Fern Annihilation

One of our first missions is to rid our farm of the ferns.. They inhabit the least forested and flattest part of the farm and so will be the first thing to go. Once chopped, they leave a nice, very thick, mat of mulch over the soil. I'm not positive what I want to put in the place of the ferns.. Eventually that land will become an orchard and garden, of course. But in the meantime I'm thinking of just popping some beans in there for a green mulch so that they can grow while I consider the larger picture which probably I won't begin to plant till next year.

It's a couple acres minimum.


These are the 5 foot ferns. On the top left is Chris there, conquering them.


More conquering.. Lots more to go. This wasn't really a work day. We usually wear tall plastic boots to prevent snake bites, long sleeve shirts, and pants..


Sunrise at 5am from my back porch.


A view of the mountains on the other side of our property.

Reishi

I found some Reishi mushrooms growing on a log on my property. Here are some photos.

Pavones

Things are going well. A friend that I met in Santa Cruz last summer came to visit and help out on the farm. His name is Chris but I'll probably be referring to him as Perch as thats his nickname. Since he showed up a few days ago I've mostly been showing him around. On Saturday we went to the famous surf spot Pavones which is a little over an hour from us here in the south of Costa Rica.

Up there I've shown in the color red where we were on Saturday. The drive there is beautiful, we go through a plesant swath of agricultural land with freshly planted pastures and acres upon acres of Palm Oil plantations.

Fresh Pasture


Here is a pasture with African oil palms behind.

Almost looks like the desert.


Had a little lightning storm the other night.. this is the view off my back porch with a slow shutter speed.

This lizard lives next door. He's always chasing this female lizard around and making a commotion.

Our view from the back porch.. It's pretty pleasant. We've been spending a lot of time sitting out there on rocking chairs studying Spanish.

The plan for this week is I am supposed to take a walk around our property with a guy from Minae, the governments environmental protection arm. They are going to hopefully give me a ballpark idea of what kind of stuff I'll be allowed to do on our property. But no matter how it comes out we are going to start off next week cutting lots and lots of ferns from an area that was previously cattle pasture.

Some more images of Fuente Verde

So for my second post i will show you guys some more images from Fuente Verde. I have since left and am preparing to begin work on my family's property down in Golfito.


This is a photo I took at night in the full moon over at Fuente Verde. That's Derick and Tiffany the farm Managers.

This is a giant flying bug that kept swooping down near us as we sat at night under a porch light. He was happy to get up on my hand and pose for pictures.

This is an example of how we are starting our orchards. The most prominent plants in the photo are the Banana trees. This was pasture only some months ago. The mulch that you see in circles around the plants is cut cattle grass. The method is to wrap the mulch around the trees and to put horse manure in the middle next to the trunck for fertilizer. The mulch is very thick and will choke out all weeds underneath it. While the weeds under the mulch is being choked out Sweet Potato plants are establishing themselves in the middle of the circle near the trunk. Once established they will crawl all over the ground near the tree so densely that weeds won't be able to compete.

There you also see Palms and that plant in the foreground with pink flowers is a legume so it will be providing nitrogen to the soil.

Topher, the guy on the left, put together this ram pump. Theres Derick on the left priming it. A ram pump is able to use the power of the natural flow of water to kick a small portion of the water way up hill. This one is for irrigation on their terraces. This model didn't work due to leakage but Topher has since made two working models, one made totally of metal.

Here is Derick and Tiffany with a dream catcher they just made for a friend.


I've been in San Jose for a couple weeks buying a truck and am supposed to be getting it today and as soon as I do have it I'll be down in Golfito starting on our farm, so that's where you'll hear from me next.

The Goings on at Fuente Verde

Fuente Verde is a beautiful permaculture farm in the Coastal Mountains of Central Costa Rica on the Pacific side. As soon as they build and official website for the farm I’ll be sure to post a link. It’s 60 acres and from what I can tell most of it is usable for one function or another be it a housing plot (there are over 20 plots but only a few houses so far), a hillside terraced for fruit and vegetable production, cattle pasture, ponds, orchards, or rainforest preservation.



This is the volunteer house that we all live in. It's got a kitchen and living / dining area downstairs and then some bedrooms upstairs with three story bunks.. I've been sleeping on the top.. it's comfortable and you get a lot of privacy up there.




So this week we made a fire pit


When I got here they had just finished construction on a chicken coop. The structure is made mostly of bamboo as is most stuff around here.. bamboo is awesome for jungle construction. The day after I got here they went and got 50 chickens, little ones called Jardineros (gardeners) because they scratch the soil very hard looking for bugs and so loosen it up and poop allover it giving it great fertilizer.. hence the name gardeners. Heres the coop.


There are currently 50 chickens but we are going to let them hatch till we get 100.


You can't really see it from here but there are three terraces to the left of the coop that run maybe 70 meters. They will all be separated by chicken wire and then there will be a door from the "chicken run" (its their own little full time yard behind the coop) to each of the terraces so we can isolate where they go, and so before we plant a certain area we can have the chickens go in, eat the bugs, scratch the soil and poop everywhere for a few weeks and then it'll be perfect for planting.

Some more stuff we did this week is dig out some terraces out behind the house. These ones are right behind the kitchen. The top one will be fed with runoff from the roof and the bottom two will be fed with our gray water from washing our clothes and other things.


We also made some paths around the orchard next to the house. This picture is taken from the bathroom down on to the orchard / garden.

So that is what we have been up to. I am going to try to get another post up within the week.