SLPCLIFE

Today started out in the morning tending the sheep. We took care of several injured sheep and brought in the new borns this week, about 5 or 6 to cure and cut their tails off. The sheep seem to be in better conditions now that the sun has been shining for two days and the following. After Sheep we planted 8 trays of lettuce, jumping up the biweekly production a bit. This should keep constant for a while, until we can analize if the estimated  25-30 pounds of mixed lettuce are enough every two weeks. We also harvested most of the sweet peppers, using them as payment in order to get them sold. After LP came C, but I forgot what it was. C....Cherries? We dont have any. Hmm oohh yeah Compost. We also worked on compost (yesterday..this post was started last night but lost computer priviledges) and this time got help from Louie from the stables. Our first batch of compost is almost all used up in the wind tunnels and the house garden now has its own supply. After C comes LIFE... again, what was I thinking last night.
L..
Love probably, right?

Peace, Love and Guacamole.

Mas

Storms keep hitting up PTP. We just got another internet loss for abou 3-4 days. this time, we cant blame a storm.
Some workers where trimming a tree near the farms office and with their infinitely sharp machetes cut through a wire. This wire had to be ordered from Kingston and took 2 days to instal. Now. Internet is back for a while. but anyway, who needs internet these days? Living up here in the mountains in the forests in the trees in the storms, we need nice covers, books and maybe some garden tomatoes and eggplants. Thank you.

I dont think the camera has taken many trips these past few days, she doesnt like getting wet.
We had an unexpected harvest (lunch) the other day. The farms horses have a nice tank, a cement cube, where they drink out of, and every couple of months this gets drained and washed out, we happened to be helping with this work when we got a nice ammount of fresh fish living the good life on horse feed. Our cooking skills werent up to the fresh fish yet, and it turned more into an oily fish soup instead of fried fish, but still good.

Our work on the farm has been influenced by various factors, such as weather, workers, ducks, rats. Much of the work which was energeticaly started the first 6-7 weeks of our internship has slowed down a bit but we hope this week we can get back into the same motivation, gear, drive etc.

Planting in the green houses has kept going, lots of rows of tomatoes have been transplanted, hoping we can see some of them before leaving in December. Stop that train im leeeaaavin. Other than tomatoes we have over 2000 lettuce (units) lettuces? which will bring in about 30 pounds per week. The cattle is getting ordered and modernized (computer!) which will make its management and supervision easier.

Enjoy

New

New Room

We have moved rooms. Now we live on the first floor, have a restaurant grade kitchen (bigger than the last, gas stove among other upgrades). To the right is our new set up. we stole the living rooms sofa. Remulos, or Romolus or Rominos, not sure what his name is but yet I call him. is unhappy, this couch was his home. his bed. Last night he came in and joined us in our sleep. Our new room has one disadvantage, curtains. Curtains keep light out. Light makes entering  a new day a more joyful experience. Darkness makes warmth. covers. pillows. seem much more appealing.                       

New Lake

The next picture is of our wind tunnels or green houses. This shows the extent of the flooding the farm is feeling in its lower sections. This lake was at one point planted with summer crops, so I hear. It is about 1 meter from the lowest green house and might reach it if rain continues. Not much would get lost if just a side of the greenhouse gets hit, but it would delay planting. In this picture you can also see the power of hidric erosion. This "canal" is still going strong after a couple of hours of rain, pulling dirt down into our ducks new lake. This ruins the hills soil, but at least it acumulates in the lake bottom (which will soon be able to plant) and doesnt get carried away in rivers like most erosion. 

New Injury

Two new sheep where born today. The mother gets special care. Other new things? New books. New cooking knowledge, we made dumplings, jamaican potatoes and garden tomatoe sauce with pasta for dinner. New mouse scurrying arround our kithchen, I might get a picture some day. New.. oh well.

New Sheep

Enjoy.

The Eternal Storm

Tuesday, as we were eating our Mr. Goldteeth meal with a slight variation (We got pork instead of chicken), during an intense downpour, flooding our eating area. thank you boots. A LIGHTning BOLT. Struck about 20 meters from us. It was a pretty exciting shock. All lunchers gave a little cry-yelp-exclamation with no one admitting to it. This electric arrow hit our internet antenna. Burned out two wireless routers and some other cables which disrupted internet availability all week. A nice computerless week in lake Pantrepant.

It´s not actually that bad, conditions are good, workers have access and roads are still open. One major FEAR is the Wind Tunnels. These green houses are usually surrounded by peaceful rolling pastures. Now are an island, fearing inundation. Tomorrow I will post a picture of the waters aproach to the lower green house, less than a meter away. If rain keeps falling at this rate we will have lost everything by the end of the week. We might build a vegetable ark. 

