Vespers...

The real challenge in farming comes when one starts to lose the contest against the insects, the fungi, the inclement weather, the heat, the rain, the wind.
It takes all I have to want to continue on this seemingly thankless task when the challenge becomes too much.
Ironically, the challenge is the biggest part of farming. When I start with seeds, planted in trays or in the beds, I assume the result will be 'glorious", like I think of a daughter when she is but an infant. But I also know that I will be dealing with all the vectors of disease, despoliation, the chances of a 'freak" mountain storm ("un garuero" we call it) and all manner of mysterious infections etc.
It is a function of human consciousness that I would expect a good harvest, "Hope springs eternal" we say. But I already have years of experience doing this and I still set myself up emotionally for the disappointment that comes so naturally...all the while knowing that my chances of a good harvest are beyond my firm control.
As I write this, I feel all the emotions of the several disappointments that this farm has given me lately. I had lost 200 tomato plants just as winter was coming to an end. A mountain storm blew in one night with severe rains and winds that exceeded 60 miles per hour. Despite the extensive system of ties and supports that had held the plants in place for the prior month and a half, the wind smashed down vertically and then whipped horizontally and left us with 3 plants that were not affected too badly. 197 plants, all the work that had gone into them, all the expectation that we would be able to offer a good crop at market time, they were all smashed to broken stems and tattered leaves, the most pathetic plants hung from their ties, roots ripped out of the ground.

Climate...

Climate is everything in farming. The timing of rains and the larger clockwork of the seasons is what makes farming possible. One can provide plants with all the conditions they need and stimulate them to produce by keeping them healthy and pest free. One can add compost regularly, mulch the beds, add minerals and organic supplements and provide the "best possible" situation for your crops but one cannot make them grow.
What makes plants grow, especially food plants, is a regular and reliable set of climate conditions that are beyond any human ability to control. I have my own ideas about how much we contribute to climate change and global warming but my experience has shown me that even minor deviations from the necessary set of conditions leads to lower productivity, greater infestations and inferior foodstuffs at harvest time.
Currently, we are experiencing the weather "pattern" known as El Nino. I had known it was expected for months, since February at least, and I paid close attention to our fruit trees where signs of early and/or irregular flowering signal the onset of El Nino. I had learned that white-faced or cappuchin monkeys, a fruit-eating ape, suffer population declines in El Nino years because trees bloom and fruit irregularly. The early and irregular blooming leads to shrunken fruit, immature fruit falling off the trees and tends to occur in large areas of the jungle forest. This last aspect denies the monkeys the chance to forage effectively as the consumption of limited fruit stocks is only achieved through extremely long treks through depleted forest.
Our fruit trees exhibited this exact behavior, blooming early for our altitude. The flowers were abundant but before long they had withered and what little fruit developed fell off the trees while green.
The coffee plants flowered evenly leaving the plantation in beautiful white blooms from creek to heights. The beans started well and developed as they should, but along the way the bushes redeveloped orange rust fungus (roya) which required spraying with copper and a fungicide. Luckily these chemicals are not phytotoxic and do not remain in the plant or in the beans.
The re-appearance of roya at a time when the plants are usually free of infections is an example of the irregularity I have noticed in the last years.
Another consequence of this irregular weather "pattern" is that plants grow sporadically. There are reasons for this, namely the uneven rainfall pattern and the intensification of ground temperatures due to days of cloudless skies. We are nearly 8C warmer than normal for this time of year.
The rainy season in Costa Rica where we live should now be in full swing. We should be receiving the majority of our rains now, in these last 4 and remaining 2 months of the season. The reality is nowhere near expectations. I have been using irrigation water on the crops and have hooked up sprinklers this winter which is unheard of.
When rains do fall, they seem to come at exactly the wrong moment for the crops. Plants in the fields, growing under the hot sunny sky, do not do well when a strong coldwater shower rushes down from the mountains. The cold rains shock the hot plants and cause the plants to stop growing for periods of days.
Fruiting tomatoes chilled by such rains remain stunted for a week in some cases.
This slowdown in development can cause the tomatoes to develop blight or be easy prey for whiteflies and mites. At times plants leaves get "burned" by the temperature change.
These storms are not overly common in these parts. But locals say that they are becoming the norm. If so, much of what we grow outdoors will have to move to covered beds.

