Hello Everyone!!  It’s amazing how time goes so quickly that I haven’t written a post in over a week!  We have had an  extraordinarily “wet” dry season this year.  The last couple of days, it started feeling a bit more like dry season with the sun and the over-bearing heat.  I think everyone felt it and since dry season is the time for burning, people started burning their wood piles.  We actually stepped out of our house into a thick smog of smoke…and, we are not burning here on our farm!

We hardly ever leave Toledo but we did yesterday because we felt our lungs thick and heavy with smoke.  Thank goodness this is the only time of the year that we get this air pollution.  It is worse this year because everyone is feeling the time pressure of a late start to the dry season.

We took a road trip to Cayo ( a Western region of Belize which is about 3 and 1/2 hours drive from Toledo) and picked up some city goodies on the way.  We met up with our friends, Graham and Joyce and had lunch with them.  I feel really silly but I didn’t bring my camera with me so this post is mostly a description of ideas and experiences.

Anyway, they showed us their new British Foods Belize Shop which is really lovely.  It looks like a “real shop” which has carefully displayed British souvenirs and good old British food (can’t give you the whole list but it’s stuff like Bird’s Eye Custard, Marmalade, Scottish shortbread, Cumberland sausages and more).  I stocked up on my “must-have” Yorkshire Tea and crumpets.  We are going to have tea and crumpets at the pond this weekend in a romantic sort of way and throw crumbs at the geese.  Oh, and I also bought chocolate Easter eggs as a treat…this  is funny but we have not had these for about 15 years!  I remember that I used to take these for granted and I would get a whole load of them at Easter time and stuff myself silly on them.  Our ascetic life-style in Belize now makes us appreciate things a lot more and we are really going to savour the taste of Cadbury’s milk chocolate!

After lunch, our friends took us to their sheep operation…these guys are always on the go with projects!  They showed a 2 acre plot fenced with barbed wire and sheep wire, divided into quarters. There was a shelter in the middle of the rotational pasture and the size of acreage held 20 sheep in total.  It was a neat set up and it did inspire us a lot.  Gnome whispered in my ear,

“After we sort out the geese, we could consider a sheep or two!  I wouldn’t mind some lamb for Easter!”

After this, Gnome had an intense conversation with Graham about…wait for it…it wasn’t politics or anything like that…it was about worms!  I wasn’t privy to this conversation because they went round the back to look at worms, tubes and stuff so I have to directly quote to you what Gnome relayed back to me.  At first he wasn’t entirely coherent because he was a bit over-excited and so he started in mid conversation with me by saying,

“…we need to get 2 pounds of worms!”

Come again?  And so he launched into a description of “worm towers.”  This is a method of composting in which you a bury a pipe (eg PVC pipe about 4 inches in diameter or more) halfway into the ground and you drill holes in it to allow worms to move in and out of the tube.  You then put food scraps directly into the tube to be eaten and processed by the worms. You just need a handful of worms to start each tower.  This idea has truly captured Gnome’s heart (he likes worms…I know, he’s a funny sort of Gnome!) and as I write this, he is under the house looking for tubes.  I also saw him scrutinising the giant bamboo this morning so I know his mind is whirring and swirling with worm tower possibilities.

We had a lovely afternoon and would like to thank Graham and Joyce for spending a little time with us and for inspiring us with new projects for the farm!