

2009-07-19T11:04:00.001-07:00

When I was little I always wanted a garden where everything was edible, perhaps inspired by that glorious garden in 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory', I wanted to be able to eat outside without having to use a knife and fork. We're working on that here.

Our edible landscape includes plants suitable for this climate, and we are constantly researching to find local plants which can be used for food. It's a slow task: the local indigenous culture is in that unfortunate stage of shedding all past knowledge, embarrassed that they ate from the jungle when they "were poor". It's hard to get information from a culture increasingly dependent on canned tuna and white bread. The local afro-carribeans brought much of their foodstuffs with them rather than spend years figuring out what they could eat here. So while the rainforest must be full of good greens it's still a mystery really which to eat. Rather we are using greens from other places: katuk from Indonesia, spinach from Malabar and Brazil, false roselle from Africa, plus several common to Central America: camote, pumpkin, chaya, chili, tomato.

Ours is a humid and hot climate with two wet seasons and two dryer seasons, so finding what grows well is a game of trial and error. The false roselle for example prefers a dryer climate than the one we can offer, so it grows really well during the dryer months and suffers in the wet seasons. Being an organic farm we also have our fair share of bugs and some of our greens are really prone to insect damage.

Our last challenge is finding plants, whether it's seeds or starts, to experiment with. Costa Rica is a country of diverse ecosystems and the stores which sell seeds tend to sell varieties that will grow in the highlands, not down here. It's amazing to me that even in the stores in this immediate area one will find carrot and onion seeds, asparagus and beetroot - none of which will grow at all. The seeds are typically imported, mostly from Holland. Who buys these? So while we can discover plants online - yacon for example, or water spinach that might grow here, we don't have access to them. Importing seeds is difficult and in most cases illegal without a permit, and getting a permit is awkward and unpredictable.

So. We grow what we can and experiment and save seeds from what we eat and try to find others who are also trying.

We are most interested in salad greens and edible leaves and flowers. Right now we have:

katuk (Sauropus androgynous)
false roselle / cranberry hibiscus (Hibiscus acetosella)
Malabar spinach (Basella alba)
Brazilian spinach (Alternanthera sissoo)
camote (Ipomoea batatas)
pumpkin (Cucurbita sp.)
purslane (Portulaca oleracea)
culantro (Eryngium foetidum)
basil (Ocimum basilicum)
impatiens (Impatiens sp.)
wandering jew (Tradescantia fluminensis)

We add various ginger flowers to our salads too.

If anyone can suggest other possibilities I would love to listen!

life is a bowl of lovi-lovi

2009-07-06T20:31:00.001-07:00

The lovi-lovi (aka rukam, batoka plum, koorkup, lori-lori or Flacourtia inermis to give its 'proper name'), is a smallish tree native to tropical Asia. It has attractive leaves and the cherry sized fruit grow from short stalks along the branches. It flowers and fruits for most of the year, though with marked seasons. The fruits bear an uncanny resemblance to cherries and follow the colour pattern from a yellow green to deep damson. They have a double layer of small grape sized seeds in a 5 pointed star pattern. The lovi-lovi is rather acidic but adds a wonderful colour and tartness. I've used it with Cas and with Carambola, and who knows what else will enjoy its company.

Jam on

2009-07-06T19:45:00.001-07:00

Well wasn't I just complaining that the araza season was over and the carambolas were at least a month away? Wrong, wrong, wrong. I was out picking cas and lovi-lovi yesterday and saw several carambolas lying on the ground - on the ground no less! Clearly those at the top of the tree are ripening faster than those I can see on the lower branches. I had only moments before been lamenting the fact that I really needed a few early carambolas to try out recipes before the main harvest began. And once again I got exactly what I asked for.

Carambolas are rather beautiful and strange. Native to Sri Lanka and the Moluccas they have spread all over Asia and now all tropical and subtropical regions. Starfruit in English because the fruit has 5 raised ridges running along its length (rarely 4 or 6 ridges), and when sliced the ridges and the seeds make a nice double 5 pointed star. The fruit tends to be sour, with a fairly detectable oxalic acid content. Sweet carambola do exist, but they're not really so sweet. The fruit is pale to rich yellow when ripe, has a crisp texture and gives a good amount of juice. People tend to use the fruit as a decoration, or juice it, it doesn't have much of a strong character by itself. But it makes a great salsa and can be used for relish and jam.

