how the garden grows

We live in the tropics, and lots of beautiful things grow here. Beautiful plants, animals and birds.

Plenty of food grows all on its own--like fruit trees and other wild plants. And also, pretty much everyone gardens. When I tell people that most Americans don't have fields, they usually respond in shock, "How do they survive then?" Here, a person has a garden to grow food for themselves, plus food that they can sell to earn a little extra money. If the average person doesn't have a garden, they are going to probably have serious problems and lack of food.

We decided to plant a large garden, too. Here is the space when we were still getting it cleared out and beginning to plant things:

A neighbor helped us out a lot in getting the garden started.

Then, we and the Zubots planted lots of things (and Tishik helped).

Well, Elliot (and Sam, too, most of the time) are actually better at destroying the garden than giving constructive aid. For example, of the dozen or so tomatoes that have appeared on my plants, only 2 have made it to full ripeness; the others have been picked prematurely by the two smallest boys. Thankfully, we just got a door put into our fence, which deters not only small boys from also goats and pigs from invading our garden.

Our garden also produces tons of wild spinach, a delicious green that spreads like crazy and grows really fast. We love it!

So far, a few of our "experimental" vegetable plantings--like bean varieties grown in the U.S.--are doing well. We have had a failed crop of sweet corn. We have also heard from an experienced botanist here that other things we planted (just to see if they will grow!) will probably get eaten by bugs--summer squash, watermelon, etc. But, we are also growing things that are tried and true staple crops here: manioc, local corn, tomatoes, peppers, peanuts, okra and lots of papaya trees.

I can't wait to see what we get to harvest! So far, we are already eating plenty of green beans (mostly greasy cutshorts from seeds that the NC Huntleys gave us--yum!)

I thought it was pretty how one of my squash plants grew over and around this tree trunk in the middle of our garden. There's a bright yellow flower right on top of the tree, and others along the vine, so I'm expecting to see some squash soon!