A dog is important...

A farm needs a dog. For security, as an alarm system, to protect and defend the crops from marauding creatures nothing beats a dog.
When we decided to travel for months to Costa Rica, we had no choice but to take our Australian cattle dog with us. She was 4 years old at the time and had traveled with us all over Europe, by car, train and plane.
Stella, that is her name, given to her by my wife who chose it because of Marlon Brando's famous scene in A Streetcar Named Desire, where he screams Stella's name in despair...Our Stella is a faithful, "velcro dog" (meaning she sticks to your side when out walking). So putting Stella in a traveling cage and loading her on a plane for a 12+ hour flight was unpleasant, but mostly for us.
Stella arrived in Costa Rica, had all her papers checked and was taken outside for relief. Despite nearly 16 hours in transit, Stella was fine.
We picked up our rental vehicle, loaded it with our luggage and Stella and headed for the hotel in San Jose.
The room was small, musty and under the flight path of the airport which did not stop landing flights all night long. We "slept", Stella lay exhausted at the foot of the bed. When the sun finally rose, we were eager to get going. After a small breakfast, we packed up, paid our bill and left for the Pacific side of the country.
Stella travels well. We made up a bed for her to travel in on the back seat of the car.  Mostly she just lays there sleeping but when we slow down or stop she is immediately interested in what is happening outside.
Once, when we stopped to put gas in the car, the attendant appeared suddenly in the open window of the car which launched Stella into a barking fit so savage that the poor man nearly fell backwards from the shock. I apologized profusely, explaining that she is a good watchdog but has yet to actually bite anyone. Luckily, the attendant showed his good Tico character and accepted my apologies with a smile and the advice that it is good to travel in this country with a dog.
It was Stella who chose our farm, actually. The day we went to see the property with no intention of buying something, Stella refused to stay in the car. She leapt out of the rental and bolted down the property. Considering that we had no idea what lay down the slope, I chased after Stella, yelling her name and hoping she would not run off and get lost. When I arrived at the bottom of the hill, I realized there was a creek, running strong despite the intense heat and dry landscape all around. Relieved, I walked to the creek's edge. Stella, standing neck deep in the water, smiling, communicated with me through her eyes, basically telling me that it was great. She jumped about in the cool water, snapping at the bubbles on the surface, the leaves floating by and chewing any twigs that came within biting distance. I smiled at the sheer joy that was so evident in her demeanour. I called to Stella and she followed me back up the hill to where the real estate agent and the seller stood. My wife was busy with her phone. As I approached, I saw she was pushing buttons on the phone and wondered who she could be calling. She was calculating the cost of the property; I told her it had a creek and woods at the bottom. A bellbird sang it's haunting call somewhere in the valley as she asked for my help with the calculations, she "must be doing something wrong" she said. Using the calculator she had determined that the cost of the land was considerably less than our savings in Amsterdam. In Europe, generally, one could not find a small shed for such a reasonable price. We calculated it several times.

"Arid plain"

