The Fruits of My Labor Are Small But Sweet

It’s been an interesting two weeks. I would have liked to update last week, but I really like to include pictures with these things, and unfortunately my American batteries just ran out and the only batteries you can buy in Nicaragua last about one minute. Aaron lent me a couple for bit.

Aaron and I commented on how sometimes Nicaragua looks like Eastern Oregon. There was more waterfall up those rocks.

There have been 3 major events these past two weeks.

One is the leaving of Hiromi and Aaron. Sad to see them go. Noemy and Bismark were too I think. They were in every way the ideal volunteers, hard working and eager to help, and just curious about how to live like Nicas.

On one of their last days Bismark and Noemy took us up a river in Mozonte to a beautiful little waterful. Walking up ahead of Hiromi and Noemy I cast my ears back to catch snippets of conversation. I think its safe to say that both groups, the volunteers and the family, have learned incredible amounts about a different way of life. I hope as well, that maybe they’ve learned a little about themselves through the experience.

“That room is open for you whenever you want to come and visit,” said Noemy

“Thank you Noe, I hope I can sometime,” said Hiromi.

“You’d still want to come back and live in poverty?”

“Yes of course, we love it here!”

I thought it was a nice little snippet. I like to think that maybe that’s the greatest gift a volunteer can give, the belief that there is something special about the way that the family lives; something special enough that it would bring people back.

Bismark and his daughter Jimena sit on a small aqueduct, leading one stream over another

Two would be Chloe from Earlham getting a good start on baking with Noemy. She hasn’t been up tons, but Noemy likes having the extra hand in the kitchen, and again I think that sometimes just seeing that someone is interested in and likes what she’s doing gives her work more importance and makes it more interesting for her. Chloe helped Noemy make Hiromi’s brownie recipe, and I was incredibly pained that I had to leave to teach a class before they finished baking.

No idea what was going on here.

Three is really just me feeling chuffed about my own work. After a great deal of struggle with solutions for  how to keep chickens out of the garden, I decided to try rocks. It seems to be working. I planted radishes, onions, and beets in a long bed out back behind the house.

Hey, I made a planting bed.

I also built a simple box for compost out of some wood I cut and some old roof tiles laying around the yard (I’ll get some pictures sooner or later). Claudia mentioned that there was some composting happening there before but it got sort of left to the weeds. I’m not sure where it all went. It was my hope that if there was just a little space for it, the family might use it and future volunteers might be able to encourage it’s use. Well, to my pleasant surprise, upon seeing the finished compost bin Bismark was very excited by the idea and started gleefully chucking food-waste in. It made me feel good to see, I just hope that interest continues.

Forces of Nature

Millet – L’Angelus, 1860 (praying for a better crop, originally painted as praying over their son who died in famine)

When one is working with the earth, sometimes the earth chooses to remind them who is in charge.

I grew up with a few people working in organic agriculture. My uncle has a farm of his own. My mom worked for years as a grant writer for non-profits, as well as writing articles about climate, environment, and food sustainability. I have seen a few times how quickly a crop can find itself in trouble. All it takes is the wrong bug, a little too much water, not enough water, too much frost. All it takes is a small change to ruin everything.

This week is the first week I found myself confronted by nature’s obstacles for the first time. Now, the primary and founding belief of permaculture is that the problem is the solution. It’s easy to say that, but implementing it is a real puzzle.

My first obstacle was Bismark’s twenty-some chickens. The planting beds I made last week will be eternally in danger of being rooted up by the girls and their main man. Chickens can potentially be great for a garden. They eat pest insects and their feces are high in nitrogen, making them an excellent fertilizer. But how to allow them close enough to the plants without allowing them to dig them up is a puzzle.

