Category Archives: Plants

Belize, Farming, Food, Plants

Happy Easter!

A Happy Easter to y’al! Oh my goodness…so much has happened in Belize (and Worldwide) in the space of only a month with regards to the coronavirus. The whole of Belize has been placed under lock-down in the last few days; we are in strict quarantine for 14 days to limit movement and traffic. It is very quiet all around; quiet in Punta Gorda:

Punta Gorda

Anyway, life on the farm is the usual since the animals and plants have no knowledge of the coronavirus. I am very grateful for the following things that has helped us through these changing times: the first thing is the definitely the water situation…I am so glad that our well is up and running. With the extra water over dry season, we have been able to provide water for the animals and to keep our vegetable garden growing. Normally during the dry season, we have no water for plant irrigation and we have very few greens to eat. This year we set up a drip irrigation system and we have had wonderful harvests. Yes you have guessed it: I am very grateful for the vegetable garden!!

Mini Vegetable Garden.

We have had a great harvest of bitter gourd (serosi). This is actually our favourite vegetable! The Belizeans eat it in a specific way (after thinking about it, I have never seen a Belizean dish with serosi so I have no idea how they prepare this vegetable…they do however talk a lot about eating it!) and apparently it lowers blood sugar naturally.

Bitter Gourd or Serosi

We eat it “Munchkin Way.” I have been stuffing them lately since we have so many; two each for lunch and two again for dinner! When you have limited ingredients, you have to get creative!

Bitter Gourd stuffed with Minced Beef and Shiitake Mushrooms.

Yesterday, I stuffed them with rice and ham ; rice was cooked in coconut milk first:

Bitter Gourd stuffed with Rice and Ham

I feel that since we put so much energy into growing our own food, I can only honour the food by cooking yummy, yummy stuff. More stuffing…this time tomatoes:

Stuffed Tomatoes

Oh, and Goosie for Easter. This is our own rosemary which is growing very well in a bucket.

Roast Goose with Orange

Goosie roasted in coals:

Roasting Goosie

I hope you enjoyed our food pictures. Keep Well Everyone!!

Belize, Farming, Food, Plants, Uncategorized

On The Farm

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:

Before
After

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.

Green Beans

More vegetable harvests:

Mustard Greens
Tindali

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:

Happy Duckies!

Lovely Duckie Eggs:

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.

Soldier Fly Container
Soldier Fly Container

That is all for now. Keep safe everyone!!

Belize, Farming, Plants

We Have Rain!

The day after I wrote my last blog post, complaining about the lack of rain, it started raining! It’s just raining bits…not that much but it is still something…we are all relieved including the animals and plants. Anyway I promised you some new pictures…

This is the new goosie area…they have a nice view of the mountains:

Goosie Area

Since the goosies are fenced in we are enjoying the freedom of planting a new garden without worrying about them tearing up all the plants. Gnome has tilled a little garden next to the house for vegetables:

Tilling the Garden

This is actually an old picture because the seedlings have been planted.

We planted green beans, okra and bitter gourd…we have a very nice variety of round bitter gourd:

Round Bitter Gourd

We have planted tobacco in between the vegetables:

Tobacco Seedlings

The plants are all looking great with the rains so I will post a more recent picture of the garden next time. Oh, we also have another little tomato and aubergine garden too!! Aaaahhhh….the freedom of open gardens and fenced in geese!!

One last picture…Gnome seems to like growing corn. This is a good picture…not looking so good right now after the drought but still hoping for a harvest.

Bloody Butcher Corn
Belize, Farming, Food, Plants

The Weather.

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We are always affected by the weather. The last two weeks of December was so hot that we thought that dry season had come early. We were getting quite worried because our water tanks were half full. The last few days, it has clouded over and it is drizzling a bit. C’mon…if it is going to be so dull and miserable, it should at least be pouring down. We made an attempt to go outside today but ran back in because the sogginess was no fun at all.

It is sapodilla time right now and our trees are loaded. We have been making a serious attempt to pick daily because we have competition from birds and gibnuts. Yes, those gibnuts are prancing around like they own the place! We are hoping to dry our harvest to make a date alternative for cakes.

We have been picking them green since the animals are stealing them all. It usually takes about a week for the fruit to ripen off the tree:

Sapodilla.

These are some dried sapodilla:

What else is happening? Well, we finally fenced our geese in a separate area. This is definitely a good thing because they had turned our 10 acres of lush grass and perennial peanut into dry, shrubby land. They had eaten up every single fresh blade of grass! The other annoying thing was their enormous piles of poop! Goosies…I love you but Honeymoon is over!! The downside to fencing the geese in is that we have to feed them on a daily basis. This is no mean feat because they eat a lot: we have to collect 4 big buckets of grass, chop banana trees and foliage and crack open twenty coconuts a day! Plus, they use up about 20 gallons of water daily…this is going to be a problem in dry season! Once we have done that, we don’t feel like doing any other farm work! The reality of the situation has set in and we are planning to fatten some of them up to eat. We dislike this part of farming but it seems like it is the only way to complete the cycle efficiently.