It's tricky getting carambola jam to set up. There is little if any natural pectin in the fruit and so it must be mixed with something else, hence my need to try out different ideas. I've made two types today, both very different and I think both good, though one certainly wins in presentation.

The jar on the left is a Carambola Butter with Lime and Black Pepper, the one on the right is a Carambola Lovi-Lovi Marmalade.

The butter was made by pureeing the fruit first then cooking up with sugar and the juice and flesh of a couple of limes (I boiled the rinds until tender then added to the cooking butter), I added a good teaspoon of our freshly ground black pepper as it was simmering. The butter has the fresh smell of carambola and the lime comes through strongly in the flavour; the pepper gives it a nice warm glow and spicy aftertaste.

4 cups pureed carambola (I compost the hardest part of the raised ridges and the ends, everything else goes into the blender)
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
juice, flesh and rind of 2 limes
big teaspoon ground black pepper

Prepare the rind of the limes by chopping finely and boiling in water for a good 10 minutes. Meanwhile combine other ingredients, bring to quick boil and simmer. Add in rinds and continue simmering for another 10 minutes or so until it thickens and a teaspoon of mix gels (see araza pictures, the butter won't set as well having a different consistency). Can in hot water bath.

The marmalade was much simpler, just a combination of chopped carambola and lovi-lovi in about a 3:1 ratio cooked with sugar, and a little squeeze of lime to bring out the flavours. It has a sweet tangy flavour and the texture and presentation are great.

1 1/2 lbs chopped carambola
1/2 lb lovi-lovi
between 1/2 and 3/4 lb brown sugar to taste
juice of 1/2 lime

mix ingredients, bring to boil and simmer until juice thickens. Test on spoon. This one takes a little longer to set up. Can appropriately!

compost

2009-07-06T08:31:00.000-07:00

I'm puzzling over the complexities of compost. It's such a simple idea. Plants grow, they die, they rot, the creatures and microbes that eat them die and they rot, the rotting matter is in turn eaten and digested and becomes food for new growth. It happens everywhere where it is naturally allowed to happen. We humans seem to want to stop it by covering the earth with concrete, sweeping leaves into piles and burning, burying our dead in rot proof containers, filling landfills with organic material. Yet compost still happens.

In the forest it happens with grace and ease - things that were once living die and fall to the ground where other things slowly digest them into smaller and smaller particles and simple nutrients which can then be used by new living things. No one measures the right nitrogen carbon ratios, adds supplements, layers with straw or wood ash, mixes with a fork or turns the whole thing over. Yet in gardening sites everywhere I hear about the importance of turning compost, of the worry that it will stagnate and become anaerobic. It must be that the way we compost is unnatural: we pile everything in one large heap rather than spreading it around. We want compost quickly and thus go to great lengths to speed up the process - we want to control it. And that's okay, we control our gardens, we manage our land.

I read about a system of composting that's used in Nairobi. It must be the simplest 'bin' technique I've heard. Dig a hole slightly smaller in radius, and just as deep as a bottomless basket or bucket. Place the bucket or basket on top. Fill the hole and then the bucket or basket with compost and plant around it. Another version is simpler yet: in a raised bed dig a trench in the middle running the length of the bed. Fill with food scraps. This seems a great idea to me. I have a sample of the bucket technique going and it seems fine, it doesn't smell bad and the scraps - almost exclusively fruit peelings and coffee grounds - are breaking down quite nicely. But I'm not turning it over, is it anaerobic? It's a shallow hole, only 12 inches deep, so maybe the air can penetrate down that far. There are worms and grubs in and around it. The theory of course is that the roots of the plants will reach into the rich seepage of compost tea weeping through the soil. I'm waiting to see how it develops. I'm far more excited by the prospect of having a garden centered around several round oasis of bottomless buckets than having a big compost bin off to one side and orderly rows of vegetables.

