Day Four -- Sustainable Eco-Tour

Warning: This post is long, but only because of the pictures. Enjoy!

(Ali in the restaurant/community center having an after breakfast cup of coffee.)

After yoga, Ali and I showered and ate breakfast. It's amazing how many times a day we change our clothes and shower here. What's even more astounding is that despite sweating through entire shirts, if we hang them on the porch, they dry and aren't stinky. We can re-wear them the next day. Miraculous.

We wandered down to Lisa's place, as she was going to guide us on the eco-tour and waterfall hike (pictures from the hike will be in a different posting). She's been incubating eggs for the farm in her living room. Two had hatched the day before, and were already out of the incubator. The chicks need to stay in the incubator after hatching for twenty-four hours, or at least until there feathers are all dry.

Before I take you on our eco-tour, let me explain briefly about the food production here at Osa Mountain Village. Their goal is 100% food security for all the residents. There are thousands of fruit trees, several tilapia ponds, and multiple gardens. The residents leave a basket with their name on it in the community center, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the baskets are filled with all the harvest the Tico workers have collected from the farm and gardens. Any leftovers are just left on the table for anyone to pick up. While I was there, I saw a big bucket of chicken eggs just for the taking.

Another thing that Osa Mountain Village does is embrace edible landscaping -- whether it's mint planted in a container at the bar, or chard planted underneath the shade of papaya trees. 

On to the eco-tour:

 You must always carry a walking stick, and a machete. Residents here can harvest anything they want, whenever they want. Here Lisa is cutting up a cuadrado. They are kind of like a mealy banana. But bigger. Yummy in smoothies and on your morning yogurt.

Banana plants grow way tall -- and are often confused with trees. They grow one (not sure on that) bunch of bananas, and when it's harvested, the plant dies and falls over. A new one grows among the mulch of the old one, and the cycle begins again. If, however, you want to plant one in a different place, you cut up the stalk of the banana plant that died, and plant that where you want a new one to grow. The new plant grows out of the old base. (I will check with Lisa to see if I remembered this correctly.)

(Ali picking a limon dulce -- sweet lemon.)

Chickens! 

(Flaka means skinny in Spanish. She's taking the lead here.)

(Beans amend the soil and make great ground cover. They are also a main staple for this region.)

(Even though harvesting amaranth seeds and processing them by hand into flour is uber labor intensive, and frankly no one does that here at OMV, they sure make pretty purple plants.)

(Some of the gardens here at OMV.)

(Lots of people think pineapples -- pina in Spanish -- grow on trees, but they don't.)

(Lisa and the medicinal herbal garden.)

(Jim, his dad, and Christian netting fish out of one of the tilapia ponds.)

(This is the freezer/fridge for the chickens and the goat milk collected for the residents.)

(Ali with the sugar cane press.)

(These are the laying hens.)

(Residents voted to raise rabbits for meat.)

(More gardens!)

(This is Charlotte. She was slaughtered the day after this picture was taken, and we are eating her tomorrow.)

The next post will be a combination of photos from two separate days of waterfall hiking.

Pura Vida.