Anyway, on a lighter note, we are re-planting our perennial peanut; it will be very pretty when this stuff is covering the ground again:

Wishing you all a pleasant evening and hope that you all had a good start to the year!

Belize, Farming, Plants

Happy 2020!!

What? Another year has passed by and gone? I say this every time but I mean it every year. Time passes so quickly, it is scary. Wishing all of you All the Best for the New Year. We have resumed the farm work again after a 2 week hiatus. The grass keeps on growing, the weeds need to b removed, the goosies need to be fed and watered and life goes on. This is just a quickie to start the new year since we finally got our Internet antenna replaced yesterday (it was never quite right after it fell off the roof with the storm months ago).

I will leave you with a few lovely pictures of sorrel (roselle); it is harvest time right now and this year, I picked them all and it is blooming again. We are drying them for tea and wine-making.

Sorrel Plant with Flowers.
Seed Pods Separated From the Sorrel Fruit.
Fresh Sorrel.
Belize, Farming, Food, Plants

Overnight Rain

Hello! I haven’t been writing because the Internet hasn’t been up to speed ever since the antenna fell off the roof. It remains temperamental with mostly “bad days” and some good days with spurts of high speed for half an hour at a time. It seems okay right now so I am taking the opportunity to write.

The weather for the last 2 weeks has been relentlessly hot. Today, we finally got a break with a long overnight rain. It is overcast today and there is a comfortable coolness which we have not felt for ages. During this dry time, we have been mowing and cleaning up the farm…story of our lives! We are just about done and will be ready to plant our new seedlings out: new trees to plant include soursop, wax apple, jujube, malabar chestnut, pomegranate and Malay (Molly) apple:

Soursop
Wax Apple.
Chinese Jujube.
Malabar Chestnut Pods.

We have found that September is the best time to get trees into the ground…there are enough rains to get them established. As the rains dwindle towards the end of the year heading towards dry season (Easter time), we find that it becomes harder for newly planted trees to survive. I think that this will end up being a planting weekend.

Other news: Our good Old Grandfather Goosie has taken over the rearing of our baby geese. A couple of months ago, we were very worried about his state of health because he had trouble foraging (maintaining body weight) because he was blind in one eye. We confined him under the house with “nursing-home care” thinking that he wasn’t going to make it. Anyway, after a four week period of regular nutrition, he started Honking!! and Honking!! and Honking!! like there was no tomorrow. The sound was driving us crazy because he was starting in the wee hours of the morning. We finally got the message and let him out. He has had a new lease of life since then: he’s been foraging fine, goes to the pond everyday for his daily ablutions and leads our baby geese around. It looks like he will grace us with his presence for a while longer!

Grandfather Goosie: Live Long and Prosper!

Grandfather Goosie.

Okay that’s it for now. If I catch some another half an hour of high speed Internet, I will write again.

Belize, Farming, Food, Plants

What a Miserable Day!

Yes it is that month of the year again when its wet, it rains a lot and it gets really boring. July is just awful because it rains all month and we are virtually stuck indoors. This month we have kept ourselves out of trouble with indoor work. Gnome has been working on tiling the back veranda and I have been cleaning up the inside of the house. Because we are in the middle of everything, the place looks like a bomb has hit it. Our task is to move the indoor kitchen out onto the back veranda to give us more room to prepare and cook food. It appears that processing, preparing and eating well is central to our lives on the farm. What else is there to do!!

Today was a particularly miserable day with all day rains. There are puddles everywhere:

Big Puddle.

Oh well…since we have had copious amounts of indoor time, we have both been doing our share of creative cooking. Gnome tends to do more Italian-style slow cooking. Here are some pictures of food that we have been eating.

We are so thankful for this quiet time that we have together and extremely grateful for the delicious food that we have everyday. Thanks to the Farm for producing and nourishing us.

We had Gnome’s fresh pasta sauce with our home-made pasta:

Gnome’s Fresh Pasta Sauce.

A meal with our chocolate pasta…oooh, and our lovely ducky eggs:

Chocolate Pasta Meal.


Fresh Greens From the Farm.

The rains are really helping the vegetables grow in abundance…I can’t really complain, can I? 😉

More Fresh Vegetables.

This is one of my meals: osso buco, wild rice (sorry…not ours…but planning to grow a patch of rice in the future) and steamed greens.

Munchkin Meal.

Okay, I actually have lots more food pictures to show you. I will leave it at that right now. Hope that you are all have a relaxing weekend!

Belize, Farming, Food, Plants

March Already!!

