The master of understatement, with a smile, our gardener. ........

"Firstly do you want me to trim back the Lantana from the path"  

"Secondly, the pergola has fallen down should we try to save it or should I throw it away".  So it had, crashed to the ground under the weight of the heavy rain.   Covered in Passion fruit and trumpet vine.   

Quite beyond repair in reality.  The first of the casualties of the rains.   The rains are now coming down strongly in the late afternoons.      

Today started with an early morning invitation to view a rare pink magnolia in friends exquisite garden.  It is now the rainy season and this morning was overcast and warm.  I decided to walk some of the way and it felt and smelt like Scotland in August.   

The garden was gorgeous, lots of beautiful and different spaces with a small river running through it and a peaceful sound of rushing water.  Beautiful little rambling roses, wild fragrant jasmine and no less than three Ylang Ylang trees one in full bloom.  If heaven exists, it will smell like this.

I was given a huge handful of Ylang Ylang flowers and cuttings of the jasmine.   My hostess recommended floating them in water to absorb the oils and release the smell into the room.  So that is what I did, back on the coffee farm, I put the Ylang Ylang flowers in a bowl of water and floated some white roses and gardenia between them.  I have a small old fashioned rambling white rose as well as a couple of larger tea varieties.  I think my friend would be proud of me.

My gardener took great interest too.   He tells me the wild jasmine is hard to propagate but we can do it if we can get it to sprout roots.   I also learned that if you touch a gardenia flower it will turn brown in a day or so.  You have to pick gardenia carefully, never touch and they will last a week or more.

The truth is that this entire country is pretty much made of banana and perhaps some rice as well.  Sobering thought.   

No matter what your genetics, there is an environmental common thread.  

Here horses eat bananas not carrots.  Fruit bats, all manner of insects, squirrels, dogs, mice and all things with fur and most things with feathers eat banana.   

This picture is a classic.  I have even attracted a crake from the creek with a bunch of bananas.  A bird that is supposed to be so shy it is only heard and rarely seen.

Just hang out the bananas and see who comes to get them.  Now it is the baby birds coming.  Their first meal banana.

Here he is my big fat badass squirrel eating the bananas that are put out for the birds.  

He chases birds and eats their eggs.  
He walks on live electric lines and chews wood and survives.

He is my very own little 'honey badger' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg

For some time I have been trying to solve the mystery of the Motts apple juice that turned into alcoholic sparkling cider almost over night in my refrigerator.  This is a water to wine story only it happened in my own refrigerator practically under my own eyes.  

The Motts apple juice was sitting, without a lid, in the fridge when I felt compelled to store some of our organic fungicide in same fridge. The apple juice was situated within about 12 inches of  the Trichoderma Viride gallon bottles whose seals were slightly leaky. I think there was some fermentation going on in those bottles causing the liquid to be pushed out of the seal.

The result was a clean tasting sparkling cider.  Something that is sold for about 10x the price of apple juice and rightly so.   As I was uncertain about the safety, or alcoholic content, of the 2 gallon bottle of apple juice, I drank the entire load myself rather than sharing with my 5 yr old.  I can conclude with confidence, the alcohol content was low, again similar to sparkling cider.  Surprisingly delicious.  Surprising period.

The Trichoderma Viride needed to be refrigerated and as it was raining and it can only be applied in the sunshine - it had two rainy days to sit in the fridge.  Really, I had no other option.  In retrospect my fridge was the crucible of a new invention.   

After a couple of days of internet research, I conclude that I don't think that the trichoderma was the primary fermenting agent.   There must have been some saccaromyces yeasts as well in the culture.  I don't think Trichoderma fungus can do this miraculous job but yeasts can and yeasts must have been present in large numbers.   

All of a sudden, I am very enamored by yeast.   Now back to the laboratory that prepares the Trichoderma Viride to verify my theory. 

There now seem to be all sorts of additional uses for my organic fungicide.  It no longer seems so expensive.

It has taken nearly three years for the gardenia hedge to pop.   Lots of waxy white flowers and delicious sweet heavy scent.

What caused the turn around.  Not sure.  Possibly: The beginning of the rains and still lots of sun.   They seem to need both.   However, I think the trick is my sludgy  black magic mulch.

I have been mulching the plants with the compost left over from making the organic fungicide laced with trichoderma.  It is amazing stuff.  Mulch, food and disease control all wrapped into one sludgy rich, and quite attractive to look at, black mulch.

My house is a humming bird trap.   Over the months, I have devised some ways to minimize the harm like not putting flowers on my coffee table that lure them inside or remembering in the morning light not to leave the porch doors open.

The good news is that I almost always manage to rescue them and re-patriate to the forest outside. This is a baby rufus tailed humming bird.  The locals call them Lucifers - they are like little devils dashing and darting noisily around the place.

Sadly, we found this corpse when we were planting baby coffee.  This looks like a 9 ringer.  Probably the victim of a neighbors dog.  We have a lot of armadillos on the farm.  They burrow beneath the rocks and are hard to find.   As I am usually only out and about with workers or a 5 yr old I have only rarely seen them.  Others who go quietly around the farm have more luck.

We are planting rows and rows of new coffee.   There is some order to it.   Each row is planted 2 M apart and each plant in a row 1.35M apart.  There are no tape measures involved.  People here prefer to step out measurements using strides and bits of pre-cut string.     Seems to be working.

As we finish  off digging holes and planting coffee for the next couple of weeks, I am going to post pictures from around the farm.  As the rains are arriving so the fruit trees are setting fruit.

This is my first set of pictures:  These are passion fruit flowers.  They turn into oval green fruits that when they are ripe are wrinkled on the outside.  The flesh around the seeds and juice is orange.  Tart and delicious.