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! 

Our view of the volcano

Yesterday, as we walked from the farm to the bus stop, we had this rather spectacular view of the smoking Turrialba volcano. It was nice to have clear enough skies to see the view!

Fer de Lance....find of the week

It appears Marcos, the farm manager, and his men are pretty good at finding snakes. This week's Fer de Lance was rather oddly shaped so he sliced it open to find live babies inside! Very cool.... and very dangerous! Thank you to Ginnee for taking the photos.... oh and Marcos and the men for risking their lives!

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!!!