To those of you who I got to see during my (brief) stint in Boston—it was so great to see you and talk to you! It was so special to come home to so much warmth. To those who I missed this time around—I will probably be back in about a year for either Passover or my brother’s graduation. If you live on the west coast, you have about a year to move to Boston. Anyways, it’s been great to be back in site and I am beginning to reconnect with my neighbors and the rest of the community. The first thing that I noticed on the ride back to site was the fresh green color of all the plants outside the bus window. It’s been raining!! Yay. I won’t say that the drought is over (don’t want to jinx it) but, there has been a good deal of rain these past few days and everyone is thankful.
As some of you may know, as an agricultural volunteer, I am required to have both a garden and a demo-plot. While I have at different points worked on vegetable farms, I have never had my own garden or field, and I always feel a little anxious when I put my seeds in the ground. Will anything come up? Will something come up and be eaten alive by bugs? (yes in the case of my bean plants…). Following some perma-culture/peace corps guidelines, way back in February, I placed my garden behind my house, near enough to a water source and in a place where I would have some natural fence posts (aka trees).Then I double-dug all of my beds the day after the one day it rained all summer. I dug my demo-plot (three rows of a field) under my bedroom window. That way, I wouldn’t be able to ignore any bugs or weeds.
A bit of rain in my absence was good news for my garden, which thankfully didn’t die while I was gone. I had thrown some seeds in the ground (most of them were old, it didn’t really matter since I assumed they were going to die in my absence) and they all came up! Well only 1 lettuce plantling came up out of a meter of old seed, but hey, the seed was old anyway. I’ve got some little carrots, chard, kale, garlic greens, and radishes . Yummm. Also, I was greeted by some gigantic sunflowers (their stems were thicker than my thumb!). This morning, after yet another full day of rain, I checked out the sunflowers and found that at least half of them are about to bloom! I am so excited to see their bright yellow faces following the sun right outside my bedroom window.
My Paraguayan neighbors keep asking me why I am planting sunflowers. The true answer is because sunflowers make me happy. But I am also planting them because sunflowers can be used as green manure—think growing compost. When they are nice, big, and leafy, I cut them down and let them decompose in my field, thus adding nutrients back into the soil and increasing the yield of future crops in that field. Hopefully my bright yellow beauties will encourage the folks passing on the road in front of my house to stop by and ask about my demo-plot. Hopefully the sunflowers will also screen my sad looking beans…damn moth larvae. I am hoping to make some organic insect repellants to save my beans and hopefully they will make a comeback!
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