Help Improve Workshop Access for Central Americans

By Tim O'Hara

Workshops, one of many forms of education, are expensive to organize, risky to run, and an immense amount of work to pull off and host well. They can also be transformational and inspirational for the participants and provide them with an amazing educational experience. We have been offering life-changing courses and classes in a vast array of areas related to sustainability for over 15 years. During this time our core team has reflected on how to assure that our offerings are accessible to as many people as possible, especially low-income and future leaders in our region, without running our business into the red. It’s been a fine line to walk and one that we’ve commonly fallen on the wrong side of.

In 2015 we began a discussion about how to provide Central Americans with options to apply for economic assistance to attend permaculture, natural building and other sustainability related courses in our region. It is not uncommon for regional workshops to cost working Central Americans months of pay or more. Moreover, workshop students commonly lose income and make other sacrifices while away from their obligations at home. It’s a difficult situation that leaves these opportunities out of reach to the majority of people that are interested in them. From our observations, there are a growing number of people in our area that have a strong desire to participate in courses which will expand their horizons, expose them to valuable networking opportunities, and provide them with hard skills that they can take back to their communities. With all of this in mind, the idea of a scholarship fund began to emerge and make increasing sense.

Mastate Charitable Foundation (MCF), a small non-profit under the umbrella of the Marion Institute, achieved some important fundraising successes in 2015-16 that allowed them to create a Central American Scholarship Fund Program that provided seven partial scholarships to our Permaculture Design and Wilderness First Responder Certification courses and 2017 Apprenticeship in Sustainable Living.

Based on these favorable developments and the associated positive experiences participants had, we have been encouraged to look for ways to expand this program so as to meet the growing demand for these types of opportunities in the future.

Rancho Mastatal has already received over 20 scholarship applications for classes taking place in 2017. We believe that there are few better investments than supporting meaningful and empowering education for leaders rooted in their communities. In too many cases, populations worldwide have suffered the degradation of their communal structures from years of neglect and shrinking budgets, brain drain, worsening economic situations, and environmental atrocities that make living in certain areas of the world less viable. To rebuild will require courageous leadership, hard work and resources.

If you or someone you know would like to sponsor one or more scholarships during the upcoming calendar year please learn more about MCFs charitable work here. Tax deductible donations for the Central American Scholarship Fund can be made here.  General donations can also be made on the MCF website here. The opportunities provided by your assistance can change the trajectory of not only a scholarship recipient but of their entire community. Help us to support a more sustainable future for Central America.

NEWS FROM AROUND THE PERMACULTURE COMMUNITY

We love food preservation at the Ranch, usually by means of fermentation. One of our challenges is finding good supplies, e.g. food grade, appropriate scale, etc., here in Costa Rica. But for you all in the States, you might check out Pantry Paratus for a great selection of supplies.

As our team at the Ranch looks toward the future, we've found much inspiration in the recent writings on commoning by David Bollier. We highly recommend the article Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm.   You may also want to check out the workshop Reinventing the Commons:  Social Ecosystems for Local Stewardship & Planetary Survival.  

Abrazos, 

The Ranch Crew

No Pickup, No Problem: Social Capital Trumps a Shitty Situation

by Dorothy Farrell

My hands are grappling the rumbling, rusty wheelbarrow handles, and as we walk half a mile through the village, everyone can hear the five Rancho apprentices clunk on through. In a village of 120 people, your whereabouts are everybody's business. Don't worry, I want to say, this will all make sense soon. They'll be having a chuckle by the end of the day. For now, we are five warriors defending alternative energy. We are making the best use of our woman power (and Dan power) when the white pickup truck is out of commission. We are going to pick up poop.

As Timo explained in a blog post last month, poop is the essential ingredient for synthesizing our kitchen's methane gas supply. Once a week, the white pickup truck is driven half a mile up the road to pick up ten sacks of manure. Assuming you have the human labor and the car labor, it's a brilliant system-- until the white truck, which has seen more years than myself, stops working. No truck, no poop, you say. Chuckle chuckle. Four of the baddest chicks and one man are about to prove you wrong. Here are two cents, to boot, on what makes a functional energy system.

We make it to Finca Siempre Verde dripping in sweat. Chilo, our friendly poop dealer, greets us as we roll five empty wheelbarrows up the driveway hill. Since we're on the theme of biodigestors, he offers to give us a tour through his biodigestor system. It's a work in progress, but here are the pigs. He shows us the pig pen which gets hosed down, and where the poop drains into a pipe. He then shows us a newly built pen that is slightly lower than the kitchen. Here, Chilo explains, will be the new site for the biodigestor. The manure will wash directly into the feeder barrel, no transport necessary.

We are five champions of renewable energy and suddenly I am wondering why my journey to move poop suddenly seems less noble. Here is a system that capitalizes on the fact that the source of manure is located at point zero for the biodigestor intake. If Chilo had a failure in one of his auto parts, there would still be gallo pinto on the table. Is Chilo's biodigestor any different than ours, or am I just about to push 100 pounds of manure half a mile because we built a delicate, un-resilient system?

Biological systems, such as Chilo's pigs, are complex. They are composed of living, breathing organisms whose livelihood is ingrained in the health of the entire system. As long as Chilo (who is also a living component in the system) continues to produce food on his farm, process it in his kitchen, bring the scraps to his pigs, and maintain his system accordingly, then poop will continue to flow through the biodigestor, methane will continue to be produced, food will continue to be produced, and the pigs will continue to be fed. 

Now, suppose we swapped out those pigs for one of those nifty new robots on the market. The Porkolator 3000 is equipped with machinery that makes it the most efficient robot in converting biomass to waste product. This technological feat is revolutionary. As it turns out, however, the company that manufactures the Porkulator did not create the machine with the capacity to heal from, say, an erupted engine. So when that breaks down, and Chilo doesn't have a spare engine in the middle of the jungle, how on Earth will the gallo pinto get made?

Pigs are complex; Porkolators are complicated. The difference between a living system and a non-living system is that a living system has numerous connections and survival responses in accordance with the environment, whereas a non-living system cannot respond. A non-living system is complicated because if there are 1000 pieces and the tropics rusts one obsolete, the system will fail to function. A living system has 999 pieces you can name, and 999 to the ninth power of interconnections you cannot even see, that when one piece fails, the show must go on. On that day, our pickup truck proved to be complicated because the inability to start the engine meant that our biodigestor risked starvation. 

Pigs are not the only example of complex, living systems. Communities are also complex. In the wake of realizing that our biodigestor may not get fed, we rallied the troops and took action. That's right, our engine may have failed, but our spirit did not. That morning, five apprentices and ten sacks of manure rolled through Mastatal and it didn't matter that my forearms were burning or that my hands were too dirty to wipe the sweat from my eyes. We were resilient, and let warm gallo pinto be proof.

News from around the Permaculture Community

We love books at the Ranch! Our library is constantly growing as each of us pick out a few new books to populate our shelves. Our favorite publisher is Chelsea Green publishing, and the folks over at Permies.com have been busy reviewing many of their best books. Check out the review list to see if any belong on your shelf! 

The National Institute of Apprenticeships in Costa Rica is having their annual Agroecological Festival this December 3 & 4 in Cartago. We hope to attend. This will be a great opportunity for anyone interested in connecting with the Costa Rica permaculture and urban farming community!

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Farm to Table Tales

by Lydia Blocksidge

Good food takes time. I've heard this phrase many times before, but after nine months at the Ranch, I've truly come to understand what it means to me. The local Costa Ricans are called the Ticos. The Ticos live by the mantra "Pura Vida", which directly translates to pure life. This is indefinitely how they choose to live. "Tico time" is another phrase I've heard and come to understand here. Ticos work at their own pace, never feeling the need to hurry or stress at time. They are the happiest people I've ever met. The western way of life has much to learn from this, no more so than in the world of food. I have three stories to tell that I think shed perfect light on this matter.

Beans

One day back in April myself and my fellow apprentices were asked by one of the local farmers and Mastatal old timer, Chepo, to help him with his black bean harvest. We were so excited by the opportunity to see and learn how black beans get from the soil to our plates, given the fact that we eat them with almost every meal. We started with a trek from the road through the jungle to the black bean field.

Here, Chepo was harvesting stems of beans that had been cut a week prior and left to dry on the ground. It was a blistering hot day, typical of the dry season and the sun was beating down on the exposed field. We jumped in and helped him collect the many hundreds of black bean vines from the undulating ground. We took them to the side of the field and mounded them up beside the bean bashing station, a big blue tarp strung between four bamboo poles. When the beans were all collected we started piling them onto the blue tarp, then Chepo stood at one end with two heavy wooden poles in both his hands. He started bashing the mounds of dried bean vines to release the beans from their pods. We rotated around, all getting in to have a go. The poles were much heavier than I'd expected and after about five minutes my shoulders started to burn and my sweaty palms started to blister.

Once one pile was done we tossed the bean vines to the side, bagged the loose beans on the tarp then loaded up another mound. It took our group of eight almost two hours to release and bag all of the beans. Once the bags were tied up we each grabbed one, slung it over our shoulders and started our slippery, steep 30 minute hike to the road, each one of us slipping under the weight of the bags and the tough terrain. But this didn't phase us, we all still had big smiles on our faces feeling accomplished and grateful for having this experience. We also all recognized that if we hadn't been there to help Chepo, he would have been doing all this work alone, as I'm sure he and fellow farmers have done many times before.

I will never eat beans the same way again. I have a new appreciation for this humble staple food. When I worked at an organic food store back home, it was regulation that if anything fell onto the floor we would throw it away. We had no compost system at the time so anything that fell onto the ground was destined for the landfill. I can't tell you how many times people struggled with the manual bean dispenser, spilling beans all over the floor. Never did we think twice about throwing them away, it was just what was done. Looking back on this now breaks my heart more than it initially did because I've seen the amount of work and effort that goes into growing and harvesting this food crop. One sweep of our broom and all the time, effort and resources that went into getting those beans into our shop were binned. Something that I never would have learned if I hadn't come here.

Pejibaye

Another story from the ranch is about the pejibaye season that has sadly just ended. Pejibaye is an incredibly nutrient-dense palm fruit. This season, each of our trees produced roughly nine bunches of fruit, each bunch containing about 30-40 fruits. Every golf-ball-sized fruit contains 200 calories! As you can imagine for an aspiring self-sufficient community, this is valuable food crop. But it doesn't come easily.

Pejibaye or peach palm in English is a tall skinny Palm tree. It's trunk is covered with needle-like spikes that will pierce through even the thickest rain boots. To harvest pejibaye we use our home crafted 20 meter long pull saw. It's a very useful tool but rather difficult to maneuver around a spiny trunk. Once the bunches of fruit are released from the tree, they splatter on the ground and we forage around the spine covered slopes to collect every one of these protein packed nature balls.

When these guys arrive in the kitchen they must be processed within two days or they will mold and spoil. So we remove them from their stems and boil them in their skin for 40 minutes. Then we drain them and have a peel party, each one of us delicately peeling and de-seeding around 60 fruits per weekly harvest. Once peeled they're ready to use in puree, soup, burgers, pancakes, torte and an endless number of other delicious recipes. It is a long process but well worthwhile when we enjoy the fruits of our labor for the next week and share this taste of the tropics with our guests. 

Jackfruit

Jackfruit is a similar story. Harvesting just two mature jackfruit can feed ten people three meals. Harvesting jackfruit requires you to climb into the tree and up to the fruit, chop the stems with your machete and watch as the 5kg spiky football-shaped fruit catapults to the ground. It's not rare to get a splatter of glue-like sap on your clothes, hands and cheeks at this stage, as well as the canopy company of wasps residing in the trees. Once harvested, we take the fruit back to the kitchen, grabbing a few banana leaves on the way, oil our hands and knives, and get to work.

First we cut it open, separating the flesh from the seeds. To use the flesh we must brine or boil it. Brining takes one to three weeks and boiling takes 45 minutes. Then the flesh is ready to use in another recipe. The seeds must be dried, peeled and boiled. By the end of this process, our hands are covered with latex sap and so are the knives, despite our efforts to oil everything prior to processing. It's just the reality of processing your own food and a rather exciting part of it. 

Good food really does take time. And I believe that this time and effort always makes our food taste better. Because we've put our hearts, our sweat, our blood and sometimes even our tears into growing, harvesting and preparing the food. It's an entire new way of eating that gives you a deep sense of appreciation for the food on your plate and on the plates of the people you love and care about.

News from around the permaculture community

The Monteverde Community Fund has a job opening for their Executive Director position. This is a great opportunity for the non-profit sector in Costa Rica.

What's your favorite permaculture present? We got a pack of the Permaculture Playing Cards from our friends at Permies.com this past year. We love the funky artwork and all the permaculture principles, founders, and strategies.

