On Saturday we had a change of pace from our classes and training sessions. All of the environment group worked in the field. We were at our normal meeting place, the farm where we have our classes. The owner, Arnulfo, has been very kind to us to let us use his "rancho", an area covered with a thatched roof, for our classroom. He gives us food and drink for our break each day. Sometimes he gives us coffee that he has raised and harvested on his land, or fresh oranges or papaya from his trees. On Saturday he led us around the farm, which is almost four acres, showing us the great variety of useful things growing there. He has oranges, bananas, plantains, breadfruit, guava, coffee, cacao, yucca, grapefruit, limes, pepper, teak trees, plus several things we don't hear of in the US, like limon mandarin, which looks like a lime on the outside but is like a mandarin orange on the inside. There are several others for which I couldn't find English translations: guanavana, chayote, noni, guava, marañon, yampi, otoe, and ñame. The fenceposts which border his property are all alive, made of the "balo" tree. Each fencepost is kept trimmed so that it doesn't take up too much space, and the leaves are very useful because they are able to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere. We created three piles of compost with different recipes, we prepared and planted a few rows of beans, peppers, squash and watermelon, and then we worked on a "magic circle", which consists of a pit of decaying organic matter surrounded by various plants of different height.
We had a lot of fun swinging machetes as we had to chop up a few old banana trees to provide material for the pit. It turns out banana trees have a honeycomb structure in the trunk and are mostly air and water with little substance to them. They are actually very easy to hack up with a machete.
Here is an updated picture of our host family in front of the house. Note the poinsettia bush!
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