Happy Birthday Mom!

This blog post is dedicated to my mother, for her birthday on Friday, March 2st. She's a great mom and I love her a bunch, so I took some
pictures and am going to take you on a little tour around the farm. This here is volcano Concepcion, an active volcano that forms one half of the island.

This is a view of the kitchen from the treehouse. We have all open-air structures on the farm, so there are pretty much no walls. While at home making time to be outside can be difficult, here there is no inside! Sometimes it's a bit stressful though because the wind is blowing all the time now and there is nowhere to escape it. The kitchen has a thatched room and the dining area has a metal roof. The tables are built on the farm, as are the benches.

Another kitchen view. Clemencia and Meerta, two sisters from the village, make us breakfast and lunch every day. Volunteers take turns cooking dinner. Tonight we had yucca and bean patties with pesto chili sauce, fried curry jackfruit seed, salad with starfruit and green papaya, fish and Mayan spinach in pumpkin sauce, and jackfruit pudding. Jackfruit is a the biggest fruit in the world, and you can eat the ripe fruit (juicyfruit gum is jackfruit flavored), cook the unripe fruit, and boil the seeds which are a large starchy chickpea-like food. All of this food comes from a tree-which you only have to plant once, and it requires very little care. It helps prevent soil erosion, attracts rain, and turns carbon dioxide to oxygen. Food from trees is more sustainable than food from annual crops because you are reforesting, whereas a garden is basically a disturbed landscape that we cultivate. Annual crops are not bad or wrong, but it is good to have trees that give us food for years to come.

I never want to eat jackfruit again. My left leg is made of jackfruit. Biggest fruit in the world, guys. We got lots.

This is an aerial view, from the treehouse, of the annuals garden. It´s in very bad shape this year because it didn´t get started on time, because volunteers were building a new garden for some of the workers. The workers now have an organic salad greens microbusiness, which is really great both for them and as an example to the community how a team of farmers can be super successful without slash and burn crops like beans and rice. There is also a lot of transience on the farm, and gardening in the tropics is

nothing like gardening in the north. There is heat and wind to deal with, and most seeds you get from the USA simply won´t grow.

They don´t like it here. Also, many plants only produce when there is a shift in the number of daylight hours, which, because we are near the equator, is less marked. Also, tropical soils contain most of their organic matter and nutrients in the plants themselves, and nitrogen goes very quickly. It´s a whole different ballgame, so when someone comes for three weeks, or even three months, it´s tough to be successful here. I am on the garden crew, and we had some frustrating times in the beginning. The weather is getting hotter so few new plants can be established right now, which means that we are mostly planning for the rainy season. We´re designing extensive perennial beds in areas of the farm that are not being used right now, and are close to the kitchen area. We´ll draw up plans and get some perennials started in the nursery (see pic) so that the volunteers who arrive in a few months will know exactly where to start.

These are our guard dogs. They guard our ipods and solar pannels. Peggy has three legs and licks

everything.

I am trying to find a way to get her to dislike me so much that she avoids me completely, without abusing her in any way. No success yet. By the way, I am having an awfully hard time formatting the pictures on here, so please forgive the sloppy layout. This is a cobb oven built out of bricks, mud, cow poop and straw. We make pizza and banana bread here. This is an example, actually, of a poor design. It is too big, so it takes a lot of wood to heat, and the dome is too high, which wastes more wood. When you build your next cobb oven, don´t build it like this! You can see the wood behind it, all of which comes from the property, as do the stones (we live on an erroded volcano, you know). We do a lot of natural building on the farm. We grow bamboo, and you may be able to see that that is what forms the crossbeams of this structure. We also grow timber trees and make things out of cobb. When we cement, we fill in with stone so that we use as little of an outside source as possible. As a longterm goal we are looking into putting in a natural floor in the classroom, which is

basically a cobb floor glossed over with linseed oil, and it becomes smooth and durable.

Very cool. Here you see thatch palm for roofs, and bamboo!

This is my tent where I sleep. It´s a cement platform with a bamboo structure that is covered by a tarp. Behind the trees you see is the lake.

Things have been going extra well since the permaculture course, mostly because there has been a huge influx of new age hippy type people. Now that we use non violent communication skills and make gratitude circles before we eat, we all get along better! I have been teaching some yoga classes on the farm, which also brings people together and destresses them, and is great practice for me. As some of you know, this fall I did a yoga mentorship program in Boston with Ame Wren and learned a lot more about teaching, and this is really the first time putting it into use. I have only three weeks left at the farm (CRAZY!), and then I´m going to a 10 day silent vipassana meditation retreat. Then I´m going to travel for maybe three or four weeks up to Guatemala, then go back to the states. This trip is flying by so fast it´s incredible. I gotta buy a plane ticket home! Last trip, because I had no plan, everything felt relaxed and slow, but now I feel like I´m running out of time. This week Alice is coming to visit me, which is very exiting. I miss and love all you guys and can´t wait to see you stateside in a couple months!