I remember having driven past "our farm" before it became ours.
We were driving around, taking in the sights northwest of the lake basin, enjoying the summer rains and the incredible rainbows they would generate in this already "beautiful enough" landscape. The road descended, entering a small rural town.
    A pleasant community of simple houses, loose running poultry and street-sleeping dogs rolled out in front of us. Young people in small groups stood about on the streets, old men sat on benches across from the large wooden church, chatting in the afternoon sun. Opposite the church, a soccer field glowed brilliant green, and beyond it stood a zinc-paneled bullring in faded paint, partly rusted. The sky was brilliant blue, that tropical cerulean blue that seems to speak of happiness. A shower had just passed over the town, leaving everything shiny and sharply defined and as we turned east on one of the small streets we were greeted with a massive, vibrant double rainbow the likes of which we had never seen.
   I asked a young man the name of the town and mistakenly thought he had said "good lands"... As we left town, we noticed a gravel road to the left of the main pavement and decided to explore it. It wound upward, somewhat narrow in places. It  was a landscape of fields with horses and cows, trees extending along the ridges and hillsides, many windblown and flagging. A single house stood in one of the fields.
     As we climbed higher along the ridge, I noticed a "Se vende" sign, for sale, on a wooden fence in front of a gated property.
     A dry summer field, an "arid plain", stretched out behind a wooden gate wide enough for a truck to pass through. I drove slowly along the gravel road, my wife and I silently taking in the countryside. I had noticed the "tapia", the roofed entrance to the farm on our right long before our car passed it and I visually scoured the field from corner post to entrance while driving the length of the frontage.
    The field was brown and yellow, the mountain vegetation and shrubbery on the yellow landscape formed islands of dark green here and there, a few trees lined the north side of the field. One tree stood out starkly in the middle of the flat field.
    I could not see anything much but a flat plain about 200 meters wide. In the distance, behind the field rose a hillside and had I been thinking more (and driving less) I would have seen that the field sloped downward to an unseen creek and woods.
From where I sat, I didn't much like what I saw, despite liking the area for it's beauty and distance from the area's 2 cities.

A few days later, our seemingly self-appointed real-estate guide (an affable man in his early 60's, father of the young woman who managed the property we rented during our stay) offered to show us some properties in the same small town.

Coffee

 We plant arabica beans for espresso coffee. Coffee requires much work. From planting the seeds in a nursery, topping the seed bed with banana leaves, to spraying it daily to maintain soil humidity, transplanting the seedlings, called "copitas", into the development nursery, the digging up of the year old plants with large rootballs, their transport to the  field (some 2,000 holes each about the size of a gallon of milk), planting and maintenance (spraying to combat orange rust fungus, "broca"/weevils, "gusano coyojero"/bud worm, regular composting and guarding the new grains against marauding thrushes and jays); all these steps are required to get someone, somewhere a cup of coffee. Before we harvest the first coffee beans, the time, energy and expense required to get the plantation started and in order amounts to about 2.5 to 3 years.
Harvesting coffee is usually done at the end of the year. If the plants have matured equally fast, the harvest may last a month. But the first harvests are usually uneven and the plants can even put out new flowers while the old beans are still in need of harvesting. In this case, great care must be taken to avoid damaging the plants and flowers while harvesting the beans. The branches that hold the beans are called "bandolas" and can hold around 75 beans per branch.
A healthy plant can produce a kilo of coffee beans in a season. Since we have 2,000 plants, that can be 4,000 pounds of coffee.
To date, all the coffee we have harvested from newly producing plants amounts to a small 90 pounds, the beans picked from irregularly producing plants with semi-full bandolas on the same plant as naked bandolas. This is the problem of young coffee, irregular flowering and fruiting. The small harvest has taken us all of December, January and one day in February. For 90 pounds of coffee that is an extremely long harvest period. But one needs to practice harvesting so as not to damage the bandolas and the leaves. Coffee beans are well-attached to the branch, so one needs to exert a controlled amount of pressure to pick them. Too soft a grasp will deliver only the red, slimy skin of the bean while grabbing too hard can break the branch at the site of attachment.
The next step, after the picking and harvesting is the beginning of the processing of coffee. First, the skin is removed. This is done with a kind of water-driven augur that rips the skins from the beans. Alternatively, the beans can be shucked by hand. This is called "chanclando", likely from the Spanish word for slipper, "chancleta". At this stage the coffee is said to be "en belota".
The bean is forced out of the skin by squeezing it between the thumb and index finger. The bean, now wearing only its "pergamino" shell and bathed in sap or miel, is extremely slippery, so one shucks them into a tub of water where they will remain until all the beans have been shucked.
In Costa Rica, coffee is measured in basic units of "cajuelas"/pots. 3 cajuelas make up a "quintal". 7 quintales are 1 fanega. The Wiki article for fanega reads;
     "The fanega (Spanish for bushel) was an old measure of volume in Spanish-speaking countries. It was generally used in an agricultural context to measure quantities of grain. The measure varied greatly, but in Castile, it was equivalent to roughly 12 Imperial bushels or 55.5 liters. It was also a measure of surface area that was further subdivided into 100 varas, or the amount of land that could be sown with a fanega of seed."
 (Having lived all my life in cities, I find the system of accounting used in the countryside quite fascinating.)
After the coffee has been shucked, the beans are "en pergamino" and need to dry under the sun for several days. The second shucking, of the pergamino, is done by machine or by smashing the coffee beans in a wooden drumshaped "pilon" using a large wooden mace. The pergamino can be separated from the "oro verde"( literally "green gold") or true coffee bean by tossing the milled beans into the air and allowing the breeze to blow the chaff away.