Fukuoka and his Natural method of farming let everything be as close to the natural state as possible: no tilling, no weeding, no pruning. In his fields the straw was left to mulch down for the next season's crops. He at one time brought in chicken manure to add to his fields, but after some time stopped and instead introduced ducks to his land. I believe this was the only addition to what happened naturally in his rice and rye/barley fields. The people living with him must have created kitchen scraps and waste, I don't recall how he managed that. I'll need to re-read.

How do you compost?

night time visitors

2009-07-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

the stick is a regular sized toothpick

night time visitors

2009-07-03T19:38:00.000-07:00

hasta luego araza

2009-06-30T18:05:00.000-07:00

Three weeks ago I thought it would never end, the araza season seemed to be stretching endlessly into the future as basket after basket of soft yellow fruit became leather or jam or frozen yogurt or cookie or even chutney. But now the trees are bare (not really true, they already have flowers for the next fruiting), the ground below is spotted with the odd fruit squelchy and marked and full of worms. The season is over.

What shall I do? Looking at the Sapote Columbiano and the Carambola it looks like it'll be the end of July at least before they are ready to harvest. Which poses a different question - how will I cope with so much fruit? I'm working on recipes now for both, it looks like there will be a lot.

But in the meantime, what? There's small amounts of Cas and Ceylon Gooseberry, and I saw with some delight that we have a huge Hog Plum tree, although they're rather astringent and mostly seed. I'll experiment, seemingly traditionally they're used to flavor popsicles.

Of course there's lots for me to do. We're putting in raised beds at the back of the nursery and readying another compost area, plus there's tempeh and kombucha, fermented veggies and drying fruits, granola bars, ginger and cookies to keep me occupied. And it looks like there is a very demure nutmeg season on its way.

reforestation project

2009-06-28T17:46:00.000-07:00

(first tree planted, a Cedro Amargo)

The farmer and I have a reforestation project on the Pacific side of Costa Rica. This last week we were there to start planting the trees we've been collecting since March. The Pacific side has a wet and dry season and the wet just started, we had to wait for the rains to come before putting anything in the ground.

It's an interesting project, a 100 hectare parcel(about 220 acres) of abandoned cattle pasture, 80% of which is to be reforested. The land itself is very beautiful being foothills of a coastal mountain range, but very close, about 5 kilometers from the ocean. The highest point is over 320 meters (over 1000 feet), and the lowest about 14 meters above sea level. It's a fairly steep climb to the top and the dirt road and tractor tracks are well eroded and slippy for even the horses. A road of sorts has been put in from the main road past the property, but with our two wheel drive pick-up it was challenging, if not downright scary, to drive.

The owners have had the piece for about 9 years, and although there have been cattle grazing it really is abandoned pasture. Cows eat grass, no surprise there, but really grass is about all they'll eat. Sometimes they'll nibble on a little vegetation, but grass is their thing. So over time seedlings and saplings from other trees and plants will grow in the pasture, the seeds probably dropped by birds or carried on hoofs or coats, or even the wind. The cows will munch around and about but unless someone is there to take care of the pasture and chop these saplings, they will grow. With all the sun and manure and with the cows conveniently keeping the grass low, the seedlings and saplings grow well and begin to overshadow the grass. The grass dies back, and other plants come in to take their place: a forest begins.

These pioneer species, in this case guava, wild orange, cenizaro, ronron, espavel and a few others, bring in their own community of non grass plants and soon small islands of woodland spring up in the pasture. Small trees form canopy and underbrush appears which in turn provides shade and mulch for ground covers, more delicate species and fungi. The whole now provides habitat for insects, toads, reptiles, birds and mammals and as it grows it is nourished by the manure and decaying remains of insect and animal life. With more animal species there is more chance of seeds being dispersed, and so the little wood grows. Pioneer species gradually make way to settler species which at some point will overshadow those first small trees, and over time the pasture will disappear under the growing forest. It's all very natural and very beautiful. Unless you're a rancher.

Our job is to help the spread of this natural forest by planting native forest trees. Though we are also orchestrating the land and thus the forest by deliberately planting specific areas with fruit trees and trees favored by certain animal and bird species, notably the Macaw parrot. In most parts of Costa Rica reforestation means plantation and it is hard to find examples of new natural forest; plantations being more or less monocrops, managed and harvested after several years. It has taken us much time and effort to find appropriate trees, most nurseries don't stock native forest trees. But we have managed to piece together over 3,000 saplings.

