March | 2020 | Casa Mascia Apothecary

Hi Everyone! Yes we are at home on the farm staying out of trouble and heeding the quarantine recommendations for the Coronavirus pandemic. Belize has closed all its borders and the International Airport has been shut down. We only go into Punta Gorda once a week anyway and within the space of one week, there was so much difference. A couple of weeks ago, it was “business as usual” and village buses into town were packed full. When we drove in last Friday, it was like a ghost town; there were one or two cars and no buses (so we actually found parking!). A handful of restaurants were open but only offering take-out and supermarkets and banks were only allowing five people in at a time. People were wearing masks. It was such a stark contrast to the usual hustle and bustle of the town, that it felt eerie and surreal like a science fiction movie.

Anyway, back on the farm, it is definitely not eerie and surreal. Lots of things are happening and we are pleased with the progress. It is probably because our attentions are not divided by other things…business has ground to a halt and we are not seeing many routine patients or people. The garden is coming along very well…we started this at the beginning of the year. This is a before and after picture:

The “after” picture is still an old picture. Right now, we are harvesting lots of vegetables…I am very pleased with these green beans; they are really sweet and tender.

More vegetable harvests:

We are eating a lot of food harvested from the farm which is great since this is the reason why we do this. The duckies are happy and laying eggs. This is a picture of our fine-feathered duckies… they are gregarious and friendly:

Lovely Duckie Eggs:

Oh and guess what we have started feeding our duckies!! Yes, we have been busy bees. We have been breeding soldier flies and feeding the pupae to the duckies. This is the container that Gnome came up with; kitchen scraps and leaf litter are dumped at one end to feed the larvae; the pupae then climb up the clean end and drop into a container filled with soil and sand.

That is all for now. Keep safe everyone!!

It seems that I only write when it rains! It is raining and it has been raining all weekend. The last few weeks have been awful…hot, hot, hot and dry and insufferable…during these times, it is best to get out on the farm and work instead of complaining incessantly about the weather. I don’t seem to be writing so much because we are always busy (on the farm, processing food, seeing patients and making products) and there is not enough energy and inspiration left to write a blog post.

So, I will try to do some catch up this time. We have had a terrible drought this year and our November corn crop failed as a result of this dryness. We did however have some voluntary sorghum grow beautifully in this climate and we think that we might be switching over to sorghum during the dry times. Anyway, water has been a major issue because we need it for crop irrigation, animals and our personal consumption. We have been recycling all our grey water for plants and have been conserving water as much as possible. This still wasn’t enough because we were down to about 2 and a half full tanks of rain water to last us through dry season. Because of this, we decided to re-visit the well situation. Last year, we accidentally got a 20 foot piece of plastic pipe stuck down the bottom of our 50 foot well. Gnome tried all kinds of ingenious ways to get the pipe back up but to no avail. We finally abandoned the whole project because we just had too many other things to do on the farm. This year, it became a priority to find an extra water source because of the lack of rain. Guess what Gnome made…this funny grabbing contraption:

This weird looking thing took Gnome a few hours to make…he used sandpaper to slope the edge of the pipe and then he drove nails into it like so. You wouldn’t believe that this would work, would you??? Anyway, with hope and prayers, Gnome lowered the contraption down with about 40 feet of thin bamboo attached to it and…CLUNK…it worked!! He managed to grab and lock onto the lost pipe and hoisted everything up. I wasn’t there to witness but I heard a VERY LOUD YAY!!! Gnome had not asked me to come over because he was doing a test run, thinking to himself that it would need adjustment and modification…he was totally amazed when it worked first time round. Well done Gnome!!

Alls well that ends well!! We have a slow filling shallow well but it helps to have a secondary source of water. Anyway, that is the major thing that happened on our farm. The rest is the usual Munchkin and Gnome stuff. We had a good harvest of Habanero peppers which I have been drying in the sun:

We went through a sausage making frenzy for about three months. Here are a few pictures; below are sausages made of vegan friendly collagen (the rest of the sausage is not vegan friendly):