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Non-Traditional Education: Reconnecting to our Roots

By Tim O'Hara

Modern, conventional education systems do not work for everyone. They cater well enough to many of today’s students but not to a significant portion of the population that might be better served by alternative pedagogical approaches. In most countries, at the age of 4 or 5, or even younger, kids are shuffled into busy classrooms to learn subjects that will reportedly prepare them for a successful future. As our economies become less predictable, politics less appealing, and the environment ever more damaged, current educational models are losing traction with increasing numbers of people who recognize that the one-size-fits all approach to education is not working for our society.

Terms referring to non-standardized teaching methods and ideas such as homeschooling, unschooling, gap years, Waldorf and BOCES are all becoming more familiar in today’s educational vernacular. Instead of paying an inordinate amount of money to learn how to navigate broken social and economic structures to barely make ends meet as an educated, employed adult, more and more people believe that it’s important that humans begin to train and prepare for meaningful, place-based work that provides a fair wage while better connecting to the elements that we most need to thrive; clean water, clean air, clean soil and clean food.

In our specie’s experiment to educate our populations to be good, productive denizens of the planet, we have lost sight of how to responsibly meet our basic needs and in the process have contaminated the resources that are inherent to a healthy life. We’re becoming a society more apt to care for our latest electronic purchase than one another.

Most visitors to the Ranch come to learn in a different setting. Many of these people are attracted to our experiential methods of teaching. As an education center since 2001, we have discovered a great deal about our students and how they develop best. We have also witnessed a trend over the last decade and a half that has students arriving to the Ranch with ever decreasing hands-on skills. It’s not uncommon to host students that have never picked up a shovel, dug their hands into the dirt, or cooked a meal from scratch.

Our education systems today praise computer work more than physical labor. While I think both skill sets are important in today’s economy, I would argue that we’ve let the pendulum swing much too far towards the idea that the solutions to today’s challenges lie only in high-tech devices and multi-billion dollar mega-projects that ignore our historical connection with and dependence on nature.

As parents, Robin and I have chosen a hybrid approach that has our daughter enrolled in Mastatal’s local, Spanish-speaking public elementary school and learning from Robin through a Waldorf-style homeschool curriculum during our trips outside of Costa Rica. We hope that this will provide her with a dynamic and solid educational foundation that will prepare her for the global problems that she and others in her generation will inherit and face as adults. We look forward to explore the growing number of non-conventional educational options as she gets older.

Gap year programs like those offered through Winterline provide an alternative to graduating high-school students. They allow students to better refine their interests before investing tens of thousands of dollars in an education that may not provide them with the schooling that they desire or need. Organizations such as Winterline recognize the existing gap in public education and focus on providing students with opportunities to learn hands-on skills. The growing popularity in these programs is a sign that parents are more willing to let go of the rigid ideas and standards that they experienced as students.

We’re proud to be a part of a more common sensible approach to schooling and we believe that well-thought out, inspirational and practical, applied programs can oftentimes provide students with a superior and more relevant learning experience. Some of today’s problems may require large, expensive and highly-engineered approaches, but others demand simplified but intelligent thinking and a genuine connection to the earth. The latter can and should be cultivated in our society’s educational programs.

Paul Stamets, the renowned mycologist, provides inspiration and an example via his mycoremediation work that partners with our fungal brethren to clean up toxic sites using simple, inexpensive and accessible technology as do Vandana Shiva’s efforts promoting food and seed sovereignty in India. Winona LaDuke’s achievement to build and restore community by means of wild rice harvesting and her work with the White Earth Land Recovery Project and Wes Jackson’s advances in perennial grain production in the Midwest of the US with The Land Institute provide us with precedents to learn from. Our hope is that the Ranch too can provide an example and a place for compassionate people in search of a better way to learn, teach, heal and live.

Check out our calendar and consider organizing a group to join our team as we promote a more rational, sensible and connected educational movement.   

News from around the Permaculture Community

One of our favorite alternative education programs is Sustainable Summer. Their groups are always one of the highlights of our year and the students who go through the program leave us feeling hopeful for the future. If you are looking for something different to inspire your high- schooler, we can't recommend them enough.

We have two new stellar workshops on the calendar for May 2017:

• Agroforestry Skills Inspired by the Forest: Orchard Planning, Propagation, Planting, & Production - May 17 - 18 with Peter Kring

• Plant as Medicine: Reclaiming the Art of the Home Apothecary - May 17 - 18 with Ancel Mitchell

Our cob oven will be seven years old this season! We are looking at re-building the oven so that it better fits our kitchens needs. Ovens are great starter projects and these plans for a double chamber cob oven just might give you the confidence to tackle the project in your own backyard!

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Making Microbes: Fungal vs Bacterial Soil Life

Scott Gallant

Organic gardeners and farmers understand the need to cultivate and protect soil microorganism life. The strategies to do this involve mulching, composting, and avoiding soil disturbance as much as possible. We know that these strategies, in addition to many others, encourage a healthy soil-food-web.

The soil-food-web is the interconnected matrix of invisible (fungi, bacteria, protozoa, nematodes) and visible (earthworms, beetles, arthropods) creatures that have a whole host of functions which create a healthy ecosystem for plant growth. They aerate the soil, decompose organic matter, make nutrients available, prevent nutrient leaching, break down toxins, protect plants from pathogens, fix nitrogen and so forth.

What we can take away from this bit of knowledge is that we want these organisms operating on our garden or farm. The best way to do this is by creating the habitat and food they need in order to thrive. This seems simple, but it quickly becomes complicated when we explore the details.

Each of these organisms does better with different food sources and each of them change their environment in different ways. In addition each species of plant we are growing thrives in different soil environments; apples and arugula have evolved very differently and the more we can support their evolutionary requirements the healthier the plants will be.

That becomes our starting point; where we ask:

• What type of soil environment do our crops desire?

• How can we then encourage the specific type of microorganisms to create that environment?

Fungal-Bacterial Ratio

Here at the Ranch we are growing tree crops, which as I've written in this blog before, thrive in an environment that mimics the forest ecology surrounding our orchards. One measure we can use to understand this ecology is the fungal to bacteria biomass ratio (F/B).

This is a measure of the portions of the microbial biomass, ie. all the living organisms in the soil, that is fungal vs that which is bacterial. The F/B ratio is primarily used to study the impact of human land disturbance on the soil-food-web. It can therefore also be used to determine what individual plants desire. For example annual grains and vegetables like a ratio of 0:3 to 1:1 and orchard trees thrive in 10:1 to 50:1 soils

Depending on the types of crops we are growing, again in our case tree crops, we may want to alter the dominance of fungi or bacteria in our soil. These microorganism, particularly fungi, are quite sensitive to changes in land usage, therefore we need to understand how different techniques affect this ratio and why we want the ratio to be high or low in the first place.

Ecosystem Mimicry

Forest soils have a higher fungi to bacteria ratio. Looking at quantities of each, as measured in a teaspoon of soil, we find that bacteria remain steady in quantities through the spectrum from agricultural soils to prairie soils to forest soils. In one teaspoon of soil there are 100 million to 1 billion individuals. Fungi, measured in yards of hyphae, though increase significantly along this spectrum. In agricultural soils they are measured in several of yards, while in deciduous forest soils hundreds of yards are found, and in coniferous forest this actually increases to miles.

Fungi love high carbon materials, think cellulose and lignin which are the primary building blocks of tree leaves and wood. Most bacteria struggle to break this down. Bacteria instead thrive with high nitrogen food sources, think manure, incorporated cover crops, etc.

We can gather from this how different gardening and farming techniques affect this ratio. Fox example mulching with wood chips encourages fungi, tillage kills fungi and encourages bacteria, and incorporating organic material into different soil horizons shifts the ratio toward bacteria.

Mineralization/Immoblization Balance

This makes it apparent as well that fungi and bacteria have different roles in the soil-food-web. Fungi are better are taking in and retaining nutrients as part of the mineralization/immobilization process. This is the process where microbes consume nutrients, thereby immobilizing them in their bodies and preventing nutrient leaching.

As they live their lives, producing waste and eventually being consumed further up the food chain, these nutrients re-enter the soil-food-web in a form that is soluble to plants. This is called mineralization. Fungi and bacteria are immensely important to different stages of this process and are each most effective depending on what they are being feed.

Knowledge to Practice

In our orchards we want to cultivate an F/B ratio between 10:1 and 50:1. There are many ways for us to work toward this goal, the simplest being understanding the ecology of fungi and providing the necessary shelter and food source. We do this by consistently mulching our trees with woody materials.

We can get more specific in the process by cultivating our own indigenous microorganisms from the forest and inoculating them directly into our orchards. This practice is called Mountain Microorganism (MM). We have been applying MM to our orchards consistently over the past year in order to shift our F/B ratio higher and gain the benefits, such as pathogen control, that these microorganisms provide to the native forests.

Next steps for us in this process is to use our microscope to analyze the biological content of our soil. With the proper training and experience we expect to be able to determine rough F/B ratios in both our soils and the MM we are applying as a foliar drench. We will be sure to let you know what we find.

For anyone interested in making their own microbes, below is the recipe we use. If you would like to learn more about this process you should consider joining us for our upcoming Permaculture Design Certification course in April/May of 2017.

Mountain Microorganisms Recipe

Phase 1: MM Solid

Ingredients

• 3 sacks microorganisms (duff layer of primary forest)

• 2 sacks semolina, yuca flour, or green banana flour

• 1 gallon molasses, cane juice, or fruit juice

• 1 gallon water

Instructions

Spread a layer of duff on a top and cover with a layer of semolina. Mix well with hands. Dilute the molasses with the water and sprinkle on top as you continue to mix. If you grab a fistful of the mixture it should be lightly damp and fall apart easily after you squeeze it.

Next, have someone stand in a 55 gallon plastic drum (never metal), while you shovel the material inside. As you shovel, the person stamps the mixture down with their feet to compress it and remove any air pockets. Seal the barrel and leave at least one month, stored in the shade.

The mixture should be good for three years. When ready, it should have a strong smell of lactic acid.

Phase 2: Liquid MM

Ingredients

• 5 kilos MM Solid

• 1 gallon molasses

• 55 gallon plastic drum filled with water

Instructions

Mix the molasses into the water. Put the MM into a screen sack and let hang in the water. Seal the drum and let sit 4 days.

Between day 4 and 15 this can be used as a foliar spray (between 10 and 100% ratio to water). After 15 days use the MM as a soil drench and after three weeks the product should be fully used up.

Once you have used the MM Liquid, you can make one more batch with the same sack of microbes. Just add 1 gallon molasses and refill the drum with water.

References

Lowenfels, Jeff, and Wayne Lewis. Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web. Portland, Or.: Timber, 2010. Print.

"Soil Health." Soil Health. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Oct. 2016. <http://www.soilhealth.com/>.

News from around the Permaculture Community

Matt Duffy, from our 2015 PDC, wants to capture your story with his new film company No Mad Films. Duffy is an incredible story teller who we hope can come back to the Ranch, bring his cameras and capture our life in action.

Our collection of cast iron kitchen skillets and dutch ovens is extensive. A good cast iron skillet is by far the most basic but essential kitchen item for our team. Over the years we have learned a trick or two about their maintenance. This article, from Permies.com, sums up nicely how to use and clean cast iron.

The many Ranch friends at Round the Bend Farm, located in southeast Massachusetts are hosting a series of Fermentation Workshops with our very our Core Team member Laura Killingbeck. These come highly recommended for anyone in the area.

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

The Peace in Knowing Yeast: How to Brew Your Own Ginger Beer

By Doro

I knew there was something wrong when the fraternity brothers put codeine in the keg, when my friends got so sick that they went splat, when thirteen year old me took a sip of every wine bottle in the house when mom and dad weren't looking and I felt like I had done something naughty. European culture is renown for serving alcoholic beverages to children, yet in the USA where I grew up, something about alcohol is taboo. The cultural history reflects just that. Alcohol in Native American early history is absent, contraband could put you behind bars or blind you, prohibition made speakeasies a mischievous and alluring excursion, and even today a cultural lag in how we enjoy alcohol still exists. 

It became very apparent to me in college that with alcohol, etiquette falls flat on its face. Why? Japanese tea ceremonies, to draw a stark comparison, dedicate hours to enjoying a tablespoon of liquid in the most refined fashion, yet the common bar pumps out wasted resources, wasted fools, and wasted dreams. People may drink so much as to make themselves sick, both physically and mentally.