 Coffee traders generally like coffee that has been stored for 8 months, preferring it's mellowed flavor to that of fresh roasted coffee's slight bitterness. But I like my coffee dark, strong and fresh roasted.*

The roasting can begin when all the coffee beans have dried. For this we use a large metal kettle pot. First we stoke a large fire, using guava wood which burns hot and long. The heat from the blaze makes it very uncomfortable to stand near while roasting so a long wooden spoon, like an oar, is used to stir the beans.
As the heat builds the beans begin to swell and the oils begin to warm out of the bean. This oil helps darken the beans. The smell of roasting coffee is quite a treat. After some time, the beans are dark and smell strongly and can be stored or ground for usage immediately.

*["Organic coffee" is a mis-nomer. With the onset of a global epidemic of orange rust fungus, coffee must be sprayed with a powerful fungicide. The use of such agents is prohibited in organic labeling rules. However, since most spraying takes place long before the coffee bean develops and since the fungicide is considered to be non-phytotoxic, the coffee beans are generally free of fungicide residues. The use of water for processing the beans and the fact that the actual coffee is inside 2 coats, the belota and the pergamino, which are removed and discarded (or processed in bio-digestors to produce methane gas for cooking), the coffee in your cup is virtually free of any taint.] Our coffee has nonesuch.

Amsterdamned...

Our life in this marvelous city was obviously coming to an end. Despite having the time and resources to enjoy Europe as we pleased, life here felt empty. This feeling was driven deep after we returned from a veritable dream vacation across the fat part of France where we had stayed in old chateaux and maisons, ate legendary French cuisine and drunk delicious wines from the Loire valley all the way to the Atlantic coast. Yet, upon returning home to Amsterdam, we felt unsatisfied. It was strange, to say the least, but it was a clear signal to us both.

I continued with my daily routines, trying to inject some meaning into my work as a studio painter, but the feeling that this phase of our lives was coming to a close just grew stronger with each brushstroke.

One day, my mother, who was living through GWBush's presidency, called and described her great desire to live anywhere else than in the USA. I listened patiently considering my mother's finances and abilities, as she spoke about her unease at the political winds blowing across America. She wanted to retire to a Spanish speaking country, but she couldn't afford Spain. She had considered Mexico, but it seemed a bit too unstable and violent for an "old woman".
I suggested she consider Central America, I even suggested Costa Rica might be right for her. Mom didn't know much about Costa Rica (neither did I really) so I offered to do some retirement related researches for her and inform her of the situation.

It was in the course of looking for my mother's ideal, non-USA, retirement that we discovered a veritable natural paradise. The country was environmentally diverse, all life zones except arctic were found within it's borders and the incredible variety of wildlife and climate made it very attractive to us as we sat in our lovely urban apartment, Dutch autumn quickly turning to winter outside our door. Could such a place actually be as great as it was promoted to be? Could one really see wildlife and be near it, was the culture really as open and friendly as claimed? We decided that we needed more information than the Internet could provide, so we bought nearly a dozen books on Costa Rica.  From Rough Guides practical information for tourists to humorous accounts like "Potholes in Paradise", we learned that the paradise it offered was real, as far as earthly paradise is concerned.