There is also the issue of the price of chicken wire and whether or not it will be effective. As with all things manufactured and imported, it runs more than it should, about $25 for 30m. An old friend donated some cash to the cause, but I had not yet found out the price of the wire, and so it will either cover seeds, or wire, but not both. There is also the problem that the young chickens will be able to jump it unless it’s so tall as to make access to the garden difficult. So, out of my intrinsic inclination toward frugality and a desire to find a solution that farmers here can implement on their own, I did an awful lot of research.

I’ve decided to try a bunch of rocks. Apparently chickens don’t like the feel under their feet. It just requires a little maintenance in the way of moving them out from the sprout as it grows.

The next obstacle has been ants. Nicaragua has the meanest ants on the face of the planet. I don’t think I’ve ever known such an aggressive insect in all my life. They’re in our yard and at least once a day one manages to bite me and leave an itchy welt. They need no provocation. They eat the plant’s produce and, to make ants even worse and even more fascinating, they cultivate aphids in their nests, which of course spread to the plants.

To my dismay, I uncovered a huge ant nest where I was making one of the beds. Right about this time I was watching a chicken chow down on a series of chilies. Either they’re real tough or they can’t feel spiciness. I waited and hoped that she’d do me the favor of getting in and rustling up some ants, but after one try she left them alone. They’re mean I tell you.

what looks unassuming on the surface is seething underneath

I’m not sure what the best solution to the ants will be. Boiling water with chili might be necessary, but that seems like it would also kill good things in the soil. Still looking into other solutions.

The rainy season is also hard on us, and my biopores, while helping, are not nearly enough.

So nature’s final blow has been a round of fever. Maybe a bit of heat exhaustion, it was hot last Wednesday when I was riding out to Mozonte, I’m not sure. Anyway, I won’t complain, these things happen.

And that’s the moral of the story – set backs happen, especially when working with the earth in all it’s grandness and power. It serves well to be reminded from time to time that I must work within the earth’s rules and guidelines; that I can’t push against her but must find ways to work with her. One can’t grow anything without a little luck and a little favor on the part of the land that grows it.

Biopore Flood Prevention

It’s fall up in those temperate climates nowadays. So if you have a yard and or garden, as you sweep up those leaves, and especially if you live in an area with drainage problems, think about this post.

Flooding is a big problem in this region during the rainy season. I’ve seen a few heavy rains that sent water tearing through the streets and Claudia scoffed at their insubstantiality. Really though, it doesn’t take much for the water to stay above ground level.

The earth in Ocotal is made from clay, rich in nutrients, but rife with drainage issues. Once upon a time there were great pine forests here (in fact, the name “Ocotal” is from the indigenous word for a pine tree). The trees’ roots penetrated the clay and allowed for the water to drain and enter into the groundwater. When the forests were cleared the earth compacted.

Claudia’s stories of previous winters evoked Gabriela Garcia Marquez’ tellings of cooking the crabs that crawled along the floors in the Colombian rainy season, except, there’s less crabs here and so it sounded less fun. A little nervous about a couple months of wet feet, I started doing research into flood prevention and ground water reparation. There is a lot out there about permaculture landscaping with retention ponds and recreating pond habitat, but, sadly, there will be no ponds or streams in this yard, if not for the threat of dengue then for the lack of space.

Then I came across this technique they’re implementing in Jakarta to deal with monsoons. To summarize, it’s basically a deep narrow hole in the ground filled with organic waste. The composting organic material attracts things like worms and insects that aerate the soil and make the earth more absorbent.

breaking the earth with the barra

I dug two about a month ago (about 1m deep X 18cm) wide and filled them with the leaves from pruning our mango trees. The last time it rained I was pleasantly surprised (honestly, I had my doubts) to see that in about a 7 foot radius of the holes there wasn’t any standing water after the storm.

I don’t understand why the original design implements cement, it seems unnecessary from what I’ve done so far, but maybe it’s because Indonesian ground is looser? It seems like the compost itself does a fine job of sustaining the walls. Anyway, I have modified their design by getting rid of the concrete and making the hole ever so slightly wider thanks to lack of a post-hole digger.

pouring a chopped up banana tree in the hole

The idea seems sound to me. The holes both improve rain water penetration and provide for an extremely low maintenance compost pit that re-integrates the nutrients form organic waste into the soil that grew them.

