tour of the farm, part one: the upper farm

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.

morning walk

Walking through the rainforest on a cool Sunday morning brings a quiet sort of joy.
On our path a javillo tree (hura crepitans) had dropped a branch and we scrambled gingerly across. The javillo is covered with sharp thorns laden with poison: if touched the thorns will readily spray their toxic juice - enough to hurt for a few hours. The indigenous people would tap the sap, much like tapping a maple, fixing a calabash gourd to catch the flow. They would pour the sap into rivers to stun the fish making them easy to catch. It's a softwood, not much good for lumber, but it can be hollowed out for dug-out canoes.
The English name for the javillo is sandbox tree. In colonial times the Europeans would use the dried fruit of the tree - shaped somewhat like a doughnut with a dimple rather than a hole - to hold sand. They would keep the 'sandbox' on their desks to blot paper. One had to be careful in collecting whole fruits - they disperse their seeds by exploding the shell and scattering the seeds in all directions. This gives the tree its other name - the monkey's dinner bell, for the sound of the pop and scattering seeds like rainfall down through surrounding leaves.
Lying across our path it posed no real threat, but the spikes were still sharp enough to catch skin and cloth. The dogs took a longer route round.