Dehydration - not a bad thing

Since it appears the raised-bed garden is going to be productive, I had to give some consideration to what I would do with all the produce since I inadvisedly planted all the seeds at the same time (well, most of them). I freeze a lot of stuff but have limited freezer space. I also waste a lot of food because I buy it enthusiastically at the farmers' market and then never use it before it gets fatigued. Happily, I can "re-home" tired fruits and veggies to the composter. But this is an expensive approach to making compost.

Several years ago, I got interested in dehydrating food. I think an infomercial may have temporarily grabbed my attention but I never did order because I would have had to jettison my Ginsu knife collection to make room for it - not! Still I thought this might be a practical alternative approach to preserving all the wonderful fruits and veggies that are available here in the rainforest. And jerky was particularly appealing since I was a hunter.

So, "like ya would", I hopped on the web looking for home-made dehydrators since the likelihood of being able to purchase a store-bought version in the rainforest would be somewhere between slim and nil. There were plenty of recipes, ranging between solar powered (which would be good for half the year here), cardboard box models, to more sophisticated designs. After extensive research, I decided I could make one out of a seldom used Coleman cooler and baking racks. I was pretty pumped for this project.

On Farmers' Market day (Friday) I was a little late getting to the venue. But my lovely friend Sally was tending bar and had taken delivery of my goat-milk yogurt so I decided to stay and have a beverage and it was raining anyway. Kelly, the owner came in and I was telling the ladies of my exciting new project. Kelly said she had a dehydrator I could borrow if I wished. So I did.
It is an Excalibur 5-tray model and it works like a charm.

It even fit into my old "entertainment centre" that I built years ago but was outgrown by the big-screen TV. So I went out and bought bananas, a pineapple, mushrooms and corn-on-the-cob. I had red bell peppers that were getting a little "long in the tooth" and needed rescued. I managed to fill all five trays, fired it up and......well, there isn't much more to it than that except to be patient and wait. The next day, I flipped the bananas, pineapple, pepper and mushrooms. Then more waiting. Today I liberated the corn, pepper and mushrooms. The bananas and pineapple are still not solid like the web demos suggest. But that's OK...there's always a learning curve. I put the captives in Ziplok bags and sucked the air out of them. They should keep for a little while but I an really eager to use them. Life can be fun in the rainforest.

More on Gardening in the Rainforest

I would like to assure both my readers that the composter is working like a charm. I keep feeding it and like "Oscar the Grouch", who also lives in a garbage can, it is working 24x7. I keep adding to it and it just accepts everything and turns it into nutrient-rich garden enhancement. The container is about 3/4 full after being filled repeatedly and added to continuously. The volume of my refuse has been significantly reduced and consequently so has my carbon footprint.

My raised-bed garden is beginning to look as though it wants to produce some veggies. This shot was taken yesterday and today there is even more growth. This is very exciting.

I have decided to build a dehydrator. One of my major problems is purchasing fruit and veggies to "eat healthy" and then watching them rot because I haven't been able to incorporate them into my meal plans. My revised plan is to dry and preserve them so they do not go to waste....I cannot afford that and, although the composter would welcome them, I cannot condone waste of primo veggies and fruit.

The Great Computer Crash of 2010

Yeah...you got it! There was an unexpected power outage and I was not in the office. By the time I got there to shut down my system, the "uninterruptable" power supply (UPS) was running out of juice. Sadly, it quit before windows closed. When the power came back on I very gingerly booted the system.......to no avail. I went through the usual routine of trying to outwit the Operating System.....to no avail.

So I had no choice but to re-install the Operating System and this required reformatting the hard drive. Now, I am a computer professional and I had nearly everything backed up at least twice over.....well, so I believed. Fortunately, I had the Operating System disks so it was pretty straightforward to do the re-install. Then began the re-build.

I began re-installing the printer, the scanner, the HP Ipaq hand-held, the internet, and some of the applications that I need. Now, living in the rainforest, when I bought this computer it came loaded with software that I need like MS Office and Frontpage. I no longer had the disks for these and I need them to do my job. I downloaded and installed Oracles OpenOffice which claims compatibility with MS Office but it would not run my Excel applications. I downloaded a trial version of Office 2010 but it would not install!! Frustrated, I searched the web and found a site that sold Office 2003, which is what I had before the great crash. I tried to purchase it but because I have a Canadian credit card and I am in Costa Rica, their fraud alarm went off and they would not sell to me.