We had expected to have the land prepared for planting, but arrived to find it untouched. This meant we had to clear as we went. We cut paths through the scrub and cleared meter and a half circles around each planting site, planted the tree then mulched the site with leaf matter and twigs. We staked it too - it's the wet season and things grow fast. The land will need maintenance and we certainly don't want an irresponsible swing of the machete to cut the sapling off before it can even begin. With each plant well staked the maintenance crew will know where to look and where to cut.

It was hard work lugging the saplings up and down the hills, slipping in the mud, getting torn by thorns and brush. Our crew of Nicaraguan and Costa Rican workers worked hard and whistled as they went, and we were alternately dripping with rain and sweat as we chopped, dug, planted and mulched throughout the week. We did kill a snake, a pit viper, that struck at a worker from a tree branch he was cutting. I was sorry to see it dead, such a beautiful looking creature, but happy it hadn't bitten him.

This is an unusual project in that we are working to recreate a natural forest and because of this it is being highly documented: every tree we planted has a GPS tag, and every tree over 8 inches in diameter already on the land is also tagged. We should be able to watch and monitor the growth of the forest, an exciting prospect.

Chinampas

2009-06-18T06:53:00.001-07:00

I went to look at the Chinampas project we manage the other day and it looks fantastic. Very beautiful soft sweeps of water filled with purple water hyacinth between raised banks edged in vertiver and young soto caballo trees. On the banks vegetables growing luxuriously from the water hyacinth mulch. A picture postcard.

Chinampas is a method of cultivation used in Mexico since the Aztecs. It has been credited as the reason why the Aztec population was able to grow so large and prosperous on what was basically swamp land and shallow lakes. Chinampas comes from the Nahua language and means square made of canes and refers to the method of constructing these 'floating fields'. In shallow lakes square areas would be marked out with canes and then woven cane walls would be fixed in place and the area inside would be filled with sludge taken from the floor of the bordering area. The 'island' would be built up of sludge, earth, plant matter and stones until it was higher than the surface of the water. Willow trees were often planted at the corners to help hold the land and protect against erosion. Vertivert and soto caballo (or relatives) which have strong wide reaching root systems were also planted to protect and secure edges. This small field would be planted with food crops and flowers, while the canals of water between were wide enough for a canoe to pass along and gave access to the farmer. Chinampas were used widely in swamps too: canals were dug into the swamp and the sludge dug was piled up on the adjoining land to create raised beds.
Free floating aquatic plants were allowed to grow in the canals and were harvested annually to use as mulch on the fields.

Last year the farmer went to Mexico to study the system and has brought it to this area. We manage a local chinampas project on what was once very swampy abandoned pastureland. Canals were dug to follow an old creek bed and the natural flow of the land. We had to wait for the driest time of the year to dig, and dig fast!This year we have continued with the digging as weather permits and the canal is slowly being extended throughout the length of the pasture. It winds its way between established trees and between the many fruit trees which have been planted. The canal is about 5 feet deep and 10 feet wide, and the sides are stabilised with vertivert and spaced soto caballo. We put water hyacinth into part of the canal and placed stakes in the water to keep the hyacinth constrained: when the hyacinth fills this area we harvest all but one or two plants (hyacinth can double its population in 2 weeks)and spread this on the land as mulch. The water hyacinth breaks down quickly and is a great source of nitrogen. The vegetables are loving the mulch and the fruit trees are also enjoying spreading their roots out to the canal for its fresh and tasty water and nutrients. All in all the project is thriving. We have been amazed and impressed by the abundance and rapidity of growth and by the beauty of the system.

When I first heard of the chinampas I thought of the farming system of the crofters I had seen in Scotland. Much of the land is peat bog and the farmer would dig shallow channels in the bog, piling the peat up on either side. These 'beds' were about a foot to two feet high and maybe 3 feet wide, and this is what the farmer's wife would grow the family's vegetables on. The chinampas seems the same idea on grander scale.