Tractor working at the school. Note the enemy in the
background rebuilding its forces.

On Wednesday we realized nature always wins. Much of our work at Unity Primary School was elimanted after two weeks of no access. Our enemy, King Grass, grew back and we decided to bring in our friend, Alba and the tractor, to try and beat it once and for all. 

Monday was Jamaican Heroes Day, a national holiday. I dont know much about Jamaican Heroes, only Marcus Garvey. 

"A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots."

Tuesday, usually known as Tuday, was spent working in the wind tunnels, transplating arugula, tomatoes and picking peppers, tomatoes and pak choi. Canals where dug for drainage, diminishing the flooding in the upper green houses. At about 10 a.m. the rains started, trapping me in the green houses until lunch, which was delayed an hour because fire is at war with rain, but cooked pork likes fire.

Yes, we like donkeys.

Treating ticks in Brahman

The work with the cattle was heavy today. Starting with Tony "Wi got plenty work fo today". The rain didnt stop it. Gathering far away herds. Curing some. Bringing them into the pens. Today the cows seemed more worked up, stressed, than usual. War with Humans. Luis had several near cow-ramming-into-him experiences and Fabio ended up being the gate master, which was consistently slammed into by angry bulls. Good days. After all that work one young bull was sold to a nearby farm and a couple of them weighed for inspection. 

Heroes Day and a Friday Payday turned into a nice time. F&L had different weekends. One being harrassed by U.S. immigration, nearly deported, eagles, hamburgers, Dali´s genius insanity, jazz, infinite train rides and highway rescues. The other (Luis) visits Golden Eye, ex-home of Ian Flemming, author of James Bond. Visit to local Bunker´s Hill Heroes Day football match. Being Filmed. 

Coming up! A life interview with Mr. Luis Rojas about his weekend! 

Saturday 8:30 am. Lovely Mrs. Cathy Sniper hurrying me to leave to Golden Eye, the film crew gave me a ride in their Van to Oracabessa. Arriving the place, knew some persons who work on the project and started to explore the place. Walking through, Golden Eye´s life guard invite me to a kayak ride around the lake and part of the reef. The ride ends up with a race and the "black man" couldn´t believe a "whitey" beat him. During the evening swimming around the lake/sea felt just like heaven and refill myself of some energy for the rest of the weekend. 

On sunday morning a horse back riding with Gareth and Paul was done around some of the pastures and forested hills of Pantrepant, ending this journey with a freedom fast gallop around the green areas near the houses of the farm. I am sure Paul will remember this. Greetings! 

Monday, Heroe's Day. Went with my bredrins of Pantrepant to the district and tried some goat testicles, liver and brain. Don´t think would take this a my diet, still prefer callaloo.....After this, Exidos (Bunker's Hill soccer team) played a match having a positive score. The evening take me at the community center, hearing some reggae, mostly dance hall.

Tuesday. Storm.

A view of Goldeneye villas

Mr. Lifeguard

The Island of relax

Swimming in the pristine waters of Gold.

Rasta Moske (Dave) cooking up goat. 

Grilled Goat "parts".

Bunkers hill soccer team.

School bredrins

One Love.

Male
.

Today, Monday, Lunes, our compost got respected. The compost was used in the wind tunnels (one of our piles) to improve the soil in the red and yellow beet beds, the salads and to fertilize some recently sprouted yellow string beans. Tomorrow, due to our new found economic and social success in the composting business, will be dedicated to rebuilding the house garden circular compost and starting a new one, after the morning activities of bringing in cattle and picking and packing produce. Luis, in his morning cattle run, encountered a death by natural cause of a bull calf. This is not uncommon and is not due to bad practices. Following this discovery, upon returning to the stables, a bet was made on the dead calfs sex, male or female?. Luis R. ended up winning upon returning to the site. Apart from fertilizing, cucumbers got planted in the house garden and lettuce in the windtunnels. Our first 6 pounds of Pak choi planted our first week here got sold. Another 200 or so pounds left. Lets hope GE opens up soon.

Luis completing our first delivery of our valuable product.

None of us like being considered pirates. Thieves, robbers, criminals. Pirates we are. We are pirates, pirates in big ships, pirates in small boats, pirates on planes, pirates on tractors, in offices, on fishing boats, in machines, factories, pirates taking. taking. taking. taking.  and we are the pirates of the earth. quick personal, personal gain with no respect for our earth. Our small planet. Home. Agriculture needs to change, in scale, ownership, marketing, methods, people involved, knowledge. farming needs to come back, farming in its true sense, a man (human) working his field. working his crops. knowing his life. living a life. being alive. knowing the world. Farming needs to get rid of pirates. So does everything else really. Our world needs to retrain, reset, our perspectives on importance. What gets done on PTP needs to be reproduced on a serious scale worldwide, reconnecting the youth, the elderly, the middle aged, the everything, the office workers, the city scramblers, everyone, with nature, with what feeds them, lets them survive, connecting in a direct form. A real form. 