The Origins of Homemade Hooch

Alcohol is actually an ancient substance that has been intentionally brewed since the beginning of mankind itself. Some people even go as far to claim that alcohol IS the reason for civilization. One theory suggests that contaminated drinking water in Europe warranted humans to grow grains and ferment them to cleanse the water. In this process, humans needed to orient themselves to the earth's growing cycles, work together to organize and specialize in different tasks, then celebrate communally with a drink because clever Homo sapiens managed to retrofit their pollution problem. 

Health is a major benefit to why people drink. Medicinal plants have traditionally been brewed into alcoholic beverages and can prevent or cure illnesses. In the "blue zones"- regions of the world where people have measurably longer lifespans--one of the factors is that residents enjoy moderate alcohol intake. Blue zone residents also benefit from strong social relationships, so community is a major piece of healthy alcohol enjoyment. Sharing drinks with other people also lubricates and warms a gathering. So-- yes! You can have your brew AND drink it too. Alcohol gets the psychological, physiological, and sociological stamp of approval. Where did clever man go astray?

Time is the essential difference in how we relate to a drink we make ourselves and share compared to a drink we buy commercially. Like many good things in life, it takes a lot of time to see a good brew from start to finish-- or in the grand scheme, from seed to chalice. Modern "conveniences" allow people to buy Budlight from the cornerstore, then smash a can to the forehead before thinking twice about going for more. Woah, Nelly! Lack of restrictions on consumption could cost an eye, a tooth, and a frontal lobe if you're not careful, and then what kind of Homo sapiens would that be? Anthropologists suggest that it's our frontal lobes that allows our brains to use foresight and therefore be more aligned with the process of time. My suggestion goes beyond sipping more consciously, more graciously; start from the beginning and make the whole brew yourself.

Meet your Microorganisms

Did you know that one in ten cells of your body share the same human DNA. As for the rest, they are trillions of bacteria and yeasts that live symbiotically with your body. Microorganisms are a great tool for living in your body, or they can be a great tool for brewing the brews that will satisfy your body. There are numerous strands of yeasts that eat sugar and through their metabolic processes, they create alcohol as a waste. What a life! Some of these yeasts are more effective at creating alcohols than others. For example, the yeasts that you can buy in the grocery store were grown in sanitized laboratories to ensure that a very specific strain is repeatedly created. This is an effective means for getting a brew consistency. If you live in the middle of the Costa Rican jungle and cannot access such luxuries, or if you have pride in your local yeasts as San Fransciscans have in their sour dough bread, then you can easily grow your own brewing yeast.

The Ginger Bug

A ginger bug is the first step in brewing your own alcohol. Think of it as a little pet, like a fish in a bowl that you feed everyday. You nurture your ginger bug, and your ginger bug will nurture you. This is how you can deepen your awareness for the beverage that gave rise to humanity, and could propel it forward, or send it tumbling back down to dust.

Step 1: Locate fresh ginger. We happened to dig this rhizome up in our Zone 2 garden. The fresher the better, as it means more active enzymes that ultimately will nourish your bug, and in turn your body.

Step 2: Grate the ginger to increase the surface area. You're going to want about 2 tsp of ginger for 8 oz of water, which will yield a decent size ginger bug.

Step 3: Add 2 tsp of sweetener to your bug. If you can avoid heavily processed and pasteurized sugars, then do so. Honey, maple syrup, and fruit syrups are excellent choices. For this recipe, I used our locally preferred option, tapa dulce, or sugarcane. Bleached white sugars can impose genocide on your microbial populations and are best to be avoided.

Step 4: Stir your water, sugar, and ginger "bug" gently, then cover with a cloth and rubber band. This will allow yeasts in the air to get in, but keep larger creatures out.

Step 5: Carefully observe the nature of your bug. If it starts bubbling, this is a great sign that "it's working". Carbon dioxide, like alcohol, is a process of the yeasts' respiration, and it creates a fizzy bug.

What's happening is that you are creating a mini ecosystem that allows local yeasts from the air a free place to get some lunch (sugar), hang out in a safe environment, maybe meet some cool other microbes; and if all goes well, fall in love, divide, and start a yeasty family. That's right, you are creating a yeast breeding ground, and because ginger tea is the base of the medium, the antibacterial properties of the ginger are keeping the population of "bad" microbes at bay. You can feed your ginger bug once every two days with the same ratios of sugar and ginger as before, but only if necessary. Avoid over feeding your bug and creating a viscous solution. Your bug is your pet. Know it, feed it, and it will reward you with love and affection. If your bug has some fizzy action-- congratulations!-- your pet is ready to use.

Fermentation Experimentation

Ginger bugs are good for inoculating teas with yeasts that will allow them to ferment into alcoholic beverages. The next step in creating a brew is to find a tea recipe or make one up using locally available resources. Fruits and herbs make great tea flavors. I brewed two separate teas for this occasion. The first is a ginger sour guava tea, in which the ingredients were chopped, boiled, and strained. The second is a cacao tea that used the same process except using the fruit that bears the infamous chocolate seed. 

Once the tea is prepared, add a sweetener, just as in the ginger bug process. Sugars will continue to feed the microbial populations you are brewing. Like mentioned before, the less processed the sugar the better. Sometimes sugars even carry wild yeast colonies. This will encourage your brew to ferment.

Once you have your ginger bug and sweet tea, you can use the bug's yeast to inoculate the tea. Like a small fish released from bowl to small pond, your ginger bug yeast is off to fend for itself. Ensure that it is going into a safe, clean environment, and that your tea is not too hot. Room temperature to 105 degrees F is a safe range. Since you know that the health of your yeast will ultimately intertwine with the health of your own being, you continue to monitor the brew. 

Thus, you have entered the experimental phase. The ultimate flavor and quality of your brew is at fate's discretion. Proceed valiantly! Check your brew at least once a day to ensure nothing is growing inside of it except for good microbes, that the texture is liquid and not thick, and that there is enough sugar. 

It may take one day, it may take ten, but you will try your home brewed alcohol and realize that all that time you spent caring for your ginger bug and your brew was very well worth it. "This is delicious!" you'll say one day, "And my gift to humanity." A successful brewer is an artist-- one who reorders the chaos of water, sugar, plants, and airborne yeasts, and transforms them into a product that brings humans together. It turns out that it was never about the buzz, or the story the morning after-- it was always about the process. As humans face the coming challenges of the environment that our culture has shaped, it is important that we remember that each of our actions continues to evolve our relationship with the natural world. Even something as simple as brewing gives proof that the things we provide care for will in turn care for us. Sit back, sip back, and celebrate the pleasure of good brew and good company. Cheers!

News and Notes from around the Permaculture World

We are scheming and dreaming about expanding our chicken program in 2017. More eggs, meat, better breeding strategies, and figuring out how to get the birds to weed our orchards has got us motivated. If any of you are trying to do the same, you should check out the Permaculture Chicken Film from the guys and gals at Permies.com.

One of Scott's past PDC students, Levi Gardner, from a course taught in Nicaragua, is doing some excellent urban farming work in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Check out this article about Urban Roots. Levi states that for him, "a big turning point was going to Nicaragua for a month last year to study permaculture. I left there going, ‘I’m not just a guy that wants to be an urban farmer anymore. I want to build something.'" We are inspired!

As you know we practice agroforestry at the Ranch and love sharing our experiences with others. The USDA Inside Agroforestry publication is full of similar experiences from the states and around the globe which we are hope to contribute to in the future. Considering signing up for their quarterly publication to up your agroforestry skills!

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Food, Familiar Stranger

By Laura Killingbeck

When I was a teenager thumbing rides around Mexico, I quickly realized my vegetarianism would not survive. If my friend Valente and I got in some dusty car with a family that brought us back to a tin-roofed house and gave us chicken soup, we ate that soup. The kindness of strangers humbled my big picture ideas of right and wrong.

Wherever food comes from, as soon as it touches human hands, human mouths, it transforms into an intimate thing, a thing we all need, a thing we all want. As soon as it's prepared, or shared, or savored, it carries with it something beyond itself, a new richness. A new complexity.

***

For thousands of years, people and the food they ate grew together in the same place. Bodies—plant, animal, microbe, earth—co-evolved together in direct relationship. Communities of people created food traditions that reminded themselves how to eat, and how to live, in the place they were a part of.

But now, generations of individuals, and entire societies, are born into places dissociated from themselves. The objects of our lives that surround us—shelter, food, clothing, stuff—come from someplace else. Industrialized, machine-scale food systems and globalized food markets (food from everywhere, transported anywhere, warehoused in grocery stores) form the foundation of our new food traditions. They remind us not of a place we are connected with, but of a world we know little about.

Increasingly, the objects of our lives we know the least about are the things we recognize as most familiar. Food, and most other objects we surround ourselves with, are familiar strangers.

Recently I began researching different types of vinegars to incorporate into my fermentation classes. The vinegars I make (pear, apple, and watermelon in Massachusetts, jackfruit, banana and pineapple in Costa Rica) are easy to ferment with whole fruits and indigenous microorganisms, and the history of this type of fermentation goes back thousands of years. But I wanted to know more about the vinegars someone might buy in a grocery store.

Culinary fermentation is a radical transformation and engagement between living things—microbes, people, plants, animals. Industrial scale production cannot really make vinegar in the way an artisan would understand vinegar—it makes a replication. Large, factory scale production simply can't manage the inherent variability of wild life, so it homogenizes, standardizes, and in doing so changes the intrinsic nature of the product.

Most of these products are replications of something that was once made by human hands, from something in nature those hands could access, an original source. But what happens when we forget what the original source was to begin with? White vinegar, for example, is not made of “white”. Sometimes its made of grains, like genetically modified corn, but often its made of petroleum. Most people who buy rice vinegar or apple cider vinegar could probably wager a guess that apple cider vinegar has something to do with apples; rice vinegar something to do with rice. But white vinegar? Would anyone guess it was made from oil? Its a familiar food that has no natural precedent.

And yet, the richness and complexity of eating still exists, and we still identify, very personally, with our strange-familiar foods. As food and objects scatter around the globe, so do people. Many of us will live in or between several places over our lives. This sudden mobility exposes us to more of the world, but in less depth, and breaks the chain of linear trans-generational traditions that once held people, food, and place together. Many food traditions now dissipate and replicate laterally, around and across the world. They travel to us wherever we are, and travel with us wherever we go.

Once, on a bike trip across Colombia, my partner Scott and I stopped in a tiny town in the Andes. We went into a little country store to get some food. The man at the counter answered our Spanish with English, and started pulling things off the shelves to show us. “Look, tuna fish!” He said, waving the can, gleeful. “Peanut butter!”

“Actually, we’re looking for Colombian foods,” we replied, smiling. We had hopes of some fresh-made cheese, vegetables, corn cakes sculpted by little old lady hands. Things from the place we were in, the people we were with.

But the man wanted us to have tuna, desperately. Later he told us why. Though technically born in Colombia, he had lived his entire life in Idaho, until that past year when he was deported back to his little Andean “home town.” But it was no longer his home, or never had been. He missed the foods of the place where he grew up—not foods from the place where he grew up, as tuna fish does not hail from Idaho—but the foods he ate when he grew up in that place. The foods that surely did not come from Idaho, or even necessarily the United States, were now the foods he identified with, the ones that made him feel the nostalgia of home.

People sometimes talk about food traditions as if they were all lost, like socks that didn’t make it back from the laundromat. And its true, countless recipes and food traditions are disappearing, never to return--and it is a loss. Yet we don’t live in an absence of food traditions. People in both industrialized and developing countries increasingly now identify with the flavors, smells, textures of global market and laboratory created foods more than the real thing from the place they live. Global market food may be a stranger, but it's a stranger that we recognize, and feel comfortable around. We relate to something we can’t relate to.

Its important to recognize our personal attachment to globalized food markets, because its real, and I think its a piece of the puzzle that sometimes goes missing in the argument for local food. Only a few generations ago people felt attached to foods embedded in social lineages of cultural heritage and co-evolution. We identified with foods that only the people of the place we lived in could produce and make. But in a globalized food system, we now get attached to pop tarts, nacho flavored frito lays, diet mountain dew—foods that no one, no single person, anywhere, could really produce or make. Most of the foods on the grocery store shelf are conglomerates of ingredients from many places, products of laboratories and mechanization. No one person could make, from start to finish, a pop tart, or chips, or industrial soda, or white vinegar, in its current form, from scratch—there are too many additives, components and processes that can only be done in a factory or laboratory.

Beyond the oft quoted statistics about the vast benefits of local food systems—that local food is more nutritious, more flavorful, better for the environment, better for people, can mitigate climate change, can regenerate local economies, and much more—eating food from the place where we live, cultivated and crafted by the people of that place; be it a home, a community, or a region--connects us deeply to something meaningful, powerful, and comforting. It connects us to a world we can relate to, that we truly are a part of, and reflects something real, and unique about us.