Our lifestyle made it possible for us to get away for many months, a benefit many deserve but few can create. So we planned to take a "gap year", as students do before heading to higher study or into their careers.  When we were young, such a concept didn't exist except for the idle rich and their offspring.

2 woody trees

The stormy winds have finally tapered off from highs of 107 kilometers per hour. As we walk around the farm, ascertaining the extent of the damage, It is not nearly as bad as my anticipation. A tall ratoncillo tree behind the house, that once stood upright nearly 15 meters tall, it's bright green leaf tips tickling the blue sky, now leans precariously toward the greenhouse adjacent to the house. It remains too wet to climb and prune, so I get the tall ladder, climb up and wrap a chain around a fork in the main trunk.  The other end of the chain we wrap around a larger tree behind the ratoncillo; a second chain is attached to an anona tree to pull the ratoncillo to the left sharply should it's roots fail before we can prune. We think this should hold until dry weather arrives in a few days.
A strong winterstorm in the northeastern US is the cause of the high winds here and another such storm front is expected for next week. All we need is one dry day and we should be able to get the dangers removed. Walking down the hill I notice that the dry laurel negro tree, which has been dead for years, has lost many branches on to the coffee planted around it on the slope. As one of us heads back up to get the chain saw, rope and the extension ladder, the other inspects the tree.
The surface is dry; the tree is shaded to the north by a tall windbreak, so we decide we will attempt to climb it and see if we can remove any hanging branches. The tree is somewhat slippery from the moss it wears, but we manage to get up the trunk and my assistant suggests that it is too dangerous to use the chain saw. As he is the one up in the fork of the tree, I figure he should decide how the cutting should be done. He decides to use his machete, despite the tree being a hardwood tree. The long period of standing dry in the tropical sun has cured the wood and the machete sings with each cut, small chips of wood falling to the ground. I stand below, in the coffee rows, holding the rope that will guide the cut branches safely to the ground where I can chop them up with my blade.
In all, the job takes about 2 hours. Considering that all the cutting has been with machete, it is a "quick job". Now the work shifts to cutting with the chain saw, but we can't cut the main trunk without crushing the 3 year old coffee plants that are flowering nearby. So we set about sawing all the fallen branches, stacking the logs into cords of firewood. The trunk of the tree is excellent lumber for cabinetry and furniture making, but we need to get it down in one piece to benefit. We decide this is a job for another day.

Wind...

12 meters per second=25 miles per hour.

The mountain ridge on which the farm sits causes the winds to rush at speeds that have made the length of the ridge a choice spot for wind turbines. That is a good thing, of course, using wind energy. However, the wind also wakes me up.

Our solidly built house handles the fierce winds well, despite trembling at times when a strong gust hits. But of late, a small sound, an annoying "double glup" sound has been heard, with frequency at night. Daylight offers no hint of what may be making this noise. I have been up on the roof numerous times looking for the source of this rhythmic double glup, to no avail.
So here I sit, at 4 in the morning, under dark skies with the winds blowing wildly outside, I am powerless to do anything but wait. And this is farming. It is not that I am awakened by the double glup, it is annoying, but I can sleep many hours with it sounding. What makes the glup relevant and distressing, is that I have no power to prevent it, control it or resolve it. That is farming when nature throws herself at you. As one small human in the face of the dark howling, there is little recourse or meaningful action.
Perhaps this isn't farming, exclusively. The world seems at times a mad place, and we feel powerless to affect it in any meaningful way. The winds of war rage, the howling of the madding crowds resound, the climatic consequences of our way of life bay at the door like a pack of hungry wolves. Our homes and apartments seem flimsy in the teeth of this awful wind. It causes us to wake, to wander out of our safe beds and to aimlessly meander the hours away until light can bring us some small respite from the darkness and the rising roar of the winds. So what is a farmer to do? Where no technique or practice can guarantee outcome, we must do what the animals do. We must hunker down, stay in place, keep our heads covered and we must wait for dawn.