This whole Valley is known as the Valley of the Moon.    Chiriqui means something like that in the Indigenous language.  The moon is big here, it is bright in the clear unpolluted sky and it tugs hard on the oceans that flank us, the Pacific to the South and the Carribean to the North.

Up here in the mountains farmers work by the moon.  If you want a plant to get bushier you prune it on the Full Moon; If you want it to shoot up straight again you prune it on the New Moon.

The weather only seems to change on a Full or a New Moon.  Right now we are having some very rainy days.  We will have to wait for the Full Moon before things change, fortunately that is only a day away.

Today, I learned something entirely new.   Queen bees lay their eggs on a New Moon and flowers are most full of nectar on the Crescent Moon.  

Who knew.

Results of a late rainy April day planting in the greenhouse are now bearing fruit.  

These are heirloom tomatoes.  I have yellow pear tomatoes and red cherry tomatoes.

Now we just have to harvest them before the rains rot them on the vines.

The rains are coming down hard, very hard at times.  There are fewer native trees in bloom and the bees are hungry.

Yesterday, they came to eat our breakfast.   Almost every day we eat porridge with honey for breakfast and recently have been adding cinnamon spice.   

Hundreds of my honey bees came to investigate. They fed on every sticky drop of honey left on the table and were crazy about eating the cinnamon powder.   Bees love cinnamon.  Maybe for the same reason that it protects them against fungal problems in the hives.

This afternoon, I was bitten by a dragon fly.  It hurt.  Who knew dragon flies have teeth or something just like them?   That was a new experience for me, a life time first.

We have a lot of huge dragon flies here.  They come in bright blue, red and green and every shade in between.  They make a noise like a little helicopter and eat lots and lots of bugs every day.

This big dragon fly was caught in the house.  I carefully placed my forefinger and thumb around its abdomen.  It flapped its wings and I lost my gentle hold.  The dragon fly was then cupped in my hand and started to bite.

Yesterday, I met a man who had lost his wife and wanted to die, sold everything he owned and set off with a suitcase in his eighties.   He stopped in the valley, settled and started a new life.  He adopted a new surrogate family of young people and lives a very full and very different life just down the road in the village. 

What happened?   Same sort of thing seems to have happened to a lot of people I have met here.  People who experience this place, having previously experienced other places, find this valley gives their life a boost and their spirit a lift.  In short, it polishes the soul.

This seems like an issue it is worth exploring.  What is it exactly that is at work here? We could all do with a nice shiny polished soul.   This could be useful.  Here is a theory, or more accurately, a compilation of casual cocktail and dinner party research.   A rough summary of what other, more thoughtful, people have told me they think is at work.

Here we all live with a very powerful version of mother nature and it affects people.    Nature rules and there is a lot of physical energy: Geothermal, solar, magnetic, wind and water all are formidable forces.  Nothing mystical about that; expected at high altitude on the side of an active volcano on the continental divide, where the ground shakes and some magnetic tugs are so strong they move cars up hill.

If you live here, you get to dance to natures beat and nature is a teacher like no other.  For the godly,  dancing to natures beat reminds us we are mortal, we are small, we are part of an inter-connected ecosystem.   

This means just like the  bees and the butterflies we better get on with it.  Get out there and do what we need to do.    Build our legacy with a sense of urgency and remember that bricks and mortar are easily leveled: A snake, a flood, disease, lighting strike or eruption is not far away. 

Today is the only given.  Live each day like it could be your last, risk taking is relative, focus on things nature can not take away.

 

My very romantic rose garden is taking shape in surprising ways.

Having established that it is not peligroso para mi.... i.e., a problem for my husband that I have hearts all over the garden, our gardener is going to town on the theme of romance.   Apparently, for local men such bold symbolism could be very problematic.  No worries here.

His creative spirit is running free out there in the roses.  I have heart shaped beds and heart shaped stone shapes in the middle of beds, beds with just red roses and so on......  I like it quite a bit.....and it is still early days.

Progress is a little slow.  I am OK with that.  Time to put in some practical improvements like a mechanized irrigation system.  

Should be ready for showtime around Christmas.

No need for Accessorize and man made hair ornaments here in the jungle.  Just pick a hibiscus and pin it.  Frilly ones, cheeky ones, red, white, yellow, pink and every color and bi-color in between.

Fungus rules the world in the tropics.  Either ants or fungus seem to be the most successful life forms here.....it is on everything living and not living.   Mostly, I'm OK with it with the exception of the humans in the house.  I want us fungus free.

This week we have started adopting some auyvedic principles in our kitchen.  What has worked fro 4000 yrs in India should work here too.   This ancient approach for using food as medicine has some good tips for how to survive in the tropics and protect from fungus inside and out.

We are aiming to reduce yeasts in the gut and on the skin as well as to make the digestion more efficient and the skin stronger and more resistant to infection from other fungus.    The diet here is higher in sugars from fruits and carbohydrate such as rice, palatino and breads than some other parts of the world.   The problem with this is that fungus loves sugars all kinds of sugars - anything ending in OSE.....sucrose, fructose, lactose.....and so on.

The beautiful thing is that fungus dislikes spices and we like them quite a lot.  So, if you add the right spices to the carbohydrate foods that the fungus thrives on, it won't think of your food as its food.  So this week a few changes .........

1.  We have made jugs of ginger infused water and are busy making and drinking oodles of ginger tea with lemon and honey.  Honey has OSE but also has anti-fungal agents.   The bees figured out this problem too many millennia ago.   We are drinking this mixture it at mealtimes.   This is supposed to improve digestion of food, keep the digestive fire in the tummy and not let it break out into the skin and cause problems.  Yeasts don't like the flavor but I think it tastes pretty good.  Really warming and invigorating.

2.  We are turning our food golden with tumeric.  We are adding turmeric to my daughters milk, to lentil soup, to dahl and stirring it in the rice and anything else we can think of.   Turmeric is an anti-inflammatory, antiseptic and an anti fungal agent.    If it works for us we might try it on the horses too.

Courtesy of our artistic gardener, this is a flower arrangement of a red rose in a bottle of water. Now sitting on my mantlepiece. 

It has attracted much attention in the house over the last few days.  Visitors Panamanian and foreigners seem equally curious.   

Apparently the possibilities of keeping flowers in bottles of water are endless - the single red rose is a simple rendition.  This way blooms will keep without oxygen in water for weeks.   

A few weeks ago the frogs in the creek stopped croaking.  Over the weekend, I noticed the sick looking yellow grass and murky water down by the water side. They had been poisoned at the hand of a notorious local gorilla gardener who uses herbicide that leaks into the river water.   

Gorilla gardening here has history.  Some might say even tradition.  In fact, in a frontier way, it is how most people originally acquired their land.    'Nuff said.  

The cheapest laziest way to clear land is to use herbicide.  Herbicide kills frogs, snakes, fish, insect life and as a result damages the entire ecosystem as well as making the river water unusable for human beings.  It is used often here but it is illegal to do so around water.

So today, instead of going to the spa, riding my horse or eating cake, I have spent my birthday visiting no less than three government offices filling in forms and writing notes and have had four officials come down to the farm to take photographs of sick looking yellow grass and murky water down by the river side.  Lets hope one or all of them can resolve this situation.  

Actually, nothing I would rather do.   Feels great to be making some progress at long last on this issue.