***

Since my teenage years I’ve changed my perspective on eating animals. My vegetarianism did in fact die, replaced by a combination of opportunitarianism and locavorism. (I’ll still gladly eat any soup you give me, but if I’m giving you the soup, I’ll make it with foods from the place where I live.) But the original ethical dilemmas I chewed on in those years remain. How do we match our values with our reality, in a world so vividly layered in tangled truths? How do we live sustainably in a world that is clearly no longer structured for sustainability? How do we reconcile a felt attachment to the objects of globalization that we grew up with, but don’t represent us?

Of all the complicated steps and solutions we can take, I think the first and most immediate one is simple: we need to engage with actual food from the place where we live. Somehow, some way. We need to “get to know” living things with our senses. To smell tomatoes ripe on the vine; watch living beans swell in water and sprout; listen to farmers talk about the plants and soil they care about; taste the salty crunch of fresh cucumber dills; touch soil, plants, animals—anything, anything real. We need to go to the source of food—the thing itself—and get to know it, remember it. On a farm, in the wild, in the kitchen—we need to engage with real foods, in real life. We need to forge identities and food cultures accessible on a human scale.

Food and our relationship with it is complicated, and to create sustainable food systems I think we need to do lots of complicated things. We need to re-skill ourselves and our communities; re-purpose tools and technologies to work for us in different and better ways; build new networks of tangible and intangible food infrastructures that make local economies easier than they are hard. But this one starting point—engaging with the real thing—is the place we can all begin.

Engage with Your Food: Upcoming Workshops with Laura

In Massachusetts or nearby? Take a class with Laura this Fall at Round the Bend Farm in Dartmouth:  Fermentation Fervor: A Vegetable Fermentation Series.

Or travel to the Ranch this May 2017 for Laura's annual The Art and Practice of Live Culture Fermentation workshop.

The Art of Stacking Functions

By Lydia Blocksidge

Tulsi or Sacred Basil harvested for tea.

Stacking functions. What does this phrase mean to you? It could mean any number of things depending on what you apply it to. In this case I'm referring to the term as it's used in permaculture. It is one of the primary principles of permaculture design. Here at the Ranch we employ as many of these principles as we can in our work and in our daily lives. 

Before delving deeper into this topic, I think it's important to first define what permaculture is. There are thousands of definitions available but I've found it useful to come up with my own because it makes the most sense to me. I encourage anyone with an interest to do the same. Here is my definition: Permaculture is a way of life that empowers you to contribute to the regeneration of the earth on a personal level. Its use is guided by a set of principles that can be applied to any aspect of your life. 

Learning about Compost making in our PDC.

With this in mind let's go back to stacking functions. As first mentioned, stacking functions is a primary principle of permaculture and basically refers to elements in your life having multiple functions, instead of a single function. I will offer a few examples to make the concept easier to grasp. A kitchen table is where food is prepared, where meals are shared and it can also become storage space. A fruit tree provides fruit, offers shade, produces mulch, fire wood and a climbing structure. Try to think of elements in your life and what you use them for. If you can only come up with one use for something, it's probably not necessary to have in your life. Can you think of anything that doesn't have multiple functions? 

After taking the permaculture design course (PDC) at the ranch, I started to notice that I was applying these principles everywhere and had been all along, only now I was able to recognize this process. Stacking functions is apart of my everyday life here. My role has taken many forms, but recently I have focused on the farm to table operations. I propagate plants, nurture them and continuously maintain them until they are ready to be harvested and used in the kitchen. 

Ready to make pickles.

One morning in the Vivero (plant nursery) and kitchen gardens I realized that everything I was doing actually had multiple functions. I'd set out to clear the paths and Swales from plants too tall to hold themselves up from the relentless rainy season downpours. I was simply cutting and clearing. But it was more than that. The plants I was tending too were edible salad and cooking greens, perfect to use in the kitchen later that day. And this got me thinking, what other functions do these humble garden tasks have? Well, I was pruning and shaping the plants, helping to promote new growth and removing old growth. I was collecting cuttings to propagate in the nursery later that day. And from what was leftover, I was gathering nitrogen rich green cover for our compost pile. When I was done clearing I got onto weeding and again found myself picking out perfectly edible food growing in unintentional places. I wasn't simply weeding, I was improving the aesthetic of the gardens, creating a new intentional herb garden and collecting herbs for use in the kitchen.

Later that week I was in the kitchen processing our farm food and found myself using these ingredients in many different ways. The tulsi or holy basil I'd cut back was used fresh to make a concentrate to flavor our kefir water sodas. Some of it was dried and put on the tea table and some of it was used to flavor a meal. One of my favorite foods to process this year has been mango. When it's ripe we eat it fresh, add it to our hot sauce, use it in smoothies and freeze it to make ice cream. When it's green we pickle it, make green mango kimchi, create green mango salads or simply slice it up and sprinkle with our chili lime salt. It seems simple but I'd bet many of you have set out to do a simple but necessary task in the kitchen or garden without realizing that what you're doing or using actually has many functions. 

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Chaya cuttings from the garden.

I've found this concept a wonderful and useful one to apply to my life here at the ranch. It is an approach I will take with me when I leave. A way of moving and doing that is easily applied to my life back home in the city. I will find myself asking the question, "what functions does this item/task/plant/food have?" over and over again. If I'm able to come up with at least 3 (positive) functions then I'm happy to purchase/do/ plant/use it. If not then I will rethink my choices. Of course there will be some situations where this concept is not applicable but there are many where it is and I believe it's simple enough for everyone to employ. After all it is these small changes in our lives and more specifically, in our thinking that help move the big change in the right direction. It is the decision to question what we are doing and using and actually think about the consequences, it is the decision to think and act consciously. 

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NEWS AND NOTES

Our Permaculture Design Course is on the schedule for 2017. Course runs from April 25th to May 8th. We are hoping for another great turnout so help us spread the word!

In 2016 we offered over a half dozen full and partial scholarships to students from Costa Rica and around Latin America to participate in our workshops.

We were able to do this through the generous support of the Mastate Charitable Foundation. We hope to continue this pattern in 2017 and are now accepting tax-deductible donations for our Central American Scholarship Program. Help has increase the accessibility of sustainability education to our neighbors and consider making a donation!

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Poop: The Secret to Sustainable Solutions

By Tim O'Hara

Poop. Shit. Mierda. Caca. Crap. Boñiga. Excrement. Feces. Dung. There are countless ways to say what comes out of an animal’s body as solid waste. As most visitors to the Ranch realize soon after their arrival to Mastatal, we talk about poop more than the average learning center or household, and it’s not uncommon for it to be the center of a meal conversation.

Human beings’ evolution towards “fecophobia”, or a fear of fecal matter, has been steady and consistent over the past few decades. The reasons behind this observation have at times been warranted, but not always. One of our goals as an organization is to initiate honest and open conversations about controversial topics related to sustainability, including how best to manage animal waste. As a child, I was taught to avoid poop at all costs. Poop was meant to be flushed away to some unknown, unasked about destination far from my house. Pull the lever on the porcelain throne and think no more about it. My closest encounters with poop growing up mostly consisted of scraping dog shit from the bottom of my sneaker with a stick after a game in the yard. This type of experience only increased any justification for not being endeared to this smelly, dangerous, and sticky substance. Nevertheless, most of us spend part of the first years of our life walking around with a load of it in our diapers, which may help to explain why my relationship with poop has oftentimes been defined by confusion. Everybody poops. That’s also the title of a book that a friend gave to our daughter Soledad when she turned 1. This wonderful little read is the author’s effort to encourage listeners and readers to start to develop a more comfortable association with an undertaking that we all partake in every day.

Since the years of my youth, I’ve grown more comfortable with the process of defecating. I have come to see what I used to see as waste and gross as not only a normal part of nature but a potentially valuable resource. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Uruguay in the early nineties working with organic farmers, I saw how animal manures made up an important part of the soil fertility building techniques employed by the food growers that I worked with on a daily basis. Years later upon arriving to Mastatal I was convinced that one of our first projects should be to construct a composting toilet that would turn our and our guests' body waste into usable fertilizer for our orchards. We thought that this would be a good alternative to the infrastructure that I grew up with in New York State that utilized drinking water to transport my family’s poop to some unseen (but not unsmelled) place to be treated with chemicals.

Fifteen years later we have eight composting toilets scattered around our campus. From our forays into natural building we successfully experimented with using manures in the plasters that now protect and beautify our buildings. Around 2005 we learned from a Costa Rican friend, an organic coffee farmer outside of Puriscal, about using animal waste to produce cooking gas. Shortly after hearing about this possibility the Ranch built its first methane digester that has helped us reduce our dependence on imported fossil fuel based cooking fuels. We also learned from a Ranch guest that you could raise a child without diapers and soon before Sole’s birth Robin and I decided to give that “radical” idea a try. Humans today that spend their first years in diapers contribute an average of 2 tons of feces filled diaper garbage to their local dumps. Diapers reportedly make up about 4% of landfill volume. When I read these figures for the first time I had to take a step back and think whether it could possibly make sense to contribute to this reality while allowing my child to walk around with a pile of crap in her drawers. The more I thought about it, and the more I researched the alternatives, the more I decided that diapers were yet another co-opted, environmentally destructive, profit driven invention that has been forced down the throats of almost every developed and many developing world families as the only civil and rational way to raise your baby. The vast majority of diapers are expensive, non-biodegradable, and in many cases, unnecessary. I concede that raising your child diaper free is not for everyone, but I am convinced that it could be an option for many more families if they understood the process and the benefits of this mode of child rearing.

Animal feces, if handled irresponsibly, can and does make people sick. Millions of children in Africa and other parts of the developing world die each year from diarrhea caused by poor sanitation and water contaminated by animal waste. These are serious issues that need to be addressed in responsible ways so that children do not die avoidable deaths. I am not condoning that we we live in a world where crap runs down sidewalks and flows untreated into our rivers. What I’m hoping for is that humans can develop a healthier understanding about both the benefits and shortcomings of animal waste and as a result promote rational and sustainable techniques, policies and ideas that allow us to relate with poop in ways that maximize its advantages and minimize its risks.

At Rancho Mastatal we think and talk a lot about our impact. We look for ways to build using local and natural resources, produce our own energy, improve our community’s health, save money and ameliorate the fertility of our soils. The sustainable solutions to all of these goals are in part hidden in the dark, rich world of animal poop, and when handled responsibly and intelligently provide answers to how humans can start shifting, and shitting, towards a more healthy relationship with our bodies and our planet.

NEWS AND NOTES

The busy season has come to an end, the last of our groups for the fiscal year have come and gone. Our Apprentice Crew has all but taken over running the Ranch. It is a time for projects, practice, rest, reflection, and beginning to prepare for 2017.

One of our favorite ways to reflect is looking back over old photos. Want to explore the Ranch's past with us? Check us out on Flickr and let us know your favorite pics!

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Going Home: The Long Road Leaving Mastatal

The journey starts with a 5am wake up; just as the sunlight is starting to spread through the jungle. I take a couple deep breaths as I admire the beautiful place that I am in.I take a last look around, heave my heavy backpack on, and head down to make a cup of coffee before embarking on what will be a 36+ hour adventure back "home." I have done this journey multiple times now, from California to Costa Rica and back and forth, and each time presents new challenges and exhausting travel times.

Every time I go from one place to the other I am overwhelmed with culture shock, but the shock is always greater in my trips back to the States. While leaving the small, tranquil, jungle town of Mastatal and landing in the big, bustling, concrete jungle of Los Angeles I am caught off guard by what is happening in the “real world.”

Fortunately, I do not and have never had to live in a city, especially not one as large as Los Angeles. I grew up in the small mountain town of Bishop, CA; population 4,000. For college I moved to what I considered the city of Durango, CO; population 20,000. Then I moved to Mastatal; population 100. You could say I don’t have much city or masses-of-people experience, and this probably factors into my feelings of shock when I leave the Ranch and get dropped into one of the biggest cities in the world.

After I chug down a delicious cup of local coffee, something I know I won’t enjoy again till I return, I head out to wait for the only bus out of town. The bus arrives and I awkwardly manage to load my bag on, which always seems to be a feat when traveling. So it begins; the first of many hours sitting, waiting, and fidgeting. If any of you have traveled to the Ranch you may feel the same way, but I think the bus ride is much easier on the way out then the way in. Better as the first leg of your journey than the last,.still with a fresh traveling bum.

I enjoy the ride through the jungle, on windy, bumpy, dirt roads, admiring the unique beauty of this place. We arrive in Puriscal and I head straight to get some chicharones. These yummy hunks of meat, an avocado, and bread have become my go to traveling food to fuel me through. I take my time because my flight doesn’t leave for hours and I would rather wander around the streets then wait in the airport.Still there aren’t many exciting activities to keep me in Puriscal so I load onto the next bus to San Jose.

