Pura Vida - Costa Rica

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...

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 ...