Lluvia

Time for a serious update! Apologies to anyone who has been following our crazy farm adventures, and a public apology to all the flora and fauna i have neglected the past few weeks :) Now i know: "dry" tropical forest don't mean nothin during the rainy season, AND it's a very bad time to leave garden plants unattended. Just like with kids, you leave 'em alone for long enough, they go WILD:

As I could have predicted, the ayote squash once again claimed reign over the garden. Squash is a hearty plant in general, and here in our "dry tropical" climate, ayote demonstrates a supreme level of prowess. This time, however, I was prepared. Instead of planting 3 seeds to a mound 2 ft apart, as dictated by standard squash cultivation, I planted a total of only four seedlings, and several feet apart at that, so the voracious monsters have been unable to dominate completely.

Many fruit have already formed!

Thanks to my newly-acquired curcubit experience, this time around ample space was available for my sandía (watermelon) to finally spread her vines!

(Last fall during my first go-round in the garden, squash ended up obliterating all trace of my precious sandías. i cried.)

Other exciting developments include:

arbolitos!

Front and center is a cashew baby, started from a fruit i harvested (and ate) on the farm. Behind, do you recognize these two? The Jane Doe sisters! Unidentified saplings that i started from an unknown seed.

Espinaca!

While I transplanted my original espinaca (Basella alba) to the farm, seeds from the mother plant continue to sprout, providing us with fresh greens daily.

I think i finally got the hang of my favorite flavor of all, jenhibre (ginger),

though i'm not sure how to know when they are ready to harvest?

And.....

for the first time ever i am growing bell peppers!

Because of all the blight issues with the tomatoes, i am taking every precaution to protect the peppers from fungus. They will be transplanted to the ground in mounds where HOPEFULLY the daily downpours will run off rather than pool up.

This is only a small taste of the delicious overgrowth happening during our Epoca de Lluvia. Here, when it rains it really does pour. i am spending most non-rain hours, usually mornings, pulling a jungle of weeds which then re-grow during the afternoon. i love it! Recently i've found that getting down on my hands and knees and pulling weeds as i crawl makes me feel like a jungle cat. anyway....

While the weeds grow, i'm doing my own growing indoors--the kombucha keeps comin'!
Two new flavor discoveries, Zacate Limón (lemongrass) y Fresa (Strawbery).

yum!

At this point, i have more SCOBYs than i know what to do with!

and my real jungle cat, napping to the sound of rain on the garage roof

Home Brew

Now that i'm appropriately armed with
glass bottles
fresh caps
the Red Baron capper
killer home brew,

LET THE KOMBUCHA REVOLUTION BEGIN!

ok so really i started with 11 bottles as a trial run. (this is a grassroots revolution, people! they all start small.) IF i perfect the bottling, and IF i can spread kombucha love throughout Nicaragua despite the language and cultural barriers and IF i can turn a profit selling re-used beer bottles, i may have my own humble kombucha business--refrescos fermentados!

My first bottling endeavor went a little something like this:

Step 1) Boiling re-used bottles about 5 minutes on stove top for sterilization


Step 2) Filling the clean empty bottles with my 2 latest brews: té verde con raspberry y té negro

i added a pinch of ginger to several of the bottles, which in retrospect, makes for a gross chunky swallow when you drink straight from the bottle. next time i will flavor before bottling.

Step 3) Using this nifty capping mechanism (the Red Baron), i sealed the magic that is kombucha into 11 air-tight vessels


¡que profesional!


It's that easy, folks. You too can bottle your own fermented tea at home. just please please not in Nicaragua! i'm not quite ready for competition.

In my eagerness to judge the bottling experiment, i waited only 2 days before sampling (usually i give the komucha 7+ days to marinate flavor.) oh well, taste test results:
1 botella té negro con jenhibre: fizzy and tart, deliciosa!
1 botella té verde con raspberry: sweet and a little flat.

HARVEST?

We're not waiting for autumn, Thanksgiving, or any date at all. Febrero, junio, septiembre, doesn't matter! Harvest is ALL YEAR LONG in these parts! From the farm this week, may I proudly present our second ayote squash, patiently awaiting its debut in Mildred's special del almuerzo, Sopa Vegetariana.


And feast your eyes on these TANGERINES (not limes)! You can wait for them to get orangey sweet or use them green in tangy sour refrescos (fruit drinks)!

OK seriously, the weather is balmy all year so it is possible to cultivate and harvest continuously. this is obvious. However there are SEASONS here, and i'm still trying to figure them out. When i arrived here last July, it was HOT. basically summer. easy. Slowly but surely the rain showers increased in length and frequency, by Oct we welcomed La Epoca de Lluvia. again, easy. Come January, I was expecting warming temps, spring-like, and so i began planting seeds. Scarlet Runner Beans to be exact. Turns out, surprise! It's the Windy Season, silly! At first it seemed refreshing, pleasant even. Six weeks later, allow me to reflect:
Serious strong gusts of wind day AND night. Bike riding? challenging to say the least. Sleeping soundly? impossible, as doors and windows and the roof rattle and shake and shiver. Being at the farm? loose dirt in your eyes gets old FAST. Growing pole beans????? sad, sad, amateur mistake. here's hoping the winds will fade before my bean babies reach heights worthy of wind ravage.

My contribution to the ongoing harvest this week: Tons of Kombucha! Our liquor cabinet has been transformed, bottles of booze reused as bottles of 'buch. Did you spot the old Carlo Rossi wine bottle now harboring a fizzy ginger-lemon brew? (see ginger floating in the bottom)


here's a bubbly glass of kombucha de jamaica, a simple infusion of hibiscus tea. DElicious!

KOMBUCHA

Here is the kombucha (japanese fermented tea, supposed to be super healthy; think fizzy ginger-ale meets cider?) project: in the bowl, our scoby (mother mushroom) floating in the most recent batch of kombucha tea; in the jar is 1 gallon of freshly brewed black tea + 1 cup of white sugar; finally, we transfer the scoby into the jar, adding 1 Tbsp of the k-tea to the top. Now, 7-10 days of fermentation!
p.s. Even if this stuff doesn't meet the supposed health benefit hype expectations, it's tasty and cheap. so there.

Fungus: Friend and Foe

Bad news first: some tomates y ayote squash are apparently suffering from blossom-end rot. Caused by lack of calcium, the plants' foliage sucks up all the calcium and the fruit is deprived; the first fruits on the plant develop black rotten spots, as seen here on my poor tomates. Hopefully, with a more regular watering schedule, the rest of the fruit will develop normally and deliciously. I also added more crushed eggshell to the affected tomato plants, supposedly an easy and effective way to add calcium. [I assume rot is fungus, but maybe not always?] Luckily, in other regions of the squash forest, fruit is growing like crazy! I am enchanted by the bright bodacious squash blossoms (and still waiting to harvest enough at once to use them in a recipe). check out the beautiful ayote squash hiding in the leaves!
Anyway, on to the good fungus: Kombucha!
See fotos above of the making of my 5th batch of the mushroom-derived elixir. Kombucha is the flat, round mushroom floating in the top of the bowl. The jar will sit in the cupboard for the next 7-10 days, after which time the té negro will transform into tangy sparkly kombucha tea. I am currently experimenting with flavors. One day I'll be able to flavor with my very own nispero y melon plants! For now, it's jenhibre (ginger), límon, and jamaica. yuuuum!