Last weekend I added another hole, and there will be another this week. All it takes is a little digging. I find I can do one in about 3 hours, and it would be faster if the ground weren’t so tough. It’s just a matter of alternating between using the barra and a shovel and scooping.

Finished biopore. Hm, it looks like I just spent 3 hours doing nothing.

Then I throw in whatever I can get my hands on. This recent hole had a chopped up banana tree, some rotting fruta de pan, and a bunch of mango leaves.

To add to the rewards, around here at about a meter’s depth one finds real clay, though not the high quality red stuff they have in Mozonte. This last time I showed Claudia’s daughter Nicolle how to get the grit out by soaking it in water.

Nicolle made a cake

I made a head. In your face Nicolle.

It was the mango leaves that made me think that this is something that might be useful back in the temperate Northern lands too. Right now everyone with a yard has a pile of leaves that will probably be hauled away in Yard Waste trucks. It’s easy to forget that when they haul away those leaves, they’re hauling away topsoil and all the good nutrients in the earth that it took to grow them that could be going into the growth of food. Why would anyone just give that away?

Interesting note: Its actually not an entirely new concept. To my surprise, I came across a passage the other night in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, set at the beginning of the 20^th century, talking about a plot of land on hard clayey earth. One character said something to the effect of, “if we could just dig enough holes into it, maybe some water would get in there.”

Crop Diversity with Earlham College

Last week work started with two students from Earlham College, Sadie and Eliza, who will be working on developing crop diversity at Noemy and Bismark’s farm. This type of work is a large part of the focus of our project, and it is so incredibly important in the region of Nueva Segovia.

As I see it, this work with these girls at Earlham is the beginning. By creating small scale multi-culture on a single farm we will begin to establish the availability of diverse seeds and provoke community interest.

With the girls from Earlham we’re starting slow. The family’s time for taking care of new crops is limited, and so we need plants which are easy to take care of. Even the best permaculture designs still require maintenance. We’re beginning with plants which are native or grow rapidly and easily in the climate here.

So, we decided to begin with a maracuya (yellow passionfruit) trellis out in the rocky, arid, unused plot behind the house. Maracuya is fast growing and healthy. Even better, it is well loved by people here, especially as a juice, and so it’s sure to get some use.

 

Stomping on dirt (the work here is always glamorous)

 

 

The first step was to go out into the timber stands and chop down a couple trees (at some point I’d like to see these vines climbing in stands or on bushes themselves, but due to tree-height and nasty ground cover it makes pest and illness management problematic for the time being). I could never be a butcher. I felt a little guilty just felling a tree, something which made me aware of just how disassociated from the sources of well, everything, we are in the States. It’s one thing to pick a tomato and say you feel connected to the source of your food. Those trees were probably at least 10 or 20 years old and it took a lot of energy for them to grow. It made me really feel how much energy goes into the wood for a house.

 

Sadie waters some sticks

 

When the trees were cut up into some Y branches and runners to go on top, the girls and I got to digging into the rocky soil. It was a hot afternoon of work breaking the soil and getting the holes deep enough.

 

Now Eliza’s watering sticks too

 

Once the sticks were in place we poured water on the dirt around them to set it better. We put some other sticks in the Ys and tied them on.

 

One day of work done! (it looks easier without any photos of the digging)

 

The next day Sadie and I went up to put string on the trellis. Claudia pointed out to me that it will need another support stick in the middle to support the fruit’s weight, so I suppose we’ll have to throw another branch in the next time we go up. We also dug another hole for planting and mixed the rocky sandy soil with some nearby clay and some chicken feces from the coop.

 

Sadie puts string up for the vines to climb.