Now even more frustrated, I resorted to downloading a pirate version. That worked perfectly and I am now back in business. I tried to do the right thing, honest I did but things don't work the same way when you are living in the rainforest.

So I am getting on with the rebuild and I reinstall Skype only to realize that I have no audio. I can't live without Skype or YouTube or FaceBook so this is serious. I called my local computer support buddy and after a while and a few false starts, I managed to find the audio driver for my motherboard on Intel's website, downloaded and installed and I was made whole again!

So the rebuild continues and I expect that in a couple of weeks I will be back to normal.

No Pants on the Ground...Plants in the Ground

Whereas Sunday is normally my "cook up a storm" day, I opted to devote today to gardening. I mentioned in my previous post that my new puppy had chewed up my seeds packages while I "rested my eyes" for a short while. I checked out the packages today and it seems she had only wasted two of five packages. So I searched the two for any seeds remaining that would allow me to identify those I swept up the other night.

What luck! The first one checked was lettuce....a wispy little green thing. The other was spinach.....a roundish little seed easily distinguished from the lettuce seed. So my work was cut out for me. I dumped the contents of the Ziploc bag I had swept the seeds into on a dark-coloured magazine cover. Then I got my trusty Swiss Army knife and separated the seeds. This occupied around three hours. When I was done, I had lunch. It turns out separating seeds is hungry work and leaves one bleary-eyed.

I had done my due diligence and determined that three of the five could be planted directly in the prepared raised-bed. The other two wanted to be planted in a nursery and one of them wanted to be blanched!

So I planted the lettuce, spinach and the basil more or less according to the instructions on the packages. Then I turned to the web to try to learn how one blanches seeds. Now I know how to blanch spinach and broccoli before freezing but this did not seem to me to be a very kind thing to do to a seed. I could find nothing! The more research I did, the clearer it became that the instructions were meant for temperate climates and the reason for starting plants in a nursery was to avoid potential frost damage.

So I planted the eggplant and the onion seeds according to instructions for transplanting. We'll see what happens. But the seeds are in the ground and I look forward to chronicling the development of my little raised-bed garden in the rainforest.

Raised-bed Garden

With the composter up and running, it was now time to construct the raised-bed if I seriously wish to grow some herbs and veggies. I had most of the materials at hand so I started by ripping a old 2 x 4 to make 2 x 2 for corner posts. I had some 1 x 12 "formuleta" lying around so I cut two end pieces and two side pieces. The ends had to be 48" inside dimension to allow for comfortable access to all parts of the raised bed.

I began by clamping the corner pieces to the ends, allowing a 1" setback to accept the sides, for which I had allowed when cutting the ends. I had requested 3 1/2" bolts but when my courier went to THE hardware store they only had 3". So I wound up having to countersink the nut ends to accommodate the shorter length. I drilled and bolted the corner posts to the end pieces making sure they were on the same side! Then, with great difficulty, I bolted on the side pieces. It's always a challenge to do a four-handed operation with only two available. Nevertheless, there is always a way to overcome if one is sufficiently resourceful.

Here in the rainforest we have critter problems. My main concern with the raised bed was the land crabs that will burrow up from underground to dine on succulent new plants. To combat this, I affixed some 1/4" hardware cloth I had lying around to the bottom of the raised bed frame. That should discourage them, I think.

With the raised-bed frame completed, it was time to mix the medium and fill it. A friend had recommended ground coconut husks be added to the soil to aerate and lighten it - similar to vermiculite in potting soil. Now in the rainforest when you are not looking for them, coconut husks are everywhere. So I dispatched my gardener to collect some for me and I made arrangements to use the chipper owned by the water association. He came back practically empty-handed. I picked several up on the beach and the road, my own property and harvested some of the fabric-like material on the coconut trees. I began running the nuts through the chipper and was delighted to see how much material derived from a single nut. Unfortunately, after a short time, the chipper totally bogged down. I believe it happened because the material was pretty damp and fibrous and simply clogged the delivery system to the point that the flywheel could no longer fly. So since today was repair-the-chipper day, I assigned my gardener to shred the remaining material by hand and mix the soil, compost and husk to fill the frame.

I am pleased to report that the chipper is now back up and running. I will ensure that coconut husks are dried in the future or simply wait until the dry season to shred them.


When we finished repairing the chipper, Jesus (my gardener) and I applied some fertilizer and worked it into the soil. I will now let it rest while I start some of my plants in a nursery.

