Our Agave plant has shot up a massive flower stem which is 20 feet in height! This is an extra-ordinary plant because it only flowers once at the end of its long life (10 to 30 years) and then the plant dies.
Flower Stem of Agave americana.
At this point, before the stem actually flowers, the stem can be cut to collect a sweet liquid known as “aguamiel” or “honey water”. This liquid can be further fermented to produce a traditional Mexican drink called Pulque.
Agave americana, also called Century Plant.
Agave americana is one of the Agave plants used in the production of Tequila. This involves extraction of the plant sugars by heating the heart of the plant in an oven. Tequila is made by a distillation process there-after.
I had a colony of stingless bees living in my electricity breaker box; needless to say, not the best place for them…
Wild Bee Hive in Breaker Box.
The first thing was to remove the wax surrounding the brood chamber…
Brood Comb Exposed.
I then had to carefully pry all those combs out in out in one piece trying not to damage anything as much as possible. I then carefully halved the comb (since I made two hives) and put them in their new brood chambers…
Half of the Brood Combs Gently Placed in Each Hive.
The covers were then all sealed up and the hives moved closer to the house for protection and observation.
This was also the first time we tried stingless bee honey. It was delicious; sweet but more watery than normal honey and with a truly intense floral aroma. It was like drinking liquid flowers. We also tried some of the pollen and the only word I can think of to describe it is amazing.
Unlike the bees we are familiar with, the honey and pollen is stored in pots…
Stingless Bee Honey and Pollen Pots.
Here’s a closer look without my grimy paws in the way…
Honey and Pollen Pots.
I’ve spent the whole morning looking at my new friends and they are starting to zoom in and out of their new homes, making it nice and comfy for themselves.
I can’t wait to build more hives!!!
I hope you are having as wonderful a day as I am!!
How’s this for a cool picture! A calaloo plant (edible Amaranth sp.) growing out of a coconut and feeding off the balanced nutients and electrolytes in the coconut water. A great example of natural hydroponics in the working.
Coconut Hydroponics.
This could be a Revolution: Start growing your veggies in coconuts!
Today I harvested 4kg (8lbs) of a little known ground root in Belize called Koorka. They are little tubers about 2.5cm (1 inch) in size. You eat them like you would potatoes.
Bumper Crop of Koorka: Spicy Tiny Potatoes.
This year we did an experiment to figure out how best to grow them. We started the vegetable from cuttings and put some in clay, furrowed earth and 2 foot high beds filled with decomposed rice hulls. We got the best crop from the beds and the largest size of tuber. The ones in clay were tiny and took the longest to harvest; it was back-breaking!
Koorka in the Ground.
This plant is actually from the Mint Family (the leaves resemble mint a lot) and it grows prolifically.
Piectranthus rotundifolius.
It is an easy crop which requires very little maintenance. It is usually planted as soon as the first rains start (May) and then harvested when the plant dies back (usually December to February). They have the same consistency as potatoes and when cooked, emit a slightly spicy aroma. They are high in Vitamin A and Calcium. Another great thing about these little ‘potatoes’ are that they can contain twice ( 5-13%) the amount of protein compared to a normal potato.
Every-one in Belize should have some of this in their own back yard.
All the animals on the farm love to eat the tuber raw. We give the little bite size ones to the piggies and they gurgle with delight when-ever they spot one of these tasty treats. And goosie…he was in top form today…circling around me menacingly hoping to steal my koorka from my bucket. He was really mean and bossy!
I think our local stingless bees are really cute, the species I have nesting in one of my old tool boxes is Tetragonisca angustula…
Tetragonista angustula in one of my old toolboxes.
They are nice and friendly and you don’t need any fancy beekeeping equipment since they don’t sting. It seems like a better start to beekeeping to me than going for Africanized Bees.
They don’t make much honey apparently, only about 1kg a year but what they do make is supposed to be very medicinal…which is right up my alley. They are also good pollinators for assorted crops.
Anyway, the point of all of this is that I made a couple of beehives in order to get this project underway…
Finished Hive.
Yeah, I know, it doesn’t look like much and I suck at taking photographs (but I am better at stitching up your face with some 7/0 prolene, thankfully…sorry doctor joke!).
This was a foolish and cavalier attempt to ‘fast-track’ my baking skills to an appreciative level.
