Mountain Intern Blog

I work on an educational/experimental farm run by a non-profit organization.

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Roselle: a member of the hibiscus family. You can harvest and eat the calices (red things seen pictured) encasing its seed pod. Many people press/juice these things for a drink flavoring.

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Cuban tree frog hiding in a star fruit. Just another day at the office.

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Found this little fella eating my corn this morning. To spray bacillus thuringensis (bt) which is an incredibly mild pesticide (one that is actually considered organic), you have to wear long sleeves, pants, waterproof boots and socks, a breathing filter and eye protection. Then you can’t return to the field for 4 hours. It’s required by OSHA or some other regulatory agency. That’s for a MILD pesticide, which is actually just a bacteria that kills caterpillars. And keep in mind that these ARE butterfly caterpillars. These are natural pollinators. But they’re killing my plants and I have a job. Back to my tirade. There are chemicals on the market that you can’t return to the field for 12 to 24 hours after application because of how carcinogenic they are, and you have to wear a tyvek hazmat suit to apply. And this is what people spray on their food before it hits the grocery store.

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Humperdinck is a 6 week old guinea hog who hates the world.

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Early morning goat rompings. Kids. Gotta love em.

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Early morning goat rompings. Kids. Gotta love em.

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Mr. Bacon got some baby Guinea hog friends. These will eventually go out to the field, but right now they're too small. I really thought he was going to eat them.

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This is a SALT (sloping agricultural land technique) terrace that I am cultivating, half in green dent corn and half in sweet sorghum (which you can use to make molasses). You can see what it looked like when the cover crops were dominating it. We planted Mucuna puriens, a type of legume to cover it. This choked out all the weeds and grasses while fixing nitrogen in the soil. You may be noticing a nitrogen fixing theme in these posts. It's really essential to growing healthy plants.  I had two volunteers help me who came down as part of a work team from Washington, D.C. The other two are Dave and Alston. These are my most consistent and hard working volunteers. Just missing Ariel, who hasn’t been able to come in a couple weeks. These guys want to start a permaculture farm/homestead. Real cool gents. Anyway, we will be using this plot to compare the nutritive benefits of growing with rabbit manure as a soil conditioner vs. compost vs. synthetic fertilizer. It will be fun to see what happens. Probably rabbit manure will not do everything we hope, but it’s more sustainable so here’s hoping!

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Baby goats!!!! (Hours old)

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Sugar apples are native to places like this, the tropical Americas and W. Indies. It's the fruit of Annona squamosa. They taste like the most delicious pear you've ever eaten, and they have a similar texture.

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It turns out convincing a 220 pound animal to climb steps for the first time is easier said than done. Mr. Bacon Tiger arrived today. The pig pen we have been building for the past 4 months completed, he found his new home of compost and rice hulls to sleep on prepared for him, and settled in nicely once he got over the initial trauma of walking 20 yards. Poor guy almost had a heart attack

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The 3 week old babies are starting to eat solid food! Baby rabbits pack on the pounds. In their first 4-6 weeks they will grow approximately 8 times their birth weight.

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Plant Profile:

This is a naranjilla, pronounced Nar-ahn-HEE-ya. It's related to tomatoes, but it tastes kind of like a kiwi-orange. The juicy green flesh is really good combined with mildly flavored meats like chicken, in salsa, squeezed fresh on salad, or eaten outright. Like most Solanaceous plants ("from the plant family Solanaceae"), it is pretty acidic. The plants can live in partial shade or direct sun, and you can see their broad leaves are characteristic of the family in shape, if not size. You may also notice the little fuzzies on it. If Satan trims his beard in the morning, he sprinkles the leftover bits on naranjilla fruit. Those suckers will itch you til the day you shower or die. Whichever one comes first. Which is a closer competition than you might think around here. 

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Just some cuteness to brighten up your day. 

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So far this morning I’ve had fire ants, wingless wasps, ticks, and stink bugs crawling on me in various places (some of which do not bear mentioning). I was happy to look down and see this guy instead.

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This is Part Two of FFF planting. Our crops were corn and jack bean. We intercropped them so the jack bean could support the corn by building the soil's fertility, and so the corn could support the jack bean with something to grow on. Hopefully they will grow up together and the corn will outpace the jack bean. When we are a few weeks out from fruiting, we will cut back the jack bean so its roots release nitrogen into the soil. This will also help to keep it from competing for nutrients against the corn as it sets fruit. This is a method that we are testing and developing for use in East Africa in order to increase maize yield. The hope is that what we lose in terms of plant number by intercropping with beans, we will make up for in the fertility of the corn that we have planted. So if a corn plant would yield one ear normally, we hope that with the jack bean, it would yield two or have twice as much on that one ear, and/or have a higher chance of survival during the rainy season. I could not be more grateful to these guys for helping me with this project. It's such a major burden to plant your crops, and you really begin to understand the need for community in the developing areas of the world.