Costa Rica’s two seasons: mud and dust

You mean I gotta take another bath!?

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When I lived in the USA, I was always conscious of what month it was because each month in the northeast is for me strongly associated with a certain weather pattern.

In Costa Rica, although I am rarely sure what month it is, I do know which season it is. It’s so obvious. Costa Rica only has two seasons: mud and dust.

The mud season. For eight months of the year, I walk out the door and put on my rubber boots (after shaking them in case something crawled in there during the night). Unlike when we lived in the USA, I don’t check outside to see how many layers to wear. Temperature really doesn’t change that much year round, so what you wear is pretty much the same everyday, except for what you put on your feet.

When the rainy season starts, we generally have two weeks of sogginess. There is daily rain, sometimes very heavy and at times with lightening. We get the same thing when the rainy season ends. During the rest of the seven months, at the Monte Cristo plantation where we live, generally there is a big rain twice a day, at about 4:00 in the morning and again in the afternoon. Inside the La Garita plantation, the rain comes every other day. This would seem to make for better living conditions at La Garita, but it really doesn’t, because the sunny day heats the soil, and the previous day’s rain creates a sauna. For living, I prefer a daily rain, but the trees don’t care.

The dust season. Activities change drastically during the dry season. We have more visitors and it is easier to do changes to infrastructure, like road and bridge building, etc. Construction is much, much easier when you aren’t ankle deep, or more, in mud. You can nearly double your time in construction if you do it during the wet season compared to the dry.

One very nice thing about the dry season is it coincides with the coolest time of the year. So the increased sun is offset by the cool winds that come from the North.

When the temperature may vary no more than 10 degrees Farenheit for the entire year, even a change of 5 degrees seems like a lot. So we all act like we’re freezing any time we have to put on socks.

The dry season is great for swimming in our river, as the water is low and crystal clear. Not so good for fishing though. A rain makes the water a little more murky and so helps hide me from the fish. Most of the Ticos go fishing during the dry season because there are places that are accessible no other time of the year except by horse.

We do the heavy pruning of the trees in the dry season. Mainly because bark is slippery and when we are pruning large trees, it is important that nothing is moving around.  We can prune for form all year round.

This is good because the grass isn’t growing as much, so workers who would have been working at keeping the grass cleared around the trees can switch to pruning.

For tree owners, the best time to visit is during the dry season, which is also peak tourist time. This is because getting into the plantations is much easier. During the dry season, we can almost drive up to the individual trees. Otherwise, it can require quite a walk to get to the trees.

For riding a mountain bike, I prefer the rainy season, but after things have dried just a little. Just enough to keep the dust down, but not so much that all the rock is loose. One really nice thing about the dry season is you can ride on the pure dirt roads, which are nearly impassible even with a bike for much of the year. They come through with a grader and clean them up during the beginning of the dry season, giving a great opportunity to ride on hard-packed dry clay.

The truth is, I like both seasons. And the end of each, I am eager for the next. When the dust is everywhere, a nice rain is very welcome, and when you can’t seem to find a dry place anywhere, three months of no rain cures that feeling very well indeed.

Posted in clothes, cycling, finca, forestry, mud, nursery, roads, tree owners, trees | No Comments »

My ATV is in the field eating grass.

One of the things I learned along the way is the difference between an asset and a liability: Assets make money, liabilities eat money. My family used to tease me that even my hobbies were profitable (or at least broke even). If I went fishing, you could pretty much count on me bringing home a nice mess of perch or panfish for eating.

Recently I was asked if I was interested in selling our old ATV. It was being used almost every day, but it got me thinking, “Why do I have this since I have other modes of transportation?” Back when we bought it used, it was important for hauling seedlings into the farms, but since then we have grown to the point of using a tractor so we can haul up to three thousand seedlings at a time. I was using the ATV to get back and forth between the office and the farms, but I also have a motorcycle that is better and cheaper for that purpose.

So I bargained to swap the ATV for five milk cows with their calves. Our caretaker wants to milk the cows and can cut the grass for them inside our farm with a scythe. I get the manure for the nursery and our garden, and he pays off the cows with his income from making the milk into cheese.

