Pura Vida - Costa Rica

  The journey continues... (Read the previous part here ) After all the bureaucracy was done, it was time for the personal belongings to be processed. In this post, I want to lay out our experiences spending the first few month in Costa Rica. This might be useful for you, if you are on the verge of emigrating to a country in Latin-america. The challenges were, that in Costa Rica, getting a hold of some things can be really challenging . So here is a list of things you  might need to bring: Good quality items Migrating from Germany, we realised that there is a big difference in the quality of american products to european brands. Even the ones imported from the US lack durability and practicability. I, for example, brought some tools, baking pans for bread and high-quality kitchen knives. Rye flour It is really hard to find rye flour. In fact. as of now, beeing in Costa Rica for ten weeks we have not found it anywhere. This is because the country does not cultivate any cereal...

Since we are in our infancy of beeing self-sufficient, we feed ourselfs with kinda basic foodstuff. Which in itself is not the worst thing to happen. I mean at least we are not hungry but our longterm goal deffinitly is being able to diversify our eating habbits . Because we are living in Costa Rica in a area, which could not get any more rural it is not only healthier, better for the enviroment and cheaper, but also necessary to produce a variety of products our own. The reason for that is, that the country does not produce many products themselves and because they are not a rich country by any means, they are also not able to import much. the result beeing, that there are not much of a selection in the local shops. So toady we harvested all the basil we had growing in the greenhouse.. Make shure to not only harvest the leaves put also the stalks. That way, the plant can better redevelop itself. We planted a lot of it in between the other plants because we read, that it is supposed t...

Todays topic will be how I planted sugarcane . Another really easy-to-cultivate plant with a great variety of usages. A few weeks ago, we tried growing fodder beet but we did not have any success with those. They did not even germinate. I figuered the best way the reuse it was by planting sugarcane. It truly is an amazing plant ! The most common use probably is making sugar , which we definitly look forward to doing. But it also has other uses. We will use it secondary for feeding animals . They will absolutely love it. Also it is a nice snack in between while working. You can just jew on a bit of a stalk and it will taste sweet. It has other benefits, like making paper , which we probably will not use. But if you are interested, I advice you to do your research on sugarcane. It is a great ecological plant . Sugarcane likes loads and loads of water , but also a good drainage for best yields. But my neighbor, who has some experience in growing sugarcane, told me, that it is really easy...

Next after the bananas were the pinapples . When I arrived the others already had planted some. This is done by twisting of the green top of a pineapple fruit and just planting it in the soil. Currently me and my girlfriend live alone on the finca, which unfortenatle led to some works not beeing done in time. Same with the pineapples. They were totally overgrown. Also, it did not like the way they were planted. They were really close together and close to the bananas. Almost in the shadows of the palms. base situation My goal was to stretch them out, making it easier for them to get their nutrition and put them more in the direct sunlight, they like. First I started preparing the soil. This will be a pattern, which will repeat itself. The soil on the property is really acidic. I really need to do a test to know for shure, but my guess is around four to five on the pH-scale. We mix the soil with charcoal . This raises the pH and secondly puts carbon in it. Effects, that we welcome, si...

In the last post I described the base situation that we are in. So today contributed my first bigger addition to the finca. I expanded the already existing banana plantages with a new kind . They were a gift from our neighbors, who are cultivating a lot of fruits. This variety is characterized by a really sweet taste within a really tiny fruit . They grow exactly like all other varieties, which is as follows: Banana plants create babies at the very bottom of the "trunk" , that will become their own palm shortly. It is not very hard cutting those babies of and relocating them, so that is exactly what we did. We got gifted six plants. Tip:  Plant or relocate your plants about three days after a full moon. Like raising the oceans creating tides the moon also affects the fluids within a plant, resulting in better growth and making it easier for the migrated plants to get build up a sufficient water supply. First I mowed the lawn and kept the cut grass on the side and dug holes ...

This is going to be the start of a series on how we are trying to build up self-sufficient-farming in Costa Rica. In this part I want to lay out the situation I was met with, when I came to our finca. Greenhouse We have a greenhouse, which is about 8x12m big. It has a closed roof but a dense net on all four sides adapted to the climate, because the main purposes of the greenhouse are to block out the heavy rains of the rainy-season and to keep out intruders in lizards. They especially like the inner heart of young plants, killing it in the process. With temperatures of 20°C to 30°C there is no need to use a greenhouse for higher temperatures. In the greenhouse there was one half  set up with a variety of vegetables with a perma-culture setup . Bananas There was forest of Bananas already existing. Some sort of Banana, the locals call "quadrados" , which are used for cooking similar to potatoes, that are nearly not sweet at all. Most of them were big already and we harvested ...