March Already…what happened to January and February? Is it just me… is time going faster and faster? Anyway, we can’t turn back the time so we must proceed and keep on going. Since the mower is waiting for a part to coming whizzing its way to Belize in a few months, Gnome has decided to chain-saw and clean up the area behind our house. This is an “after” picture…look! You can actually see the mountain to the back…

Backyard Cleaning Up!!

What other things can I show you? We have basil coming out of our ears right now. We have about forty of these…some in pots and some in tyres around the house. I guess we need to get more tomatoes going because we like basil with tomatoes:

Basil.

Oh, and this one is catnip grown especially for our lovely, lazy cat. I have read that cats go crazy for catnip. Well, not our cat!! I’ve tried giving him a few leaves and he just looks up at me like he is saying, “I don’t eat greens…where’s the meat?!”

Catnip Plant.

Gnome has been chopping down some coconut palms to give more space for our mangoes and avocados. We have been eating coconut heart of palm almost everyday…there is so much of it. In my opinion, the heart of palms all taste quite similar. The commercialised one is usually from the peach palm and the main one that is eaten in Belize is the cohune palm. They all have a crunchy texture and sweet taste.

Heart of Coconut Palm.

Gnome has a new modified method of baking bread: in a cast iron pot surrounded by coals in a sand pit. We both love this crusty bread and it tastes so much better than oven-baked bread.

Coal Baked Bread.

Anyway, wishing you all a good day!!

Belize, Farming, Plants

The Usual!!

Well, what’s the usual? Life, environment and the usual getting in the way of farm work. The first “usual thing” was that Gnome got ready to start on his big mow around the 20 cleared acres and he was gone only for half an hour before he had trundle back to the house. A cable broke on the mower and he tried to Belize-rig it without any success. So, the mower is down!

When it works, it’s Great!

We are back to this again…Ha-Ha!!

Manual Mower.

What else? Gnome changed tactic and decided that yesterday would be a good day for chain-sawing since the weather report stated “Nice Day.” At 6am there was a huge rain that continued all morning. Our plans had been thwarted by the Gods yet again! Did they mean “Nice Rainy Day?”

Anyway, that’s the Munchkin and Gnome usual. And here are the usual round of pictures:

This is a cutting from a voluntary tomato that just appeared in one of our tyres a couple of months ago. It is the local tomato variety but they seem to be a lot sweeter than the bought produce.

Growing Tomatoes.

The rue (it is called ruda in Belize) is thriving. They like a dry environment similar to rosemary and sage. I also bagged some curry plant seedlings in black bags seen to the front of the picture.

Growing Rue.

This is a wild passionflower with produces a strong resin. It is used medicinally rather than for culinary purposes:

Wild Passionflower

The black pepper plants are growing well in tyres…taking out new leaves:

Growing Pepper.

The jackass bitters are flowering everywhere at this time of the year. This is a very popular medicinal herb of Belize which is used to treat external ulcers and sores and internal parasites.

Jackass Bitters.

Okay, we will tentatively attempt some farm work today!!

Belize, Farming, Food, Plants

Farm Harvests.

The weather guess (forecast?) for today was “good day for lawn-mowing.” When we got up, it started raining and it proceeded to rain on and off until 10am. Gnome muttered to himself:

“….hmmm…not good day for lawn-mowing.”

The weather reports are becoming a joke with us and they are starting to appear like wild guesses that are about 90% wrong most of the time. We were thinking of reading tea leaves or getting a crystal ball instead…

We finally managed to get out mid-morning. Gnome dug holes and planted out the rest of the seedlings. We now have peach palm and jackfruit in the orchard area. I went harvesting today; It seems to be berry season right now on the farm.

The huckleberry plants seem to like the worst soil conditions. Last time I planted them in a prime spot on a bed with lovely dark soil and they hardly did anything, This time, I stuck them in the ground in thick, hard clay and they are thriving and producing well. Here are some fruits:

Huckleberries.

We have one miracle fruit bush and it is bearing so much this year. I have described this plant before; it contains a molecule that binds to your taste buds making sour things taste sweet. I find that I can’t use it all the time…there is only a certain amount of sour things you can consume in one day! Anyway, they are a pretty fruit:

Miracle Fruit.

This is all that I collected today. The green leaves are malabar spinach; they grow all year round and are our main greens at the moment. The orange fruits are Barbados gooseberry; I have started putting them in savoury dishes with pork…the acidity helps to balance and compliment the fattiness of the meat…very tasty!

Berry Time.

Oh, lastly…we have a harvest of black peanut. We didn’t manage to get much this time round because there was a large tree shading the peanut area which stunted the growth and production. Nevertheless, we got enough to start a bigger patch and Gnome is very pleased with his black peanuts.

Black Peanuts.

That’s it for tonight. Wishing you all a lovely weekend…there is supposed to be 6 hours of rain tomorrow…let’s wait and see!