farm practices

cheap and dirty insecticides: set water to boil over fire. once boiling add the tobacco of 6, preferably natural, cigarettes to the water. stir and continue boiling for fifteen minutes. add oil to the mixture and spray over rows the day before planting. the mixture seeps into soil and is harmful to plague carrying beatles. also, before planting we sprinkle ash, senisa, over the rows to send thee ants packing. ants are a nightmare here, both to me and the plants.

biofertilizante: let cow manure sit for one month. add to water in a five gallon bucket and stire, straining any clumps of hay from the mix. add sugar. cap. punch hole in lid of bucket and place a small tube through it. the end of the tube should sit in a coca cola bottle to allow the mixture to ferment. set in cool, dark area out of direct sunlight for 4 to 6 weeks. before planting, add water to mixture and spray over the soil.

a variation on three sisters gardens and cover cropping: here farmers interplant beans, Frijoles de Carnival, in beteen corn, maiz, to add nitrogen and organic material to soil, serve as a living mulch to retain water and attract beneficial insects.

vermiculture: farmers place cow manure, estiercol, in waist high wooden boxes of red wiggler worms. this is a very potent fertilizer and the red wigglers eat their way through in 21 days. we harvest quickly ad add more every three weeks. the veggie scraps go to the compost and the rest to the pigs.

carioca: farmers working with Cosecha Sostenible are instructed in how to build a drying area for seeds, corn, rice, beans, cacao, etc. the design resembles a movabñe chicken coop. içm trying to convince the tecnicos to put handle bars and wheels, put the chickens underneath and rotate the chickens around the veggie gardens to turn the organic material into the ground, as farmers only have pick axes and machetes to do this work. the value of chickens is yet to be realized here. for now they run free. rotational grazing, too.

seeds: are impossible to come by here. Whereas I would wirte away for last years free seeds to use in our gardens in Boston, here, Cosecha Sostenible pays, in dollars, for seeds from 2005 to 2008 from US companies in Southen California that actually translate the cans of seeds into Spanish and rely on this business as part of their income. luckily the farmers receive these seeds for free. i am interested in doing germination tests and then writing to these companies eith the results.

more to come about biodigestors, water catchment and gray wate systems, etc.