Making chocolate and a few other things...

For me, one of the most exciting things about being away is seeing different plants.... especially ones that end up on our dinner tables in the UK and half the time I have no idea what the original plant looks like or the process it’s gone through before reaching me! In the garden behind our volunteer house in Esperanza there are a plethora of exciting plants... halaconias, birds of paradise, shampoo fruit, bananas, sugar cane, oranges, lemons, guavas, annonas, manzana de agua (both of these last two were new to me), papaya and cacao trees.

We thought it would be exciting to try to use the cacao to make our own chocolate. Here’s how the process went....

The cacao pods grow off the branches of the cacao tree and are ready for harvesting when they turn a browny-orange colour. When you crack the pod open, the fleshy (rather slimy), sweet, white coating around the seeds is the edible part. We fermented both the flesh and the seeds for a few days and then dried them in the sun.

We then took the thin shell off of each seed. I’m not sure the seeds were quite the right dryness however, as shelling took ages and was no easy feat for my finger nails!



Once this was done, we whizzed the dried, shell-less cacao seeds in the Vitamix and ended up with this amazingly fragrant, gorgeously purple tinged cacao powder. Now we just need to add milk and sugar and we have chocolate as we know it! Next time I purchase a luxurious bar of Dairy Milk, I’ll definitely appreciate it all the more now that I know how much work went into just getting the cacao alone!

Apart from trying our hands at making chocolate, we’ve been busy on the farm preparing beds in the greenhouse, planting seeds, transplanting saplings and Ethan has been occupied fixing anything and everything wooden from the chicken house to the farm house window frames.

Fixing the chicken house proved interesting when Ethan found a rather large boa snuggled up next to the chickens. Luckily Marcos was on hand to help catch it. I certainly wasn’t going any nearer than necessary to take the photo!

And cleaning the nursery had a little added excitement when Ethan decided we needed to get rid of the hornet nest!

We’ve also been reminded of how powerful nature is this weekend. Yesterday it must have rained for at least 36 hours straight, which meant the streams that ordinarily bubble across the road with glistening clarity turned into fast flowing, brown torrents that flooded our boots as we endeavoured to walk home. The river at the bottom of our garden raged with all of the extra water it was being subjected to and we could hear river boulders crashing against one another 100m away from our house. Definitely a force to be respected!

So yet again, life here excites me and at the same time petrifies me. There are so many things that we can grow, make and at least start to understand. I’m not sure that I’ll ever grow tired of the excitement of seeds germinating or eating freshly baked bread. All of these things are fragile though in a powerful world that we seek to work with, rather than tame. We could plant thousands of trees and the river could rip them all out in seconds in a flash flood. And it’s not just nature that terrifies me here, it’s the responsibility.... to our potential employees, our local community and people who are supporting us along the way. I guess my conclusion is that not to take the risk, not to try and make a go of things here would be to stick my head in the sand. As long as we do the best we can, endeavouring to be well informed, listening to people, respecting the powerful forces around us and being willing to learn from our experience (and in the best case scenario that of other people too!), then we should be able to be proud of how we live. And along the way it’s important to cherish every moment of beauty, excitement, accomplishment and love, ensuring that we’re journeying towards a life that we want to live rather than leaving somewhere we don’t want to be.

WOOFing in Costa Rica

Goodness! It's been ages since we posted anything! You must all be wondering where we are and what we're up to. For the last few weeks, we've been staying at a gorgeous organic farm up in the mountains, about 45 minutes south of Turrialba, Costa Rica. For lots of beautiful photos and an impressive 6 years of blogging history, check out the farm's own blog at:  http://costaricamountain.blogspot.com/

The house where we are staying is in the tiny,rural town of Esperanza, where we luxuriously have electricity and running water straight from a mountain spring (all of which FAR exceeds our expectations of roughing it!). Each day we walk up to the farm, where Ginnee and Phil Hancock live off the grid, with the River Oro at the bottom of their garden and a view of Turrialba Volcano shrouded in cloud (on a clear day!) off in the distance to the north-west. The pride and joy of the farm is their herd of 30 cows who bask in nearby fields, with their four horses and delightful (but surprisingly strong!) new foal.

Since Ethan arrived last week, it's been a hive of building activity. We've spent the week constructing a greenhouse at the back of the farm house for a kitchen garden. It has a bamboo frame (all of which was grown on farm) and a plastic roof, which is quite necessary given the high rainfall in the area. As always, we've had a lot of help along the way and it's been fun trying to communicate in Spanish! Now we're working on turning the soil and adding compost so that my germinating seeds will have deliciously nutritious beds to grow in. Hopefully in the next blog post we'll have photos of beautifully planted beds and glorious colour bursting from the soil!

When we're not working, there is plenty of land on the farm to explore. Last Sunday, in between bursts of rain, we hiked up to one of the waterfalls on the property accompanied by Orejas, who when she's not sleeping in the quad likes to keep us under close surveillance!

 We're enjoying farm life... It's exciting to see projects that we'd love to replicate in action, such as composting toilets, hydro-electric power, growing bamboo and permaculture gardens that incorporate lots of local edibles. There's a lot of us that can't wait until we have our own farm and start the journey towards living more sustainably and then there's my muscles that are telling me that I need a bit more practice still!!!