Disaster No.1: Sesame Cookie Mess!Disaster No.2: Big Hole in Spice Cake! How embarrassing!
Firstly, the sesame cookie thing all coalesced into one big cookie in the oven. Furthermore, it got stuck in the baking tray and I had to scrape it off (with a paint scraper of all things!). Then I concentrated all my efforts into making a spice cake and it rose beautifully in the oven with the yummy whiff of baked cinnamon, all-spice and clove. But, then when I tried to bang it out of the tin disaster struck and the centre flopped out of the tin leaving a crater in my cake!
I have never been much of a baker especially of cakes and biscuits and now I have two very important tasks to fulfill!
Firstly, as a follow-up from yesterday’s post on cassava, we did finally get 4 cups of farm fresh home-made tapioca flour from 10lbs of fresh cassava.
Our Very Own Blessed Tapioca Flour! We are so proud!
I want to bake a tapioca bread(Argentinean or Korean!) made from this but I have only one chance since I only have 4 cups. I really don’t want to mess it up since we went through such a labourious process to get it. Hence the reason why I was trying to bake other things to get a bit more experience.
Secondly, Gnome has made a special request for home-baked Panettone(traditional Italian Christmas cake). I have looked at the recipe and it involves a long drawn and complicated procedure with yeasting, letting it rise 4 times through-out the day over about 8 hours and the kneading of tacky, gloopy dough. This is a real challenge and I have 7 days to make the perfect Christmas cake for him which will hopefully remind him of cold winter nights in Italy by the fire hearth waiting for Santa! Aaaarghhh!!! I hope I can do this!
Like most foreigners that have come to Belize, we wasted a lot of money buying (really crappy, cheap, screw-top wine priced like fine, premium) wine in an attempt to have a taste of home and feel sophisticated. In addition to the price, the heat and humidity, the higher alcohol content of wine was sure to make us uncomfortable for the whole night, the fuzziness continuing to the next day and making work difficult. Now, after having lived here a while and given up all pretense at being sophisticated, we just want some good, honest-to-God, alcohol that doesn’t burn a hole in our pocket or our stomachs.
Having had some experience while at University with brewing, the obvious answer is to brew some beer. How to do this, though? There is no friendly brew-shop down the road to get all the essential ingredients…no barley, no hops, no nothing!
Well, we do have plenty of maize, grown by the bushel by our friendly Mayan neighbours (I’ve tried growing corn and I just haven’t managed yet…go figure!), GMO free and cheap. What do you do with it, though?
The first step is this…
Sprouting Maize for Malting.
After the maize has sprouted it needs to be dried before it can be turned into the different types of malt we are all familiar with…like, pale malt, chocolate malt, Munich malt, crystal malt, etc. Here it is dried…
Dried Malted Maize.
And this is the basis for my maize, gluten-free beer.
For a more detailed discussion on the malting process have a look in our Bored-in-Belize section for Malting Maize.
Tune in next time for Part II, Brewing with Maize.
All my computers are running Linux now…thank God…and I don’t have to use any of the other operating systems out there, especially the ones that cost money!!
This one is truly farm fresh from digging in the dirt to the dining room table! This morning, Gnome dug up 5kgs (10lbs) of cassava on our farm (about 3 plants only) and afterwards we both set about to wash and peel our freshly acquired roots.
Washed Cassava.Cleaned and Peeled Cassava.
Next, we grated the cassava. This was done by hand and this part took the longest length of time (about 2 hours).
Grated Cassava.
We then washed the grated cassava once with water to remove some of the starch. The washed water was retained so that the starch (tapioca) could be obtained from it.
Next, we took the remaining grated root and reserved cassava water and laid them all out in the sun to dry. This is to make dehydrated fufu which is an African/ Caribbean preparation of cassava in which the vegetable is boiled and then pounded with a large wooden mortar and pestle to make a dough-like food. Traditionally fufu is eaten with soups.
So, out of our harvest of 10lbs of cassava, we obtained: 2lbs of sun-dried fufu and 2lbs of tapioca flour. Not to mention a snack of Cassava Hash Browns!
Jar of FuFu. The Finished Product!
Gnome said that today was a good lesson on realising the time and energy required in processing food from harvest to finished produce.
Our Agave plant has shot up a massive flower stem which is 20 feet in height! This is an extra-ordinary plant because it only flowers once at the end of its long life (10 to 30 years) and then the plant dies.