 

I can’t express how good it feels to work outside. I spend a lot of time on the computer doing translations for our tours and different promotional work for the project, but I love working in the field.  It’s nice to have a finished product that you can touch.

 

That’s a lot of chicken poop.

 

In the coming weeks, Eliza will be making a garden behind the house and Sadie will be working in increasing the crop diversity through transplants and the construction of a seed bank. I’m excited to have them on board.

 

Done!

 

Claudia’s been finding all sorts of seedlings in our compost pit. I’ve been taking tally and making some observations about what would make an easy and well used transplant.

Hopefully, when people in the community see their neighbor with a bunch of passionfruit, taro, chaya, dragonfruit, and whatever else we can manage to plant they’ll want a little for themselves.

Campesino Hands

I’ve been going up to Mozonte a little more often lately, thanks to some work we’ve been doing with some students from Earlham College. I love getting up there and getting my hands dirty. It’s also given me the opportunity to see Hiromi and Aaron a little more.

It’s absolutely amazing how they’ve integrated with Noemy and Bismark’s family. The first weekend it was still a little awkward, communication was strained. Hiromi and Aaron didn’t want to be intrusive. Their hosts weren’t sure if they would like it. A couple weeks later and Hiromi and Aaron seem completely, well, countryfied. They talk a little slower and everything. Noemy, Bismark, and Doña Soledad are all joking with them and they maneuver around the kitchen and the bread oven like it was their own. Bismark trusts them to do good work. It makes me happy to see.

Boy have they been hard at work since they got here. The first week they spent clearing the field to plant the beans, then plowing it using an ox.

The next step was planting the field. A lot of the time I get to the house by entering at the far end through the fence, and every time I come now I see the little bean sprouts growing.

Then it’s been picking coffee from Bismark’s plot. It’s a little early in the season still, but hey, when you need some coffee you need some coffee.

After that it’s been weeding and keeping the bean field clean. It looks like some pretty tough, hot work, and I’m impressed with how they keep at it.

By the time these two leave, they’re going to be more Nica than me (I quantify my Nicaness mostly by my ability to drink municipal water). They seem to have taken of the gloves, literally, and are going to be earning their campesino hands.

There’s a Nica saying, “Never trust a man with soft hands.”

New Arrivals

Last weekend our program’s first volunteers since I’ve been coordinator arrived. Getting people to volunteer at a small program is a challenge. I remember looking for volunteer programs, and except for the biggest, most established and most well funded programs, it’s always impossible to know what you’ll find when you show up. It’s made more difficult by the fact that instead of being one of those ‘free’ programs that ask you to find and pay your food and lodging, which would be rather expensive, we are in a situation where we have to charge a flat fee, one which would actually be less than normal living expenses here. But, of course, that doesn’t really matter, because it’s all about marketing. In a few sentence summary, “free” with hidden small print, looks a lot better than $30 a week. Oh, I’m on that rant again. The point is, my job involves a lot of marketing, and our program is a great product with a lot of marketing disadvantages. Getting people here is a small success not to be taken for granted.

Our new volunteers are a couple from Oregon. Hiromi was working in business and quit her job recently, as she put it, “to have a life”. Her and her husband Aaron have set out on a journey through Latin America that will take them a little over a year, through most of Central America and eventually parts of South America. They’ve come from 3 months in work-away programs in Costa Rica, and one and a half in Granada, Nicaragua. They’re trying hard to learn Spanish and are excited to have the opportunity for full immersion at Noemy and Bismark’s house. They’re even more excited to get to work. It’s what I like to see.

Noemy is a baker who’s trying to expand her bread sales. Up until now she’s been occasionally cooking some sweet tortas, sort of like a loaf of cake, in a small electric oven. Unfortunately, that little electric oven has substantially limited her possibilities as it is only big enough to cook one torta at a time and uses too much electricity to really make them profitable. A friend in the community has just welded them a wood oven out of a couple of metal drums. Having done a bit of welding myself, I feel like I can say that it’s a pretty nice piece of metal work.