The whole trip gradually eases me into civilization, each stop with an increasing population. The bus stops in the middle of San Jose, I get off onto the busy streets. I have done this journey many times but I have never had to find the next bus station to the airport by myself, so this will be the interesting part. As anxiety starts to come up with the increase of people and hustle, and every other person in a car is yelling “taxi, taxi!” I inhale, exhale, tighten my backpack straps, and start walking in the direction I think is to the next bus station.

After multiple blocks I start to think I may have missed a turn.I spot a group of police officers chatting on the corner and shyly approach to ask for directions. They all jump eagerly on the opportunity to practice their English on this lost, white girl.

I make it to the airport. The Costa Rican airport is so small that everything moves smoothly.This is where I will wait for eight hours before my plane leaves. I find a nice private corner, lay out my yoga mat and start stretching. I’m the wandering, hippy, dirty, traveler that doesn’t mind making herself comfortable and if that means doing some odd yoga moves in the airport then so be it.

On my flight to LAX I sit next to a Costa Rican man that is moving to Alaska to be with his family. I wish him good luck and warn that he better buy a coat! I arrive in LAX, wait in the two hour immigration line, get on the airport shuttle to the opposite side of the airport, find my next gate, find another private corner, and lay out my yoga mat in hopes to get some sleep. By this time it is at least midnight and there is hardly anyone in the airport.

It turns out not many people sleep in the airport; except for those too cheap to get a room. With the lack of body heat the airport feels like a walk in freezer, and this is not just because I am use to the heat of the tropics. I thought I brought enough warm clothes to bare the cold airports, but I can barely feel my toes so I try wrapping myself in my yoga mat. At this point I do look like a homeless person camping in the airport. The late hours of the night are also the time that all the construction and cleaning gets done in the airport, so between the jackhammers, vacuums, and freezing temperatures I don’t get much rest.

The early morning hours come, people slowly start trickling back into the airport. I continue to wait for my flight to Mammoth, the town an hour away from my home where I will get picked up by my parents. I have had this flight canceled on me multiple times due to not enough passengers, so I worry until I'm on the flight, if it will take off or not. If this flight doesn’t run that means one of my parents will need to drive the five hours to LAX to pick me up. That for lack of a better word, sucks. Finally, the time has arrived for the last leg of my trip; I board the Mammoth flight, an hour long beautiful trip over the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I land. My dad is there to pick me up and we drive home. It has been at least 35 hours now since I left Mastatal; I am exhausted.

I am in a totally different place now. It always amazes me how one day you can be living in the tropics and the next you are in the high desert mountains. I went from a landscape of complete green, to one of different shades of browns and speckles of green. On the drive home my dad comments “it’s been raining a lot, things are looking really green here.” Ha! I think, a lot of rain, really green, you should see the jungle.

Usually my transition back into life in the States is cushioned by the comfort of being in Bishop, a town so small you almost know everyone. But unknowingly, I arrive back home during memorial day weekend. Which in Bishop is when the town holds its annual Mule Days event, a well known event that attracts 20,000+ people and their 20,000+ mules. All flooding into Bishop for a week of mule fun! It is as ridiculous as it sounds. Not having been to Mule Days in many years, a long time friend and I decide why not? So we put on the good ol’ blue jeans, cowboy boots, and plaid shirts and go down to watch the rodeo! I feel like I have walked into a costume party, what happened to the raggedy t-shirts, sweaty shorts, and old crocs of the jungle? I ain’t in Mastatal no more!  

Ali Ostergard

NEWS AND NOTES

Did you know the Ranch is on Instagram? Follow us here!

Have you ever wanted to build your own home? Just bought a piece of land in Costa Rica and want to create a jungle paradise? Well in 2017 we have the classes you need to re-skill and build your place in this world.

• Timber-Frame Construction--January 18th to 27th, 2017

• Earthen Walls, Plasters, and Artistry--April 11 to 22nd, 2017

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Cultured Butter & the Culture of Butter

When my dad was in third grade, his class followed the curriculum laid out in a workbook. In times of boredom and monotony, he would flip ahead and learn new material the class was soon to arrive at. One day he came across a particularly interesting bit: a tongue twister. My dad spent the next six weeks practicing the tongue twister in secrecy of his classmates until, finally, the class caught up to that point in the workbook. The teacher gave each student the opportunity to recite the tongue twister from the book, and each student who attempted this tongue twister stumbled through a slew of "Betty botta buddhas," until it was my dad's opportunity. Without even glancing at the page, he busted out the tongue twister:

"Betty bought a bit of butter for the batter, but said she, 'This butter is bitter. If I'd bought a bit of better butter it would have made the butter better.'"

With impeccable clarity and speed, my dad enunciated each syllable with the swiftness of an engine. Every kid's jaw in the class dropped.

My dad told me this story when I was a kid, and at that time, it was just a funny story. Now having spent some time at the Ranch where foresight, accountability, and sustainability are key, the story has adopted some unique and colorful undertones.

We prepare a lot of our own food at the Ranch. Dark, leafy and salad greens are grown and processed right around our kitchens. Jackfruits, soncoyas, and mamonchinos are fruits grown in our orchards and slipped into our diets. We grow many of the ingredients processed into red curries, our chickens lay a portion of our own eggs and we even grate and make coconut milk. A lot of time and intention goes behind the scenes of preparing one of the 22,000 meals the Ranch serves on a yearly basis. The latest ingredient to pass through our team's newly established food processing kitchen is cultured butter.

Although butter whipping is a simple business, conventional agricultural processes have complicated matters. Imagery of sprawling fields with shady orange trees and golden sunsets are merely a misleading, commercial scheme that draws in consumers. If the same Betty from my dad's tongue twister had seen a butter package of a concentrated animal feeding operation, she may have consulted her local dairy neighbor instead.

In the campo of Costa Rica, we are fortunate enough to have two neighbors that milk their cows and preserve the cream with a microbial culture. Those two neighbors are Daisy, and coincidentally enough, Betty, who does not make bitter butter at all, but rather fresh butter. When we walk down the road, we can see that their land is integrated in Costa Rica's biological reserves, or protected forest lands that weave through the countryside's agricultural sites. A low intensive dairy system means that farmers can give more attention to the quality of the ambient environment. The flavor of the ecology shines through in four simple steps of processing sour creme into butter.

Step 1: Buy sour cream from your local dairy neighbor.

Step 2: Whip the creme with the keystone appliance, the food processor, until it has thickened.

Step 3: Pour the product through a food strainer. This separates a rich, cultured butter from the liquid, buttermilk.

Step 4: Add salt to the butter and use a spoon to press out any excess buttermilk and drain. Once this process is complete, you'll be left with your very own cultured butter product.

Freshly sourced cultured butter has revealed some illuminating assets to Ranch food culture. Like everything else served from our kitchens, the butter is delicious. It's a medium for live microbes that actually form symbiotic relationships with the microbes present in your gut. It's produced by our neighbors, so we are able to see the land and the cows and ensure we are sourcing responsibly. A simple price comparison even reveals that our homemade, cultured butter is less expensive than supermarket butter by about $1 per stick.

These are all great reasons to process your own butter, but the most important relates to reading and learning from patterns. When my dad was in third grade, he predicted the pattern laid out by the structure of his class. Each day, the class moved forward in the workbook, all of the information having been laid out before him. Patterns similarly exist in the ways cultures are interacting with their foods. We can read these patterns and change our behavior to make sure we are eating foods that are healthy for both our bodies and our land.

In 1963, maybe Betty going to the store to buy butter was the growing custom because social norms suggested that this is how the batter comes out best. As proof of the tongue twister, the only butter bought was an obviously unsatisfactory product. Global patterns in the vast mechanization of agriculture without cultural or environmental conscientiousness has contributed to their degradation. Industrializing a simple process such as butter-making means that the vitality in microbial life is significantly decreased, land ethics are overlooked, and the wheels of economic engine and government subsidies can keep the price of this process competitively low. Plus, the taste is never fresh, never pure.

Patterns are not just ways of reading into the past, they are tools for looking ahead to the future. As people make more conscience decisions about where they source their foods, they regain their food sovereignty. They can be a part of a cultural and environmental shift that heals their bodies, waterways, soils, and communities. The pattern of regeneration is exciting enough that reintroducing skills like simple butter making become more appealing. When we sit down together for a Ranch meal, we recognize a labor of love that goes into every ingredient.

In questions surrounding the ethics of sustainability, answers are never obvious. As we navigate these territories, we are met with the awesome challenge of reconstructing a culture that respects land and people. Sometimes that means we just want our butter to taste better! Whether that culture come from your food processing practices or your live microbes, it's a robust tool in assuring that nobody be left with bitter butter.

Dorothy

NEWS AND NOTES

Have you ever wanted to build your own home? Just bought a piece of land in Costa Rica and want to create a jungle paradise? Well in 2017 we have the classes you need to re-skill and build your place in this world.

• Timber-Frame Construction--January 18th to 27th, 2017

• Earthen Walls, Plasters, and Artistry--April 11 to 22nd, 2017

We also have a few spots left in our Sustainability Primer program. If you know anyone interested in joining us please spread the word!

Abrazos,

The Ranch Crew

Lard, the new Super Food?

Hola! My name is Jessica, and I am one of the five apprentices of the 2016 crew. Health and food are two very important topics I hold dear to my heart and are in my everyday thoughts. Essentially these are some of the main reasons why I decided to come to Costa Rica and apply for the 11 month apprenticeship at Rancho Mastatal. Some of my many roles here as an apprentice are harvesting, processing, and creating the delicious food we serve here at the ranch.

Everything we eat at the Ranch is homemade or made from scratch as we'd say on the east coast of the United States. It takes a lot of time, and is made with a lot of love, which makes it taste even better. Since I am someone who cares a lot about what is going into my body, I became very interested in how our food is grown, where it is coming from, and how it is being cooked.

During my first interview with Tim and Robin in the summer of 2014, they mentioned that the food at the Ranch is cooked in lard within the mix of all the details about the apprenticeship. After our hour long interview, the only thing that left me puzzled was the conversation on lard, and why would a sustainable center that grows such healthy food cook with lard?

What do you think about when you hear the word, Lard? Before coming to Rancho Mastatal I thought of lard as a sludgy, disgusting fat that was seemingly the most unhealthy thing you could put into your body and would make you obese. The name alone sent chills down my spine. All I could think about was a Family Guy episode where Peter chugged a whole barrel of lard and went from fit, skinny Peter back to overweight Peter. I never pictured cooking with or eating lard in my future. Tim assured me that the Ranch did their research on lard and it was the most sustainable and practical option for them. Feeling intrigued to learn more about this mysterious lard, I decided to dive into the research and see for myself. Was lard really unhealthy? Could it be a sustainable cooking oil? How does it compare to other cooking oils? These were some of the questions I set out to answer.

While conducting research using the Ranch's food cookbooks and articles about lard, I learned about the American history of lard. Did you know a hundred years ago lard was found in every household and was a big money maker within the meat packing industry? At the time, animal fats were the main use for all pan frying, until the invention of the light bulb. What does the light bulb have to do with lard?

Well, Procter & Gamble, a candle and soap making company, had all this extra oil from dropping candle sales and they needed to find a way to use the extra cotton seed oil. In 1907 a German chemist, E. C. Kayer came to Procter & Gambles' company with his invention of hydrogenated cotton seed oil. It looked and cooked like lard and it was cheaper than the American household staple. They called it Crisco. With an amazing marketing roll-out including advertisements, demonstrations, and free cookbooks promoting the use and purchase of this hydrogenated vegetable shortening, soon Crisco was all anyone was talking about. To top it off, in the 1950s, scientists claimed saturated fats, such as lard, caused heart disease which made consumers switch to the new vegetable shortening substitute.

Most of America soon ditched lard from their homes and restaurants. Today's health studies now say having a moderate consumption of saturated fat in your diet is not unhealthy. For example, coconut oil is a popular oil to cook with today and it has an 86% saturated fat level.

Given what we know now; why is lard the best choice for Rancho Mastatal and its guests? First, lard is local! We know exactly where it is coming from and it is very fresh. Secondly, we are supporting a small butcher in Puriscal, the closest town to Mastatal. The Ranch does all we can to eat only local and support small businesses. And finally, and most importantly, the taste test. The taste of a homemade falafel or yuca bammie made with pig lard is in no comparison to one cooked in sunflower seed oil. In a normal week, our meals are made with only vegetarian ingredients and the cooked dishes are sauteed in our local pig lard. We have all kinds of guests visiting the ranch for a tour or to take one of our amazing workshops, and between 5-10% of them are vegetarian or vegan. We always ask our guests if they have any dietary restrictions, some decide to opt out of trying our local based diet and instead have their food cooked in a mass produced sunflower seed oil. As a former vegetarian, I understand the reasons to not eat meat products, especially when you don't know where it is coming from.