So, the ATV has gone from being a liability that needs repairs to an asset that makes cheese. Just as long as I am not the person who has to milk it in the mornings, I am happy!

Posted in bargaining, business in Costa Rica, nursery, scythe | No Comments »

There is more than one way to get a seedling

Here in Costa Rica, there are about 2,000 different kinds of trees, at least 150 of them are good for lumber. You would think seeds would be easy to get.

Nope, not at all. Generally when we try to order seeds, we find 4 or 5 different types readily available. These would be teak, gmelina, mahogany, cocobolo, and acacia. Everything else is fairly unpredictable.

I personally am not fond of monocrop plantations. They are not very interesting and for native species, not very good. Native trees grow better mixed — like in nature.

The majority of the rare trees we plant are from seeds that we collect within our plantations. This year, the only way we were able to find almendro was from our own trees. All of our cebo was from our own trees as well. A big bonus this year was finding balsamo, a very rare tree with wood as valuable (if not moreso) than cocobolo.

When we first arrived in Costa Rica, I thought to grow trees would be as easy as calling up a tree nursery, ordering the seedlings, and planting them when they arrived. I figured some day we would have a nursery, but just because of volume. The truth is, the only way that we could get the seedlings we needed was to have our own nursery. Nothing else worked reliably.

I am sure it is frustrating for some of our clients that in January they might order, say, 500 cristobal trees and I have to say, “It depends on if there are seeds.” This really emphasizes that what we are doing is working in an area that requires the cooperation of nature, and nature at times will decide that this is not a good year to produce certain seeds.

A good example is our mango trees on our property this year. I was starting to wonder if the mango trees we had actually did produce fruit, because for two years there was none. But this year they more than made up for it and there were mangos everywhere! The same thing is true for seeds we need in the plantations — we can’t just plant whatever we would like, because at times, Mother Nature doesn’t give us any seeds.

Another thing we often do is collect seedlings, or as they are called in the USA, wildlings. Currently in the plantation where we live, there are lots and lots of seedlings that have sprouted in the last month or so. We will go out and carefully extract them from the ground and put into bags, to plant inside the farms. Often, these are the best possible seedlings because they have already shown their vigour in surviving.

Aside from the very popular plantation trees, we never know exactly what we are doing to have to plant, but, that keeps it interesting.

Posted in acacia, campo, cebo, finca, forest, forestry, mahogany, nursery, seedlings, teak, tree owners, trees, wood | No Comments »

What’s in a name?

After living in Costa Rica for nearly 4 years, I am finding that I am turning bilingual. Not like Amy who can speak English and Spanish very well - I have enough problems with English. This is not to say that I can’t communicate well in Spanish, I do, it is just I mangle it at times.

When I say I am turning bilingual, I mean that there are words that between English and Spanish, I select the one from one language or the other, depending on the concept I am trying to express, even though they both, in theory, mean the same.

A good example is months of the year. July means hot, dusty, Fourth of July - grass dying, daylight until 9 pm, etc. Julio (Spanish for July) means planting seasons, mud, everything super green, well into the rainy season with no sign of dry for the next 6 months. If I say that it is July now, my brain gets seriously confused. Darkness here is at 6 pm and we have roughly 12 hours of daylight. That should be March, but no, it is too warm. Much easier for me to think, it is julio now.

Another word is nursery, as in our tree nursery. My family had nurseries in the USA, and a nursery is something with a plastic over it and a source of heat so you can start plants early while there is still threat of frost. Excuse me? Costa Rica doesn’t even use the word for frost, unless maybe it is referring to what builds up inside the freezer.  What we have here is a vivero, where you put up shading material so that the new seedlings aren’t cooked by the sun, even during the rainy season. Also, since we tend to start the seedlings during the dry season, a water supply is important - and there is no need to worry about heat, except perhaps heat stroke!

One last example is when we are talking about measurements of wood. The standard measurement here is a pulgada cubica (cubic inch) which doesn’t mean a square inch like in English. It is 132 square inches. Usually, in the USA we are used to using board foot (BF), which is 144 square inches. The reason is that a pulgada cubica (usually just said pulgada) is 1 inch by 1 inch by 4 varas. What is a vara you say? It is 33 inches. So, 4 x 33 = 132.  A curiosity is that they used to use varas for measuring land in Texas.  So, I think readily in pulgadas now - which is a good thing because it is how you buy wood here.  You can imagine the confusion when people first start dealing with wood here and someone says that it is 1 dollar per cubic inch!