Apparently the design was actually taken from a community member who’d spent some time in the US and spotted something similar. The oven will allow Noemy to produce bread at a larger scale. The bread will be sold in local shops for now, but eventually she’d like to have a small storefront of her own in town. She knows a few more complex recipes than the torta including one for carrot cake, but it’s a matter of finding that confidence in the community for trying new things.

As she said to me yesterday, “people just buy what’s cheapest and what they know”

It might be hard to break people out of the habit of buying what’s cheapest, but maybe it only takes a little time and bit of word getting around for a new recipe to catch on. I think if she had her own store front it might be easier. Hiromi has had some recent experience in one of their previous homestays with bread making and told me she has a little book of recipes she’s collected, so I’m looking forward to some continuing collaboration.

This week Hiromi and Aaron finished up the bricklaying for the wood burning part of the oven with Bismark (all three seen below). When I went and visited Wednesday they were baking their first loaf from Hiromi’s recipes. Noemy was impressed by how economical it was. Tortas contain boat loads of butter and sugar, which apart from not being so healthy, also cost quite a bit. As there’s nothing along the lines of a temperature gauge, and there’s a learning curve for this kind of thing, the first loaf was a little imperfect, that didn’t stop me from loving it though. It was so nice having a bit of real, fluffy bread.

Now they’ll be moving on to preparing the ground for planting some new bean and corn crops. I’m excited to see how it all works out. We might get a couple blog posts from them about their stay, and in general we’re trying to get a lot better about updating regularly, so check back in!

Artisans, Design, and Big Dreams

It’s been a busy few weeks here. Sometimes it seems like doing work is the best way to create new work. Every finished project opens the doors to two more. A large part of my focus in the past two weeks has been on different design projects, mostly directed toward the coffee courses that fund our project. This is the front of a flyer waiting approval from one of our partners to go to print:

and our new logo:

Lately we’re really looking into different ways to promote our artisan connections. Things like our connection with a local guitar maker and local ceramicists seem like great ways to both generate a little extra revenue for the project and to introduce people to the communities who don’t have the time to commit to volunteering. Check out our pages for our ceramicist and guitar makers here:

Guitars

Ceramics

Our first volunteers since I’ve taken on the role as coordinator are coming this Saturday. I’m excited, it will be a learning process I’m sure. Bismark and Noemy, their hosts, live in a beautiful little house with a tiled roof and clay walls up in Mozonte. They have a small farm where they grow corn and beans, and a little coffee crop, all without the slightest hint of machinery or chemicals. They make their own cheese and sour cream in the house. Claudia has made some comments about how she’s jealous of our new volunteers. I can’t help but agree.

It’s our program’s hope that eventually we’ll have a small demonstration farm in Mozonte as well, with the idea of creating a community garden and agricultural learning center. With a little luck, after this year’s coffee season we might have enough to buy an acre or two and start on that. I’d really love to see more variety in the crops grown here, and the only way to start is teaching through demonstration. After all, what good is it to grow broccoli if no one knows a recipe with it?

A good analogy for why teaching agriculture in this fashion might be my relationship with sushi, one I feel like is probably shared with at least one person reading this. The first time I heard about sushi I was, well, pretty grossed out by the idea of eating raw fish, but then when I tried it I fell in love with the buttery deliciousness of salmon sashimi. If we can give community members a taste of the metaphorical sashimi that is a multiculture, maybe they’ll fall in love.

It should be possible to buy a piece of land to start a demonstration farm for around 10,000USD. It seems like so little for land in american eyes, but it’s an incredible amount of money here. Like I mentioned before, the revenue generated through the courses for industry professionals in the coffee season should bring us pretty close, but it’s hard to know for sure.

The next couple weeks will definitely be interesting. We’ll keep you posted.