Here at the Ranch we know where everything we eat comes from and it feels good knowing we are eating as sustainable as possible. Pig lard has a respectable 40% saturated fat and 45% unsaturated fat compared to butter which has a 60% saturated fat and 23% unsaturated fat. For our vegetarian and vegan guests, we use non GMO sunflower seed oil which has 13% saturated fat, 24% unsaturated fat, and a not so well known active ingredient TBHQ- 0.02%.

TBHQ is a chemical cleaning agent and stabilizer to keep the oil from going rancid due to the low percentage of saturated fat in the vegetable oil. Most vegetable oils have low saturated fats and need to be chemically altered to preserve the oil, especially oils that are okay to use at higher cooking temperatures. Lard on the other hand can sit at a room temperature without any alterations. With limited knowledge about the mysterious TBHQ and its health risks, the decision to cook with local lard seems to be a no-brain-er.

Since the Ranch takes such pride in what we grow, source, process, cook and eat, I thought it would be only fair to bring awareness to our future guests and reveal the reasoning behind why we cook our meals with pig lard. It feels good knowing our food is always fresh, we know where it's coming from, and have the opportunity to build strong relationships with the people who grow and process the food we put on our plate. With one bite of our homemade corn empanadas cooked to a crispy perfection, you will understand our love for locally sourced lard.

Jessica

Resources:

http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/lard-the-new-health-food

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/02/03/146356117/who-killed-lard

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/how-vegetable-oils-replacced-animal-fats-in-the-american-diet/256155

On Food and Cooking: The science and Lore of the Kitchen, Pages 799-802, Harold McGee

NEWS AND NOTES

We are planning some exciting new workshops for 2017 on plant propagation, soil re-mineralization, forestry and more. Keep an eye on the calendar for new additions. We still have space in the following workshops.

• Timber-Frame Construction--January 18th to 27th, 2017

• Earthen Walls, Plasters, and Artistry--April 11 to 22nd, 2017

We also have a few spots left in our Sustainability Primer program. If you know anyone interested in joining us please spread the word!

Abrazos,

The Ranch Crew

How to Design, Plant, Maintain, and Feast from your Food Forest

When you visit the Ranch you will not find rows of squash, tomatoes and carrots as you might associate with a temperate climate organic farm. You won't find deep layers of topsoil. You won't find tractors and their associated implements. What you will find is an agriculture that blends pleasantly into the forest. To the untrained eye it may even be challenging to tell where the forest begins and the farm ends. This is because our agriculture is based on the ecology of the place we live. And we live in a tropical monsoon forest. Our agricultural practices, often cited as agroforestry or food forests in the permaculture jargon, mimic the forest around us. 

Mimicking this complex ecology and all the associated relationships occurring in this hyper-diverse place is novel, exciting, and challenging work for us new-generation farmers. In order to help others on this same path we are documenting our work more and more. As part of this effort, I recently published a series of in-depth articles on tropical orchard establishment practices and concepts for the Permaculture Research Institute.

For anyone wanting to learn more about how we manage our 15 acres of food forests please explore the following links.

Part 1: Discover our site goals, layout patterns and approach toward water.

Part 2: Explore our soil management strategy.

Part 3: Learn why and how we make certain species selections.

We hope you enjoy these and now have a clearer picture of the agricultural landscape we are creating.

Scott

NEWS AND NOTES

We have a number of life changing workshops coming up.

• Wilderness First Responder--June 8th to 17th

• Sustainable Homestead Design--June 22nd to 26th

• Timber-Frame Construction--January 18th to 27th, 2017

Please share around if you know anyone who is ready for a trip to beautiful Costa Rica, a swim in the waterfalls, nourished with homemade meals, and challenged with an intensive educational experience.

Abrazos,

The Ranch Crew

Life with Limited Communications: How We Thrive with Crappy Internet

I’m unable to answer all of the emails that I receive into my inbox everyday. Even though I do receive my fair share of electronic correspondence, my inability to reply to all messages is not likely a result of the inordinate amount of inquiries that I receive compared to many of you out there. The reason is that I live in a place with shitty Internet.

I have a 2-hour window each morning before most people in town are awake to get into my account and open and answer my emails. After that, people begin to chew up the ever so precious limited bandwidth that serves our community. In my head I envision people in town rolling out of bed to take a peak at their Facebook accounts or watch a video on Youtube before school or work while I struggle to open a reservation request that might result in a booking and some income for the Ranch. Our painfully slow Internet means that I can generally check emails only once a day. If I didn’t respond to an email this morning, it will simply have to wait until tomorrow.

To add to my current communication challenges, I don’t have a cell phone, much less a smart phone. The pressure seems to mount each day to get one. Given my administrative obligations as the director of Rancho Mastatal, all of this results in a daily confrontation that I strive to find balance with continuously. For those of you with poor Internet connections, which may only be a small minority of you reading this, what do you do when you simply can’t open an email that you know you should read and respond to as soon as possible? How do you react when you can’t attach a simple Excel spreadsheet to your email to send to a prospective client? In an age when businesses increasingly rely on the Internet for their survival, how has the Ranch been able to make ends meet for 15 years, the first 8 without even a phone in our town, in a world that today demands email responses in minutes or hours, not days or weeks?

Honestly, I don’t have a great answer or fully know. It’s an interesting dissertation topic for a future graduate student that loves our community. I think mostly it’s been a life-or-death (for the business, not us as humans) need. Somehow, we’ve been able to organize our work and lives to make it work, in spite of the poor odds in Vegas. We’ve persisted and persevered while the communications here have slowly improved. We’ve been forced to depend on our amazing library (with real books) for research and traditional means to build friendships, trust and a dedicated following that have kept us alive and mostly well.

Every 3 weeks, for almost a decade, I drove 2 hours to find a reasonably fast Internet connection. I also relied on a terribly annoying auto response message that asked those emailing to me to please be patient when waiting for a reply. Many of you probably remember (and still receive a watered down version of) the message that states that I’ll get back to you sometime within the next century. This is mainly how I assuaged and bought time with those interested in our project and “stayed on top” of bookings and guest visits early on in our evolution.

In the earliest days, I would wait in line at the public phone in San Miguel, 4 kilometers from Mastatal, to make bookings for our educational groups. If I had to make more than one call, I would have to get back in line to make the second. A third. Back in line. You catch my drift. This little exercise might take me half a day. Setting up homestays for our high school groups would take multiple days. It now takes me an hour by phone.

The current reality, fortunately, is that I’ll probably be able to respond to an email that you send to me within a week, and if it’s high priority, even sooner. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. While most of you enjoy life with high-speed wifi and 4g service, we struggle with a 3g network that’s reminiscent of my first email experience with AOL and dial up just out of the Peace Corps in the mid-90s. I haven’t come that far in the past 20 years, but I’ve come somewhere, and all this said, there’s great relief and many benefits in not owning a cell phone and being tied to the Internet 24/7. I am currently avoiding total dependence on modernity’s electronic leashes (or nooses) but also appreciate and recognize the great benefits that the Internet brings to me, my family, and our business. Without it we would struggle even more than we presently do to make financial ends meet and stay in touch with our families. My weekly drive to the highest point in the region to check phone messages has evolved to a predawn wakeup and email session in my cozy cob home, and I’ll take the latter any day of the week.

Visitors to the Ranch almost universally, eventually feel relief when they spend many days, weeks or months with us and are unable to stay uber connected to their digital lives back home. The Internet and cell phones are yet other additions to a continuous string of technologies that we have to learn to find a happy medium with and balance. Like so many of life’s conveniences, too much has proven over and over to destroy our mental and physical health in the long-run, and just like coffee, hooch and phone access, a little can and should go a long way.

Timo

 

 

 

NEWS AND NOTES

We have a number of life changing workshops coming up.

• Wilderness First Responder--June 8th to 17th

• Sustainable Homestead Design--June 22nd to 26th

• Timber Frame Construction--January 18th to 27th

Please share around if you know anyone who is ready for a trip to beautiful Costa Rica, a swim in the waterfalls, nourished with homemade meals, and challenged with an intensive educational experience.

Abrazos,

The Ranch Crew

Year of the Ear: Nursing in the Tropics

Ashley is one of our 2016 Apprentices in Sustainable Living. She has a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Florida. This post is about the challenges of nursing in the tropics, common ailments in the community and how these challenges are managed at Rancho Mastatal.  If you would like to learn more about medicine outside of hospital settings, consider joining us this June for our annual Wilderness First Responder Certification.

The sun rises in Mastatal around 5:30 am, and with the light comes a symphony of sound. Buzzing, chirping, and humming act as constant and steady instruments to the jungle orchestra. Every morning without fail they fill the Hankey with music. In the comfort of my bed, I can hear the roosters crowing and a chorus of bird songs. This natural symphony signals the dawn of a new day. But recently many of the residents of Rancho Mastatal have been unable to hear this daily symphony. Tropical ear has literally blocked the music of the jungle.

Halfway through a bowl of breakfast pinto, a student from the visiting Villanova University approaches me with the familiar symptoms of hearing and ear discomfort. David had just returned from a trip to the local waterfall and fell victim to an ear full of trapped water. This condition is called swimmers ear and not ironically is also called tropical ear. What is a nurse to do in the tropics? No otoscope, no problem. Allow the ancient wisdom of observation to begin.

The best way to examine an ear is to pull the ear gently down and away from the face to straighten the ear canal. A headlamp is best for visualizing blockages. "If the gentle pulling of the ear causes pain, then the canal is infected.(1)" A simple recipe, despite limited resources, can be the front line defense for ear infections. "Drop into affected ear 1 spoon of vinegar with 1 spoon of boiled water 3 to 4 times a day. (2)" Fortunately, an ear infection is not what David has. My headlamp has spotted a crusted golden plug. "The ear canal cleans itself by moving dead skin from the eardrum out through the canal as if they were on a conveyor belt. Accumulated debris and earwax tends to trap water that gets into the ear canal during a shower or while swimming. The resulting wet, softened skin in the ear canal is more easily infected by bacteria and fungi. (2)"

David looks around nervously, aware his classmates are peering into his ear with me. Their faces scrunch up with amusement and wonder. David's ear needs to be irrigated. We sit at a bench around the corner and he comfortably lays down. I proceed to place 10 drops of mineral oil into his affected ear. His classmates are commenting on the size of David's golden wax build up.

If mineral oil is not present in your community any natural oil is a good substitute. The oil needs to be in the ear for 10 minutes to break up the earwax. With the help of his classmates' good company, the 10 minutes flies by. When you irrigate an ear, warm water is important. Using an irrigation syringe, I gently flush his ear. With his classmates on my heels, I feel them starting to lose hope as I continued to flush and flush. I gave his ear a grand finale flush and the golden treasures came pouring out. The "ohs" and "ahs" of his classmates shortly follow. David faces us with a look of confusion. "I can hear again!" He says remarkably as he catches a glimpse of the golden nuggets that left his ear. 

Nursing in a small community has its challenges. With limited resources you are forced to get crafty. Books supplement my medical knowledge. The realm of Google and quick answers is unavailable. The lack of privacy can be daunting; as the majority of treatments are centered around meal times. The main house is the keeper of the medical supplies and the maker of all meals. Still, when David full force hugs me, I can feel his appreciation osmose into my body, up to my face where it turns into a smile. He thanks me for opening his ears to the symphony he's been missing. I've learned in the short time I've been part of this community that together we are capable of some very amazing things. 

(1) Berkow, Robert M.D., The Merck Manual of Medical Info, 1997

(2) Werner, David. Where There is No Doctor: a Village Health Care Handbook, 1992.

Ashley Chow

NEWS AND NOTES

We have a number of life changing workshops coming up.

• The Art and Practice of Live Culture Fermentation--May 10th to 13th

• Wilderness First Responder--June 8th to 17th

• Sustainable Homestead Design--June 22nd to 26th

Please share around if you know anyone who is ready for a trip to beautiful Costa Rica, a swim in the waterfalls, nourished with homemade meals, and challenged with an intensive educational experience.

Abrazos,

The Ranch Crew

Extreme Food Processing: Flaming Nuts and Poison Ivy Spray

I was harvesting fruits down by the classroom this week when Jenny walked by with a line of high school students, en route for the river trail. She paused for a moment as she passed.

“We're roasting cashews at five tomorrow. Why don't you gather some from the ground here and bring them?”

As I nodded in reply, she kept walking, the line of students slowly disappearing into the trees.

