Happy New YEAR!!!! Feliz año nuevo!!!

Greetings all,

2009 is in the house. Here at Bona Fide we are really looking forward to delving into creative projects and growth for this year.

Holiday celebrations were excellent, Bona Fide staff and volunteers participated in a holiday gathering of folk from 10 nations where we ate a mountain of local foods, drank cold beer and sang Spanish Christmas songs into the wee hours. Thanks to all who participated and to all the abundance we shared.

The last 2 weeks have been fairly quiet with many folks going on short vacations and respites before the busy 2009 winter schedule of courses and hosting groups begins. Tom and Eira fell in love with the magic of the Laguna de Apoyo and I managed to drag myself away from working on my house long enough to get out to a beach for lots of swimming and a much needed recharge of ocean salts, beachfires, and good friends. We said good bye for a spell to a few long term volunteers who will return soon and bid good bye to Natasha who helped us so much down at the ‘El Centro.’ community center.

I wanted to share a few images of BF life here with folks:

Please enjoy my recently finished circular wood floor over a 6000 gallon water catchment/cooling element cistern.

OUR FIRST CACAO HARVEST has begun, we may only get a dozen pods or so but our original dreams and visions of ORGANIC BF cacao are becoming real before our eyes. THANKS to all the local folks/volunteers who have maintained these systems so that now we can all enjoy their fruits.

Corn and other grains are featured again this week as we learn little by little about the struggles and trucos of preserving grain in the monsoon tropics. Kudos to all helping keep our corn free from buggies!

And finally a solo image of bamboo, one of our most mature clumps, well maintained and ready to be sustainably harvested for building material for our natural building research.

Hope 2009 is great for EVERYONE,

Chris Shanks
Co-director, Project Bona Fide

Tomatoes_and_rice

Hey all,

Greetings from BF land down under here on the 11th parallel. This week saw the start of our tropic tomato experiment co-ordinated with the Escuela de Campo, Chris’ research and our crack cadre of interns. Our hunger for fresh organic tomatoes, and cracking the nut of organic cultivation here in the tropics continues, meanwhile we will sate ourselves on hot chiles and dreams of gazpacho…

This week also ushers in DRYING TIME for our organic rice harvest, looks like we will have about 250 pounds of rice from the farm for the farm. We also harvested about 40 pounds of BF coffee this last week. We will choose the best coffee berries and sow this in the nursery to start an shade grown coffee effort here for home scale consumption on the farm.

Congrats to Tom, Amory, Norman and all other involved in erecting our long term volunteer housing, or the ‘Love Shack’ as we have dubbed it. All the wood is from BF land, sustainably harvested and processed here mostly with hand tools. The bamboo roof and thatch is also from BF or locally sources. Nice work gents.

Hope everyone celebrates a great holiday with friends and family,

Chris Shanks

First Workshop of the 3rd EdC Season

Greetings all,

This past week saw the beginning of the third year of the Escuela de Campo, founded by Andrea Calfuquir and staffed with great folks like Mai Kobaiyashi, Katherine Young, and Hannah Roessler over the last two years. This season we have a new crop of interns and a mixed crop (in terms of experience) of EDC students from the village, both from years past and new to the work. Nevis is in his third year and he is leading the garden team, putting volunteers to work and co-ordinating with Jackie Pitts. Maria will head up the nursery with Ashley Carter as well. Karen and Aleida will be the medicinal plants and preparation team and all three groups will meet weekly to do group work, have meetings, and share experiences. Just this last Saturday we had Juan Jose Calero from the Masatepe region of Nicaragua come out and teach a group of close to 20 folks a workshop on plant propagation and grafting. The workshop was open to the general public and was well attended.

The garden is shaping up nicely and we are gearing up for our 4th season gardening here, learning daily and reaping the harvest. We will post some green garden shots next week!

Last Monday we managed to get the 3rd part of the playground in, our new swing-set, we are just awaiting the slide and in true Nica style what was promised weeks ago is still in the ‘manaña’ stage of delivery (you have to come here and live this place to understand this)
Thanks to David Ortiz and Vienel and Hector for the help with installation.

Well, we are gearing up for the holidays here, bulls to catch, drunk people to step over, and LOTS of fireworks, HURRAH!.

Be well all,

Chris