Left row: Non fertilized red and yellow beets.
Right row: Very happy super fertilized bed. 

I would like to make an important (To me, and all people who knew him) intermission in our super serious blog. In the year 2000 REX, a pretty common name for an uncommon entity, was born in Cuba. He lived under Fidel Castro in terrible conditions, eating potatoes, but decided to escape communism, fleeing to Costa Rica. In the Year 2010, after being with me since I was 14, he has left. Thank you Rex. Thank you for joy and companionship. Thank you for being crazy and being part of all my adventures. 

REXXXXYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

The day of Travel

Morning tractoration

Although distances covered in Jamaica are short, its a pretty tiny island (80km wide and 240km long), travel is long. Today we woke up early, not really, at around 7. to get out of PTP on a mission to RASTA VILLAGE, a sort of tourist-y group of rastas, or trying to be. In RASTAV we planned to visit their local medicinal garden, said to be the largest on the island, by them.

Fabio and Bongo Steve river crossing

Getting out of PTP is never easy, many taxi drivers dont like coming up the eroded and flooded road, but we got lucky in the morning and got dropped off by the farms tractor about halfway down the hill, near Friendship.                                                   Two people got in a knife fight in friendship last night. They were not friends. Well.. hmm.. oh in Friendship we encountered our Friend Bongo Steve, mentioned in an earlier post, who knew about RASTAV and helped found it a couple of years ago. With him we quickly got a car to drop us off in Wakefield, where we now found a quicker "shortcut" road towards MoBay. Somewhere in between MoBay and RV we got off, in the middle of nowhere, and had to cross an angry river and walk up a small mountain. RV was well organized, run by about 6 or 7 rastas with ITAL food, good music, crafts, childrens school, medicinal garden, a bamboo maze for meditation while walking among other things. We were lucky enough to get a free tour for being Bongos friends and where treated to great food and invited to play the drums. They asked us to come back and JAMMM some other time and bring our own instrument.

ITAL food kitchen

A new word learned today is something like IANI (pronounced something like eye-an-eye. It means WE. EYE is me. EYE is you. I is the universe. I is nature. I is jah.god. I is peace. I is our world.

The medicine garden we found had a pretty good collection. We only got one endemic herb (Search me heart) and might have a very hard time getting it to survive. Search me heart (Rytidophyllum tomentosum) is used for general colds and as a drink when mixed with coconut oil. Its rare in Jamaica, so them Rastas and Mr. Bongo say. They werent too happy about sharing their herbs and we didnt get many. Most of the herbs they had are common in our mountains, so they gave us leaves and told us to bring them back and get locals to identify them for us.

Rasta making herbal tea

Rasta smashing up medicine herbs

Our return journey was met with rain. We ended up having to go to MoBay, walk around downtown to find a bus that takes us back to Wakefield. In Wake we waited a while for a car to take us up to Friendship where our foot journey began again. Just got back from a nice walk.

Anyway. what else. Gonna go try and get our herbs to survive in a potting and compost mix and keep it in a cool shady place for a while. Tomorrow is Sunday.

Enjoy.

Don't worry, we still happy......

The day started with bad new for us. Fabio wake up in the morning and when arriving the garden he realized that a callaloo murder was about to happen. Some planting beds having callaloo on it were going to be cleaned for a later carrot and brocoli sowing. Now, with other consumers arrival on sunday, callaloo demand is going to increase and we are very concerned about wether it will be enough plants to supply our future vegetarian dinners. Nevertheless to prepare against this, more tasks were developed during the day, consisting mostly on preparing this ex-callaloo bed's soil again to be planted by carrots and broccoli, and others. In some of the beds a cover for rainfall was putted on it.

RIP callaloo

Carrot beds

Also the seedlings development of different crops is going excellent giving us our final hope to forget about our callaloo based diet.

On the animal part, two of the red poll herds were sprayed to control ticks on them and other herds were changed to another pasture, to make sure that the pasture plots are getting enough days off to have an efficient pasture regrowth for e better animal feeding.

Several experiences has happened during these weeks at Pantrepant, the last update:

• Fabio's back is better due to his new purchase.

Fabio's new purchase

• Luis has dizziness, diarrea, etc, he probably though at any time himself as a local and started drinking pipe water with the worker's. Now he is getting better..."in every life we have some trouble,when you worry you make it double, don´t worry", we still happyyyyyyyyyyy. Bob Marley.

pipe water consequences

endless summer

I wish. It´s more of an endless night.