I looked down at my harvest—a small sack of red lovi-lovis, pink water apples, and green peppercorns. Friendly faces of the fruit world, each one unique in form and function. The lovi-lovis bright and tart, the water apples soft and quenching, the peppers prized for their addictive pungency. Understanding each one's harvest, preparation, and usage is one of the true joys of farming and cooking; each new discovery a revelation in the subtle and powerful nuances of the life around us.

The cashews, though. The cashews were dangerous temptations.

I looked up from my harvest. The Ranch cashew trees were close enough that I could smell the fruits, softly sweet, with a piercing astringency. Cashews are mythical beasts of the fruit world, strangely formed in an unlikely combination of parts. The fruits themselves are soft and oval, and vary in size and color like apples do, most red or yellow. They have a soft, waxy skin and extreme juiciness—which ironically leaves your mouth completely dry when you bite into one, courtesy of the high quantity of astringent tannins. But the strangest part is the seed. Instead of hiding buried inside the fruit's flesh, the cashew seed dangles in a curved shell on the bottom of the fruit itself, like a tiny curled finger, beckoning and warning.

Each February and March at the Ranch, as soon as the first mythical cashew beasts begin to form and dangle from the trees at eye level, an urgent announcement is made to all apprentices, guests, and passersby: do not touch the cashew nuts or they will get you!! Like all mythical beasts, cashews come with a set of strange powers. In addition to the fruits sucking all the saliva out of your mouth when you eat them, the nuts are covered in urushiol, the same chemical substance that gives poison ivy its poison and people a terrifying rash when they touch it. Nuts nuts nuts!

I happen to be extremely allergic to lots of plants, including plain grass. My legs from the knees down still bear hundreds of poison oak scars. Urushiol is my nemesis, and I always lose our battles. So when Robin warned us about the cashew nuts' latent danger—don't touch them the wrong way, don't look at them the wrong way and above all else, don't try to roast them—I took the message to heart as fair warning and good advice. After all, this sound advice was preceded by experience: on the two occasions when people attempted to roast the nuts at the Ranch, both events ended in trips to the hospital for steroid injections. Swelling of the entire body after consuming urushiol is apparently even worse than itchy legs. “Robin had a cashew trauma,” Jenny later described it. Some fruits are better left untouched.

And yet. My friend Amanda who, bless her lovely heart, is afraid of nearly everything in the jungle, including insects, sounds, and rainstorms, happened to tell me just that morning that she was enjoying cashew processing with her four-year-old daughter Lily. “We just cooked them in the fire and then Lily broke open the nuts with a rock and they were really good,” she said. And then there was the time last year that we filled a whole sack full of cashew nuts from the driveway, and Junior was thrilled to lug the things back to his place to roast and eat. And of course the fact that there are cashew trees everywhere in Mastatal and everyone seems to eat them. Maybe it was time to try again.

The next morning at meeting I announced my plan to collect the nuts and bring them to Jenny and Marcos's to roast. A small sea of terrified faces looked back at me. “Its okay!” I said, “It's okay!” Having no idea if it would be okay or not, but hoping.

“For anyone that chooses to participate, we will help you in any way we can, but you will be responsible for the cost of your own transportation and hospital visit,” added Robin.

That afternoon I took a bag to the cashew tree patch, scavenged for fallen nuts, and thought about my future. Would it be bright? Painful? Delicious? It was easy to gather a good quantity of nuts in a half hour or so. I stuck them in a backpack along with a take-out container of salted Maya nut seeds to share. Just before leaving I asked Robin what part of the roasting process she had been allergic to. “The nuts, the utensils that handled the nuts, everything that touched the nuts, the smoke, and everything the smoke touched,” she said. I added a bottle of benadryl and an emergency inhaler to my backpack, and Rachel Jackson, Jess, and I set out walking to Marcos's.

When we arrived Arabela was sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch, and Chilo wandered up with a shovel in his hand. I could see smoke coming from behind the house, and Chilo pointed us around the corner.

There was Marcos, shirtless and stirring cashews over the fire with a very long stick. In front of him sat a small crowd of young tourists and volunteers, watching, chatting. Someone strummed a guitar. No one looked terrified or swollen. Jenny greeted us. Smoke wafted from the fire onto the crowd, and Rachel, Jess and I stepped back out of its reach. We explained our trepidation to Jenny, and she shook her head. “It's fine!” she said. “As long as the toxins spray out and burn up its no problem, its good.”

We handed Marcos our sack of cashews and he tossed them on a roofing sheet over the fire and poked them around with the stick. “You have to stir them until they pop,” he explained, “then they open and spray out all the toxins, and it runs into the fire and burns.” After a few minutes the cashews looked black and charred, and I heard the hiss and pop of shells breaking. Marcos pointed out the rivlet of liquid running off the roofing sheet onto the ground. Once he deemed that all the shells had opened, he dipped the end of the stick into the fire, and brought the burning tip up to the cashews. They ignited immediately, and burned like an enormous flambe. After a minute or so Marcos told us to step back, and he flipped the roofing sheet with the flaming nuts onto the ground, where they burned out in the dirt. Jenny used a stick to gather them into a pile and brought them over to us. They were completely charred, the husks burned through. She put one on a rock and tapped it with a piece of wood. The husk fell off, and she picked up the nut. A cashew! Golden brown, with one end toasted slightly black. “If its wet, and bends, don't eat it, its got the toxins,” she said, pressing the nut between her fingers. “This is good.” She handed it to me to eat. It was warm, and tasted sweet and tender-crisp.

We spent the rest of the evening by the fire, cracking open cashews and passing around May nuts. The Maya nut, also called ojoche or ramon, is a native rainforest tree that produces an edible, high-protein nut. The week before, Jenny accompanied us deep into the forest in Zapaton to track down one of the last known mature trees in the area. We hope that by valuing the Maya nuts as a food source and the trees that produce them, we will help drive sustainable food economies that are financially viable and promote conservation of forest ecosystems.

One of Marcos's volunteers took a Maya nut and popped it in his mouth. He looked at Marcos poking another roaring ball of fire on the roofing sheet. “If cashews were in the states people would go crazy, there'd be like cashew parties every year or something. Its so cool!” He took another Maya nut. “What are these, these are good?”

Around dusk it began to rain, and we crowded under the awning of Marcos's house, snacked on Maya nuts, and talked about the cashews. Marcos explained the differences in varieties and processing techniques. We concluded that the Ranch Cashew Trauma was probably a consequence of ingestion of un-combusted urushiol and a serious allergy to it. Even though Marcos made it all look easy, the complete combustion of the toxins in cashew nuts is an extreme food processing technique honed by many seasons of experience. I certainly won't be roasting them by myself any time soon. But hopefully Marcos and Jenny will let us continue to celebrate the season with them in years to come.

A Ranch guest recently asked me why local food traditions are important in Mastatal. Why trek into the jungle to gather rainforest seeds? Why feel the adrenaline spike of watching someone combust toxic nuts in a ball of fire? Why prepare three meals a day from local foods--no boxes, bags, or can openers involved? Why do we do this, and why is it important?

Food is constant. It builds us, it forms us, it unites us. Sustainable food systems are the heart of resilient communities and regenerative ecosystems. If you can do this one thing—food--on a sustainable community scale, everything else will follow. Community cohesion, local economies, conservation of diverse ecosystems, health and wellness, celebration—all fall into place as we create successful, vibrant local food systems. Its not just about the flaming nuts, its about the whole picture, and that's why it worth it.

Laura Killingbeck

NEWS AND NOTES

We have a number of life changing workshops coming up.

• The Art and Practice of Live Culture Fermentation--May 10th to 13th

• Wilderness First Responder--June 8th to 17th

• Sustainable Homestead Design--June 22nd to 26th

We rely on all of the amazing ambassadors to our project to spread the word; if you know of anyone who needs a get-life-into-gear experience, send them to one of our classes!

Abrazos,

The Ranch Crew

Transition Ethics: The Art of Compromise

By Scott Gallant

Permaculture Design is many things to many people, but one of its pillars is a set of three ethics.  These as originally laid out by Bill Mollison are

• Care of the Earth

• Care of People

• Redistribution of the Surplus

These are our primary directives for how to act to sustain the earth.  Or on a simpler level these are the ways to a good life.

Teaching these ethics during our annual Permaculture Design Certification (PDC) course is one of my favorite topics.  It inevitably brings up pointed and challenging conversations, commonly around how to live these ethics in a world that often does not care for the earth, nor its people. How do we live and design for today’s world and for the parallel world we want to create?  This discussion leads to fear and anger based responses, a tear-it-down approach easy to rally around in a classroom of like minded, fed up and passionate souls.  Unsurprisingly, this is not an effective route for change.  It became apparent to our teaching team that this conversation on ethics lacked a route to speak about compromise.  To fill this gap we utilize a fourth ethic in our PDC curriculum; the Transition Ethic.

The Transition Ethic is a guide for how to be effective in creating change. In their recent book Practical Permaculture (one of the few references to the Transition Ethic in permaculture) Jessi Bloom and Dave Boehnlein state that “the transition ethic says that no one is going from zero to sustainable overnight. Making the transition takes time.” We have to meet people where they are at.  We must understand their cultural context.

When I first began learning about the industrial food system and what it was doing to our personal and environmental health, I was angry.  I desperately avoided all participation in that system.  This was easier to embrace while living and working at the Ranch, a NuMundo impact center. But it was challenging when I returned to my parents’ home during the holidays.  While they eat healthy by many standards, I was disappointed to find apples from Chile, processed meats, and corn-syrup fueled snacks around the kitchen.  It was not a local food paradise by any means, so I jumped on my soapbox and preached.  They needed to support local economies and take care of their bodies!  Didn’t they care about the amount of pesticides used on those tomatoes?!

They responded with kindness and listened, like the wonderful parents they are, but were likely rolling their eyes in the background, and not much changed.  A few years latter though, when I was able to show them how excited I was to manage a farm in Costa Rica, bake my own bread, and build my own furniture.  I began to see them make real changes.  As soon as my ideas came from a place of positive examples versus negative critiques the transition began for them. Their garden as expanded, they save and share more and more seeds every year, and the kitchen has a few more jars of ferments upon my home arrival.

This instilled in me that even though I was ready to change, the world around me operated at a different pace. So the question became: how do I navigate the series of compromises needed to encourage change?  The original three ethics of permaculture speak to this in varying ways, but they don’t provide a road map as clearly as an ethic of transition. For me it is a road map of humility, recognizing that we are all coming from different places and we can’t begin to guess the context of others’ lives.

The Ranch is one of the leading natural building centers in the Americas.  Yet, we still use concrete in our foundations and metal on our roofs.  We don’t love the environmental impact of either of these materials, but we have done the due diligence to know that they make the most sense in our current context.  These are compromises we must make in order to protect our infrastructure investments from rain, earthquakes, termites, and the tropical climate.  This infrastructure allows us to operate as a world-class education center, without it our livelihood and mission fails.  It is a compromise we must make.

The Transition Ethic makes it clear that these compromises are ok and often necessary.  The key take away that I share with our students is that we can never compromise our ethics but we can make ethical compromises.

Most of us use fossil fuels, don’t eat only local organic food, and participate in a globalized economy.  We may wish this wasn’t true, but this is the world we live in; and it requires an art of compromise.  So how do we make choices and design our lives for the current world and the one we are creating and visioning for the future?

Permaculture design is one tool at our disposal to navigate these waters (primarily through good design of our lives, homes, and land) and with a Transition Ethic in place it becomes an even more robust tool.

Learn more

We have a number of life changing workshops yearly.

We rely on all of the amazing ambassadors to our project to spread the word; if you know of anyone who needs a get-life-into-gear experience, send them to one of our classes!

Abrazos,

The Ranch Crew

Tips for Working with Tropical Soils

Lydia is one of our 2016 Apprentices in Sustainable Living. She has studied Horticulture and has a Bachelor of Environments (Landscape Architecture) from the University of Melbourne in Australia. She is super keen on plants and the fundamental relationship between plants and soil. Healthy soil is the key to healthy plants. This post is about soil in the tropics, including some of the challenges that exist and how these challenges are managed at Rancho Mastatal.  

Sacha Inchi before a heavy mulch application.

Soil, the ever fascinating topic to any garden guru or green thumb. Here at the Ranch it's all about topsoil, which is basically non-existent. The little soil that is present has a high clay content making it particularly susceptible to compaction. It is also highly acidic. The combination of the two means that without any additives it would be challenging to grow anything at all. So we've devised a number of methods to build up the topsoil, break up the clay and raise the pH throughout our orchard and garden spaces. These methods can be used anywhere in the world to improve your soil.

The same plants as above after a healthy mulch cover.

