A garden update

Since we’ve been at Phil and Ginnee’s farm for over 2 months now, I thought you might like to see how the garden under the green house is going. It’s certainly come a long way from its brown beginnings in July.....

 

 

In the foreground of the picture, our herb spiral is becoming more fragrant with an abundance of lemon basil accompanied by purple basil, chives, mint and parsley. I’m also delighted that some lavender germinated after the seeds spent a month in our refrigerator and the culantro (similar to coriander) that was growing wild in our garden seems to like its new situation. This week’s landmark event was that we ate our first root vegetable from the garden... a rather powerful, white radish proudly stretching an entire 20cm! You can just about see the radish tops (which are tasty salad greens too) behind the seed tray table. Now we are avidly waiting on the tomatoes and the tomatillos, which are now displaying tantalizing green lanterns. Other plants that are doing well are okra, sweet peppers (which are wearing tetra pack collars to protect them from nibbling mice), eggplants, carrots and an array of different leafy greens. The kale did survive aphid attacks with the assistance of garlic, chilli and onion spray and the broccoli is recuperating after being accosted by the leaf cutter ants.

 

Dowsing the ant nest with blended citrus peel for about a week, seems to have held the ants at bay for the time being. It certainly didn’t kill them off, but they at least got frustrated at having to excavate their thoroughfare each day and have opted for a different nest opening, the other side of the garden.

We are also praising the virtues of compost tea, which I’m sure has given the plants a significant nutritional boost and helped to deter pests as well as bacterial and fungal infections. For anyone who hasn’t made compost tea (and I hadn’t before I came here!), you submerge a net sack of fresh compost in a weak solution of molasses and water. You then aerate it all in a large bin, using a fish tank pump, for 24-48 hours. This creates an exponential growth of friendly bacteria as well as releasing soluble nutrients, which you apply to the leaves and roots of the plants using the good old fashion watering can method. For anyone interesting in making compost tea, check out an interesting article by a Faye Ingram or this YouTube video by the ‘Dirt Doctor’. I'd love to hear if anyone else tries it out... it could be a great way of keeping UK lawns nice and green as well as boosting greenhouse crops.

Battling on a small scale

In one of my previous posts, I talked about the terrifying power of nature and how any trees we plant might be ripped up by the river at any minute. Turns out, I need to think on a slightly smaller scale on a day to day basis.

Meet my adversaries.....

Cut worms burrowing into the maize stalks

Aphids attacking the kale



Leaf cutter ants returning to their nest with a successful harvest

The cutworms have been plaguing the maize; burrowing down into the ear, leaving their trail of destruction (rather holey leaves and yellow gunk) as a handy detection aid. It comes as no surprise that the first line of organic defence is rather time consuming.... pluck them out with tweezers one by one! And don’t even consider embarking on this task without full length trousers, a long sleeve shirt and a hat, or everything else out there will attempt to eat you alive! The second line of defence is slightly less pleasant. You put the ‘plucked’ cutworms in the blender, dilute the product with water and spray it onto the crop. Apparently this spray then contains a chemical called Bacillus thuringiensis (or Bt). When this is eaten by fellow cutworms it produces a protein that paralyzes their digestive system, causing them to die from starvation. Sounds nasty, but kind of necessary if we want any maize to harvest!

Aphids are a problem I’m a little more familiar with, but I have to confess that some of the organic suggestions for getting rid of them such as frying the aphids by placing tin foil under the affected plants and deterring them with shredded banana leaves buried underneath, were new to me. I settled for a more personally tried and tested method- onion, garlic and chilli spray. I’ll let you know how it works or if I need to up the concentration.

In the way of leaf cutter ants, I spotted them over a week ago now. I naively hoped that they would continue to prefer their weed diet and only use my garden as an access route, leaving my plants alone. No such luck. The broccoli was the fall guy and the ants made easy work of nearly all the broccoli leaves over the space of two evenings. They’re pretty amazing creatures- able to carry twenty times their own body weight, building nests that cover up to 600 square metres and house up to 8 million individual ants, and being able to decimate foliage on an entire tree in a single night. And they don’t even actually eat the leaves! Instead they take them into their nest where the leaves act as a compost for their fungus food. Knowing the likely size of their nest, we decided that boiling water wasn’t a particularly viable option. So we’re trying out two methods of killing their fungus- blended citrus peels and boric acid (the second method being a little more aggressive!!), both placed around their nest holes so that they’ll traipse it into the nest on their feet.

So my fingers are crossed that our anti-pest measures take effect. Otherwise the beds that we've worked on for 2 months now may start to look very bare! And if anyone reading this knows of any other better, non toxic methods of pest control then please let me know. I’m clearly still wet behind the ears about tropical horticulture!

A trip to the beach

A few weekends ago we decided that we needed some perspective and down time so we took a long weekend and headed off to the beach. Three different bus rides later, we reached Cahuita- a sleepy little Caribbean town complete with its own wildlife reserve and reggae bars. It was gorgeous.

Our hotel room looked out directly onto the ocean and to the right of our view stretched the pristine tree line of the reserve.

 

 

The reserve, which operates on a donation basis, was no disappointment. Delicious stretches of white sand and an extremely well maintained forest trail that clung to the coast, crossing the occasional creek and bustling with monkeys, birds, lizards and butterflies (the last of which proved too challenging for my patience to capture photographically!). And although we didn’t go ourselves, the Cahuita peninsula also boasts snorkelling along its coral coast.

 

To add to our excitement, Ethan also spotted a sloth one evening plodding its way along the telephone wire in search of supper. Apparently these guys are smart... when they get close to the electricity cables, they nimbly (but still slowly!) limbo their way around them to avoid being shocked. 

 

If this blog post reads more like a travel advert than a description of life on a farm, then I make no apologies. I’m trying to convince you all that you need to come visit us as soon as we eventually have our farm!! Plus for us, the weekend was the perfect reminder that we’re not here just to live on a rural farm... we could do that in either the UK or the US. We’re here for the whole package and that includes being able to access white sandy beaches, have the choice of swimming in the Pacific or the Caribbean, witnessing the beauty of tropical forests and the species that inhabit them and mixing with an amazing diversity of people. And on this trip there was also the added bonus of Caribbean style fish and rum cocktails!