This is sure to be a challenge as my new puppy chewed up the five packages of seeds I had purchased. I was able to recover a whole bunch of seeds but I don't which is which. I am hopeful there are seeds remaining in the chewed up packages and that they are different enough for me to tell what is what. Nothing is easy in the rainforest.

Composter

I decided a while ago that I would put in a garden this year. I want to grow some herbs and veggies to get the freshest and most nutritious food available. So yesterday I decided to give over some of my cooking time to making a composter and starting it off. I had a plastic garbage can that has not been getting much use since I started recycling in earnest. So I hopped on the web and searched out recipes for home-made compost bins from garbage cans.

I was amazed to see how many postings there were on the subject....and how many differing and, in some cases, conflicting opinions existed. I read as many as I could stand and came up with a kind of hybrid plan of attack. Needless to say, we are looking at an extremely simple project here. Basically, we are drilling holes in a plastic garbage can (sides, top and bottom) to turn it into a compost bin. The size and spacing of the holes was gleaned from the web postings and the conformation of the trash can. I created five rows of holes 4-6" apart vertically, drilled into every second "valley" - about three inches apart horizontally.

Now it was time to build the compost. My sources said to begin with a layer of small sticks. This was a piece of cake (except for the bending over part) as my property is littered with small sticks and I collected a bucketful. Next was a layer of shredded paper. So I went to my office and shredded paper, tidying up somewhat as I went, until I had a bucketful. Next was a layer of green material. My gardener had just trimmed a lot of the plants and stacked the clippings in a pile that will ultimately be run through the chipper. I filled the bucket once more and added it to the compost. Then came a layer of soil. This process was repeated until the composter was almost full but with room to accept kitchen waste which will be converted to nutrient-rich soil in a relatively short time. Of course, I had to water the materials as I introduced them and will need to ensure that the compost is moist. Other than that, the only maintenance necessary is to shake or roll the trash can around once a week.

As recommended, I placed the compost bin on concrete blocks just outside of my outdoor kitchen. This way, I can access it even in rainy weather (of which we have six months) to deposit kitchen and other material. The added advantage is that my volume of waste material will be further reduced as will my carbon footprint as what would have been landfill is converted to soil and ultimately to food. The rainforest will be a better place.

Gate Repair and Clicker

I made a set of gates when I moved here eleven years ago. I made them from wood because that is what I was used to and felt comfortable with. They have served me well, keeping the roaming cattle out of my property.

One of them was smashed once by a friend who had come to drop off some pastries she had made. I wasn't home and I gather when she was reversing out of the driveway one of the gates had swung into her path and got crunched. She was back to repair it the following day.

On another occasion, my ex drove through the gates in a golf cart. I know what you're thinking. Yes, it was deliberate and made a mess of the gates. But I was there the following day to repair them.

They are made of pochote, a beautiful tropical wood that is easy to work and has the reputation of being insect-resistant. But after ten years of service, some of the members were beginning to rot. When I came home the other night one style was missing as was the chain that held the gates closed.

So I had to implement, at minimum, a temporary solution. After all, the cows might come at any time. So I dragged my hundred-foot extension cord out to the gate and, with Missy bouncing all around my feet and running away at the sound of the drill, I stiched a short length of pochote to the top rail, drilled a hole in it and tied a rope loop through it. The loop drops over the style (which is not missing) of the companion gate. Voila....temporary repair affected in short order. I was able to take advantage of a lull in the rain that has been more or less continuous for three days. I was told this morning that we have received more than ten inches!

On my to-do list is an instruction to replace the gates. I had identified the deterioration months ago and pondered what the replacement should be, i.e. metal gates, swinging or rolling, wooden, etc. I can fabricate wooden gates myself but metal gates will need a manufacturer and installer.

I started training Missy today. The training program I am following prescribes the use of a "clicker" to provide a "bridge" between a behaviour and a reward. Makes good sense to me and the demonstration video is impressive. So I think, "Where in the name of God can I get a clicker in the rainforest?" Perhaps a toystore would have such an item, even incorporated into something I could dismantle. But there are no toy stores handy. Then I realized that the lighters I have for the grill and the gas range click. And I had a spare. Dismantling time. I burned off all the butane in the spare which was considerably smaller than the current and went to work.

A few minutes later, I had a clicker! It is not as loud as I wish it were, but it definitely clicks and, I believe, does the desired bridging. I went to the local convenience store and procured some el cheapo hot dogs. Missy loves them and I believed they would serve as a worthy reward. I had one training session with Missy. She will now sit on command and she's only eight weeks old but very smart. The training system is awesome and gets quick results. This is going to be fun.