A Plethora of Primarily Productive Pictures

Due to my delinquent posting behavior (none for a week and a half), I have accumulated oodles of photos.

A week ago Friday, we went to a Haitian restaurant to celebrate one of the interns' birthday. We had meat and vegetables (we don't know what kind, although the other options besides "meat and veggies" was ox tail, goat, and possibly cow foot?) with red beans and rice, with fried plantains. The food was fairly tasty, as long as you didn't think about what exactly you were eating. It's rather greasy, though--I don't think I'd like to eat it all the time.


Jumping ahead one week to last Friday, I helped tame the rainforest! Well, I laid down mulch in the rainforest demo area, at least. We weeded, laid down cardboard or several sheets of newspaper on top of the soil (to keep the weeds from coming back), and spread pine mulch on top of that. This shows some of the area we were mulching. You can see the newspaper on the left.


In addition to pulling weeds, we also found a snake! The rainforest intern really likes reptiles, and when he saw this black racer, he caught it. It was pretty small and the two work-team members held it. I declined and instead took a picture for you all . . .



Remember that cute little peanut plant I showed you? Well, here I am watering those peanuts. They're for a variety trial, so last week the Monsoon area intern and I worked on transplanting seedlings into spots where the peanuts didn't germinate so that germination rates for the seeds (which can vary by age, harvest, etc) will not affect the trial.

Here I'm picking tomatoes for that variety trial I've been telling you about. The plants are pretty decrepit-looking right now; fried by the summer sun and drowned by the torrential rains. The ones I'm picking from looked fairly healthy. At the top left corner you can check out the cowpea variety trial right next to the tomatoes. Those plants are going crazy! Apparently they use some varieties of cowpeas/beans simply for ground cover. I see why--I've untangled cowpea vines that were no less than six feet long.


This is Rachel, the intern in charge of the variety trial. We spend about half of the time picking tomatoes and the rest sorting and weighing tomatoes. As the plants get worse and worse, the amount of "unmarketable" tomatoes (with cracks, bugs, or blights) gets larger as well. We always stink up the place we sort the tomatoes!



Part of the evaluation of the tomatoes is a taste test. This week we recruited interns and ECHO staff to participate in a taste test, ranking each of the six varieties with comments as to their merits/drawbacks. This week we picked 12kg of tomatoes, roughy half being "marketable." The amount shown in the picture is probably about half to a third of the harvest this time. Rachel has been canning tomato sauce and juice, and I have made copius amounts of salsa! (Quite tasty!)
Tonight we're having an 80s-themed goodbye party for a family who has been living at ECHO. The father was an intern last year and has stayed on, helping with the nursery, the mother gives tours and helps out in the nursery as well, and their two boys have had a blast carousing around the ECHO farm. One hard thing about ECHO is that people come and go a lot, which means that it's hard to have long-term relationships with people. There are quite a few staff and volunteers that will be here for many years to come, but the interns only stay for a year, and a lot of the staff is young and the strong missions vibe here means that they are often only staying here until they go to Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Kenya, etc. I think I'll be glad to go somewhere where I know the people I'm seeing now will be there 3 months from now.