Before we moved to Costa Rica, I was talking to a little girl whose parents were North American and Costa Rican. She had two sets of grandparents, one who was English speaking, the other who spoke Spanish. She was completely bilingual. Once while making conversation in Spanish, I asked her about her abuelos (grandparents) in California. She told me she had no abuelos in California, only grandparents.  In her mind, the parents of her tico father were the only abuelos she had, the others where grandparents. At the time I was amazed, but now I am starting to understand.

Posted in Spanish, business in Costa Rica, communications, cultural adaptation, language learning, nursery, trees, wood | No Comments »

A Long Day

Yesterday wasn’t particularly exceptional and that is the scary thing. Because I don’t punch a clock, I often don’t think about how many hours I work. As I was reviewing what to write today, it occured to me just how many things happened yesterday.

Usually I’m awake by 3:30 or 4:00, but yesterday the day started at 2:00 AM. I tend not to sleep very long — it runs in the family. So, when I wake up, I just get up and work. If I need a nap later in the day, I take one. Predawn is a good time to connect with people in other parts of the world. We have a distributor in England, so  it is the best time to call. Usually around 4:00 or so Amy will wake up, and this is our time before the day starts in earnest. Our general manager has been known to show up as early as 4:30 to talk about the day, since he knows we are awake.

I also like to take the earliest part of the day to do research and learn things. If I learn something early in the morning, I tend to remember it much better than later in the day, although I never have much of a problem remembering things.

Back to yesterday. At 6:00 we needed to go up to our Monte Cristo plantation where our house and furniture factory are. Amy needed to meet with construction and woodworking. I needed to meet with tree nursery and wood harvesting. We returned to the office at 8:00. We are currently living at the office because our house is being finished. Between 8:00 and noon I worked on an order for decking and on learning Sketchup for doing drawings of projects.

At noon, I  took visitors to one our first plantation. Some of our earliest tree owners came to visit us and see their trees. They were amazed at the size of the trees and how much they had grown in the last year. One of these visitors is a good test point for us, because they have their own trees on their own property and also have us growing some trees for them. They have told us that it is cheaper just paying us to grow the trees.

I got back to the house about 5:00 pm and caught up on emails and forums. About 6:00 pm one of our contract forestry engineers showed up to talk to Amy about the residency laws as they relate to forestry. We have a potential buyer who wished to use an investment in reforestation as a way to get residency. Unfortunately, everything is up in the air now so there is nothing concrete that can be said. I had several other things to discuss with him, including explaining our project of plantation to permanent rainforest. It took a while for him to get it. As he said, no one is doing this here, although he knew that it is done in other countries. I will meet with MINAE to explain our long term goals. It thrills me to know that my Spanish is now at the point that this will not be too difficult.

I finally finished the day at 7:00 pm and tried to stay awake. I fell asleep about 8:00 pm. This morning I slept in until 3:00.

Posted in finca, nursery, tree owners, trees, wood | No Comments »

Getting ready for planting season

Although we start planting in July, for us the planting season starts in February. This is because we have our own nursery. We get most of our seeds from CATIE but also many come from our own forest. This year, almendro trees we planted 2 1/2 years ago are producing seeds. This is really remarkable when you think about it. These trees are a good 15 feet tall or more and the wood is harder than oak. Very resistant to termites too. Almendro is a very important wood ecologically because it is needed by the Great Green Maccaw.

The nursery currently has nearly 20,000 cebo in it and a few leftovers from last year of other species (probably 10 or more different types).

The nursery crew tends to be women mostly - there isn’t a lot of work in the campo (countryside) for women, and women really do much better than men caring for the seedlings. It works very well since they help in the nursery growing the seedlings and then they help planting. The men do the heavy work, the women do the delicate work. Often this allows families to work together.

Posted in Great Green Maccaw, almendro, cebo, nursery | 2 Comments »