-Bennett LaFond, Project Coordinator

Where Your Coffee Comes From

While Guardabarranco does a number of different things, the project centers around small coffee producers and their communities. Despite having grown up in Seattle, being a coffee lover, and being surrounded by coffee lovers my whole life, I really never had any idea where my coffee came from before the first time I met Claudia and she showed me the farms in Dipilto. I thought I’d start this blog with a short description of where that delicious dark beverage I, and so many others, consume every morning comes from.

Your coffee starts as a seedling in a seedbed. The seeds (coffee beans) used to grow coffee are carefully selected from the best plants on a farm. The best variety of coffee plant to grow depends on the growing conditions of the farm and the preferences of the market.

The strongest seedlings then make their way from the seedbed to a shaded nursery. As the time for planting approaches, the shade is removed to prepare the plants for transplantation to the hillsides.

Plants take about 2 years to begin producing coffee. Their production increases until it reaches it’s maximum at 7 years and then begins to decrease. Between 8-9 years they will cut the plant to it’s stump and it will grow again.

When the cherries are ripe they will turn either red or yellow, depending on the variety of plant. Each cherry contains two coffee beans. The inside the cherry around the beans is a sweet and mildly stimulating “honey”, which answered my long standing question: If coffee beans are toxic until they are toasted, why did anyone bother toasting them?

During harvest season, large groups of migrant workers travel north from farm to farm with the harvest.

Coffee picking is hard work, it’s necessary to only pick the ripe cherries and leave the green ones. As well, if a cherry is not twisted off the branch properly the plant will not grow another cherry in its place in the following season. Workers must go quickly, and to make matters more difficult, most coffee farms are at least partially situated on steep and often muddy slopes, combined with the bushy foliage of the coffee plants, just moving around is a chore.

The cherries are then de-pulped. This means removing the soft outer layer of the cherry. In our small farms, this is done with a machine powered by a 2-stroke motor from a dirt-bike fed from the story above by the worker’s baskets. It’s important that this machine is calibrated properly so that it removes all the pulp without biting the beans.

Here we have the wet-mill. The wet-mill is used to separate the good beans from all the rest of the stuff. This worker is stirring the beans in the chute. At the end of the chute is a skimmer that stops the bad floating material. The good beans, which sink, fall into a catch where they are strained and then put in big 100lb bags called ‘quintales’.

As quickly as possible the beans are taken to drying-patios. Here they are dried. They are constantly turned over with repeated raking.

When they’re dried, they’re taken to a warehouse where they’re stored and aged. A light colored papery material called ‘parchment’ loosens itself from the bean. This is removed from the bean leaving, ideally, a grain that is bluish-green, well shaped, and slightly translucent.

The coffee you drink is probably roasted with a big machine, a little like a laundry dryer, which rolls the beans and keeps them consistently moving. In the mountains, they use a wood fire, a cast iron pan, and a stick. The important factors here, with a machine or in a pan, are high heat and constant motion to get an even roast. It’s also necessary to provide some kind of wind or ventilation to remove light flaky chaff that peels off the beans during roasting. In this photo one of our producers, Roberto, is roasting in a pan.

Spin spin spin.

Cooling the beans quickly to stop the roast at the right point is important. Here, a piece of wire mesh is being used to give the beans good ventilation.

And there you have it, from beginning to end. If you’re anything like me, you’re craving a cup of coffee right about now.

(Special thanks to Clement Reidel for a large portion of the photos)

-Bennett LaFond

Hello from Guardabarranco

Guardabarranco is a non-profit organization based in Ocotal, Nicaragua that works with local farmers and people in the community to create an exchange of knowledge, experience and culture through volunteer work.

The organization offers coffee industry-centered tours and classes and uses the profits to fuel community improvement programs in a variety of venues. Currently we offer volunteer positions in organic agriculture, education and coffee farming, and are looking to expand to a local foods program with a family bakery in the nearby community of Mozonte. For more information, check us out at http://www.eco-nic.com/