LR on his road to school. 

First time in Jamaica that insomnia gets me. I´m not sure whats happening but at least the cocks are already crowing. If thats what they do, sunrise coming soon, and a long tired day ahead.

Today.Yesterday.We went to work in the morning at Unity School. We hadnt been in a while, due to weekend adventures and intense storm rain wind flooding. The flooding has subsided a little, but crossing One Tic is still not possible. To get to school we had to cross various flooded streets while it started raining again. Since we havent been to the school in about 10 days and the rain has been incesantly feeding the KING GRASS, our arch enemy, it seems like our work is starting over. Quickly resprouting. Quickly showing us that nature is king. Evidently Japanese farmer scientist Masanobu Fukuoka, founder of natural or "do-nothing" farming had no king grass in his rice paddies. Oh. So we got the layout of the whole garden set up, which will make work more organized from now. Hopefully Saturday, if the weather permits, we can go work and beat KG once and for all. We have a pretty nice group of workers willing to come help so I think this will be our final battle, before being able to get to the nice aspects of the garden and being able to work with the students. 

Today we had the company of a recent High School graduate visiting his primary school. He told us about the farm they used to have and how much him and his classmates enjoyed agri. He blames its dissapearance on lazy youth. He was forced to work hard back in 2000. 

Fish Hut on our fist nice afternoon in a while.

After school we walked down to Bunker´s Hill and decided we needed to go to Falmouth, nearest town with a bank, and stock up on food again. We got our groceries and asked arround where we could get some fresh fish. Jamaica is a fishless island. Most Jamaicans dont like fish, unless it is in Ackee and Saltfish or other national dishes. It is not common. We took a road towards MoBay and ended up enjoying a coastal Fish Hut, kind of like Pizza Hut without pizza. 

We learnt a new and very important lesson today. Dont buy your taxi driver any beer. In Costa Rica, once you get going in a party mood we say "Montado en la Carreta". Our taxi driver, Bunka, was most definetly Montado en la Carreta, meaning on the bandwagon. Ready to party. On our way back he kept stopping to visit all his friends and several bars-shops on the way and inviting us to several servings of white rum. Maybe that is why im not sleeping. The drive back was pretty intense. In two hours we will wake up, Luis will probably go out on his horse and check up on the cattle with other cowboys in the morning and I will go work with the garden crew. After a nice Mr. Goldteeth lunch im sure I will need a 12 to 1:30 p.m. nap to make up for this sleepless night, and then in the afternoon we where planning on visiting Mr. Macdonald and try to get the 20 or so medicinal plants we have identified so far in his surroundings. 

Enjoy your morning. 

Cooking lessons

This weekend, due to flooding and rain and flooding and wind and flooding and rain, we stayed locked up in the hills of Pantrepant. This was a great weekend, relaxing. home. cool. food. On the right you can see what is usually a dry pasture. This picture was taken today, 3 days after the serious flooding.
On Friday we worked in the Wind Tunnels making new beds, clearing a new tunnel and planting  two rows, one row of Bull´s Blood beets and another one of Touchstone yellow beets. These, due to the flooding in the surrounding areas here having ant trouble. Ants where digging out the planted seeds in the dry wind tunnels. To control this we increased the soil humidity and applied BT on Sunday. This doesnt seem to be working as of today, so this afternoon will apply Vinegar and Chili mix, which is supposed to keep ants away from the area.

                      

Saturday and Sunday Tony was giving us cooking lessons. We had gotten a chicken about 3 weeks ago, but had absolutely no idea what one does with frozen chickens. Saturday we learned how to cook chicken in a sauce and made rice and greens. Sunday we learned how to make fried chicken. This knowledge is of utmost importance in Jamaica. Chicken being a staple food. Tony used to own a restaurant near Wakefield.

I think this post is going to be only pictures from now on. Enjoy

Mr. Donkey, usually lives by the river but flooding drove him up.

Cocky, the evil dog, killed a kitten today. We had to tie him up.

Three course meal! We are getting better every day. 

Had to take care of some cow wounds today. 

Finally a clear sunset, after two weeks of rain. 

Master Brayer #2

Tractorado

Rain lluvia pioga raga rain lluvia 

Luis R. turning compost. 2 of the 3 piles are ready and will be
applied to the wind tunnels upon transplanting.

In the 18th century sugar cane plantation ruins on
Pantrepant

Pineapple. Hurt my back. Lots of work. 

Cave exploration. These caves have a pre-Spanish (1400 or so)
carving on the walls. 

Flooded wind tunnels. This is pack choi planted
three weeks ago. Up on top you can see the
same pack choi almost ready for harvest.

Home. 

Good Night (Even though this is sunrise...)