First and foremost, topsoil! How do we do it? The majority of nutrients in the jungle ecosystem are stored in plants. When nutrients become available plants are quick to soak them up because there is stiff competition when living in such close proximity to your neighbors. This means that plant biomass is an incredibly rich and abundant source of nutrients. Plant biomass refers to all plant material, living and dead including leaves, trunks and branches. The main way we utilize this biomass is what Scott refers to as "doughnut" mulching, basically forming circular doughnuts of plant material around the base of our fruit and nut trees. This mimics nature by following the 'top-down' approach that allows microorganisms to move the material down. It is important to note that mulch should never touch the trunk of your trees because this will cause rot. A 5 inch radius between trunk and mulch is a good aim.

Another method used in zone 1 to improve soil quality is to bury pieces of wood under the soil in our garden beds. The wood acts like a sponge, retaining water throughout the dry season and, reducing compactness in the wet season by aerating the soil. It also provides habitat for microorganisms, crucial for plant health and growth.  Our garden beds are mulched regularly with dead leaves collected from the forest floor to retain moisture in the soil, reduce weed growth and add nutrients.  This is known as Hugulkulture.

Now, onto soil pH, the next big topic around soil in the tropics. There are 6 cooking methods used at the Ranch, 3 of which rely on wood, the rocket stove, the biochar stove and the pizza oven (read here for more about our alternative cook stoves). With 3 meals per day, 6 days a week being pumped out of our kitchen, you can imagine how much charcoal and ash we produce. Instead of simply disposing of this alkaline-rich bi-product we add it to our soil. 

Charcoal is a carbon-rich soil additive, that adds alkalinity to the soil, raising the pH. It has a high surface area on a microscopic level which means it is capable of storing water and nutrients in the soil, making it a valuable additive in both the dry season when water is required and the wet season when nutrients are required. The addition of charcoal also aerates the soil and breaks up the clay. It is essential to note that when adding charcoal to soil it must be soaked in a nitrogen solution first, such as compost/ worm tea. This will ensure it doesn't lock up precious nutrients from the soil. Ash is similar to charcoal but much finer. It also adds alkalinity to the soil, raising the pH. Limestone is another soil additive used to raise the pH and up the alkalinity. We spread lime around the base of our fruit and nut trees, vines and shrubs. 

Lime applied to a raised garden bed.

Nitrogen is one of the most important soil nutrients and in order to produce good crops, nitrogen is essential. What better way to introduce nitrogen into the soil than with nitrogen fixing plants. These plants produce "cake & cookies" i.e. sugars in the soil that attract nitrogen fixing bacteria. These bacteria are capable of using these sugars to convert nitrogen gas in the soil into a plant soluble form, accessible to the surrounding plants. Believe it or not, plants control this process depending on how much nitrogen they feel they need.T he more sugars the plants produce, the more sugars the bacteria consume, converting this sugar into nitrogen for the plants. It's an incredible natural process! The nitrogen fixers most extensively used here are Acacia mangium, Shizolobium paryhybum, and Madero Negro, all of which are trees. We also use peanut grass, a spreading ground cover. Most plants in the Leguminosae family can be used as nitrogen fixing plants. 

Making Biochar with a TLUD System.

Potting soil is another essential part of our plant operation here. The recipes used for potting soil change depending on what's available and required. One of the recipes we use is 2 parts forest soil plus 2 parts worm farm compost plus 1 part sifted builders sand. We collect the forest soil from the forest floor where a build up of plant material is prevalent e.g. a puddle, low point or valley. This is where nutrients gather because soil and small plant material is deposited (read here how we cultivate mountain microorganisms). The worm farm compost is a bi-product from our bio-digester system. This waste treatment system converts cow manure into methane gas, while leaving the fibrous material behind for the worm farm. The key to a great potting soil is to balance soil pH and ensue there is a rich source of matured compost where microorganisms thrive. 

So there you have it, the challenges and of course the fun of soil in the tropics! Creating and enhancing topsoil, balancing soil pH, in this case raising it, balancing the clay content of your soil and making nutrient rich potting soil. I hope you can take some of these tips away and enrich your soil wherever you are. Here's to happy soil and abundant plants.

Lydia Blocksidge

NEWS AND NOTES

We have a number of life changing workshops coming up.

• Permaculture Design Certification

• The Art and Practice of Live Culture Fermentation-

• Wilderness First Responder

We rely on all of the amazing ambassadors to our project to spread the word; if you know of anyone who needs a get-life-into-gear experience, send them to one of our classes!

Abrazos,

The Ranch Crew

How We Bee

We took a handsaw and a chisel to the football field the other day. Not the most common tools for that space, but exactly what we needed for the beekeeping job. Nestled up in the bamboo of the field shed,a low hum of busy bodies was stirring our curiosity: little bees. They have been living in that hive for quite some time, but on that day, the bees were on their way to a new home. I looked onward smugly as Esteban sawed out a piece of the public structure, because nobody in the back country of Costa Rica is going to stop you for something like that. Does it make us vandals? We jokingly called Esteban Winnie, for the Pooh Bear style honey thievery that we were getting into.

Names can be misleading, as nothing is set in stone. Names are just our mind's attempt to label things in order to make sense of our environments, which often appear to be in complete chaos. We must define these things. Take the bees for example. There are two types of bees in the world: bees that sting, and bees that don't sting. The Meliponi genus of bees, which we were investigating at the field, has been named the "stingless bee" (or "abeja sin aguijon" in "espanol"), insinuating that this characteristic sets the bee apart from other bees. Most bee species, however, have not evolved stingers, the way many colony dwelling bees have. There are hundreds of species of bees worldwide pollinating the majority of plants, but they go unnoticed because nobody learned to fear them. The honeybee, for example, is renown in part for its sting, but also for producing a rich, syrupy delicacy coveted by numerous creatures of the global biome. "Honeybee"-- why, that name insinuates that this bee is somehow special from other bees. This is where words have fallen short, because again, honeybees are not the only bees to produce honey. Meliponi bees have been producing honey for millenia, and though their presence globally is about fifty times greater than that of honeybees, honeybees have gotten about fifty times as much research and attention as Meliponi. It is only recently that more attention is being granted to these ecological keystones.

Meliponi bees hold a large presence in Costa Rica. Every now and again on the Ranch landscape, a little pipette appears. This is the entrance to a Meliponi hive made from wax and propolis. Meliponi live in cavities, such as hollowed tree trunks, but they're also keen to bamboo cells and manmade walls. We find them in our bamboo framed structures, like the Hooch and the garage, and in the wall of Jeannie's bunkhouse, but they very often go unnoticed. They are masters of flying under the radar. Mariolita, or Tetragonisca angustula , is the bee at the football field, and one of the smallest of stingless bees at 3- 4mm long. They are generalist pollinators, meaning they can pollinate a wide variety of plants. The bees are an asset of multifaceted benefits. They build orchard productivity, provide an indicator to ecological health, produce medicinal honey, and strengthen our awareness of our relationship to the environment.

We opened the hive at the field using a handsaw and a chisel, and we were no longer vandals or robbers, we were ecologic explorers, because the contents of such a hive are so rarely seen by human eyes. The intelligence of the bees to produce such sound and creative architecture in darkness is a wonder. Tiers of brood chambers, honey pots, pollen chambers, and a network of highways ramping within alluded to the bees' high degree of evolution. They are eusocial, meaning they cooperate impeccably, as each hive is viewed as a single organism. Such an organism falls under the natural laws of reproduction, which is just what we came out that day to do.

Call us ecological explorers, but I'd say we were just being resourceful. We took the nursery of the hive, the place most likely to contain the queen, and placed it in a bee box, along with some honeypots for food. We closed the box back up, sealed until the day when we access the hive again without the need for handsaws or chisels. We harvested a little bit of honey, but left most of it for the bees. Then, we took the bees and their box back to our newly renovated bee barn. They promptly began building a new pipette for their hive, an indication that the queen was leading the bees in their business as usual.

The bee box is currently surrounded by dozens, if not 100's, of flowering plants. From herbaceous ground covers and ornamentals, to the bananas, fruit trees, and forests, the abundance of resources for bees is obvious. Within a few hours, new honey pots had already appeared inside the box. Bees are industrious little creatures, and their presence works with mutual benefit to the health of our orchard spaces. Many flowering trees produce more flowers when there is a greater chance of pollination. More flowers means more fruits, and more fruits means we can maintain a sovereign food system. More fruit means our kitchen is stocked with pejibayes, coconuts, water apples, and biribas, and so many more fruits whose pollination I have yet to witness.

Call us resourceful, but I'd say we're just propagating life. This summer, the Ranch is approaching bee propagation from a new angle. We are building boxes from wood or bamboo that can serve as bee hives. When a bit of wax and propolis from an old hive are speared around the box, new queen bees are enticed to start building their colonies inside. The bee barn is decked out with one new bee hive, soon to be many more, if the queen capturing season is successful. The next few months classify the beginning of swarming season, so lone queens will be on the search for cavities. The queens will go on to produce workers, and the workers will pollinate trees, and the trees will produce fruits, and the nectar and pollen will produce more bees, and the fruits will be laden with seeds to grow more trees. And while all of this is happening, we humans will look onward with fascination, here and there harvesting fruits and honey, all the while taking notes on what it means to be a part of such an effective, cooperative community.

Call us vandals, call us robbers. Call us ecological explorers, or life propagators, or just curious creatures. I think we are just working harmoniously with the systems of our planet, and through our work, becoming more aware of how we impact the living environment. 

Dorothy Farrell

News and Notes

We have a number of amazing workshops coming up.

• Permaculture Design Certification--April 17th to May 1st

• The Art and Practice of Live Culture Fermentation--May 10th to 13th

• Wilderness First Responder--June 8th to 17th

• Sustainable Homestead Design--June 22nd to 26th

 We rely on all of the amazing ambassadors of our project to spread the word; if you know of anyone who needs a life changing experience, send them to one of our classes!

Abrazos,

The Ranch Crew

Re-plastering: What will be unveiled?

On the building list, one of our goals is to correctly re-plaster old structures to enhance their look and highlight our unique architecture. Over the last couple years we have slowly been giving our old structures new face lifts. Using lime plaster techniques that we have been learning, practicing and perfecting, we have transformed various run down plasters into beautiful canvases of art.

This process of remodeling never fails to reveal a variety of problems and headaches. We have learned that you never know what will be exposed once you start to take apart a wall for re-plastering and patching. So, as we have been going back to old structures to prepare for a face-lift we have encountered many different troubles due to past techniques.

In order to apply a new lime plaster you must remove all material from the wall that seems loose or may not allow the lime to adhere well. This is done by chiseling off old plaster materials, which can lead to more of the wall falling apart than planned. Once you’ve taken off the old materials you must go back and fill in the gaps created in this process; which can be a lot of gaps! The quality of the original wall is a big determining factor in how quickly (or not so quickly) this whole process will take. Therefore determining the amount of time a project will take is extremely difficult; you can make an estimated guess, but depending on what you uncover the estimate can change drastically. As in any remodeling job you just never know.

You can tell the difference between the walls that were built patiently with skill to those hurried by the physical amount of material falling off. There are a variety of reasons why there is so much variation in the quality of our walls, but we believe it is mostly due to the transient workforce that was utilised to build many of these structures. High school groups, short term volunteers, and so forth have built much of our campus. Lessons learned during one construction project were not always carried over to the next due to this lack of consistency. It resulted in a huge variety of quality and decisions were made that in reflection were not the best.

During our long evolution we have tried many different earth building methods, mixtures, materials, and tricks with varied success. For example, our previous wattle and daub methods used little bamboo wattle support meaning that the earth mixture didn’t have enough support and the walls ended up being a little wobbly. Now we have moved to weaving many bamboo strips between the uprights, spacing them about one half inch apart rather than a few inches. Our earth mixture has changed through the years as well, experimenting with the ratios of clay to sand, the additions of manure, different straws, and other materials that we were told would make the mix better. We went through a phase of adding manure to our earth mixes and applying a “poo schmer” as a plaster. Looking back the additions of manure possibly led to a weaker final mix and the schmer although an effective plaster was not ultimately what we wanted aesthetically. It has since proven difficult to remove in order to apply a finish that we actually want. We didn’t realize the importance of compressing the edges of your walls, which have resulted in cracks around the edges of our wattle and daub panels; or the importance of bridging between two different materials (eg. wood to be covered by earth).

Over the years there have been many different techniques used and we believe for the moment that we have developed the mixes, techniques, and materials that get the job done efficiently and create great looking walls and structures. Among other plastering projects the main one for this year is to re-plaster the Casucha inside and out, using a method called “poor man's” tadelakt on the inside and a sponge floated exterior. Stay tuned for pictures of the finish!

Ali O​