The farm report:

aayiiiyiiyii its a miracle! Plants here grow when you simply put sticks in the ground...I am watching this happen with bougainvillea (in six colors!) orchids, Brazilian red colak, saragundi, sugar cane, dracenas and a bunch of other stuff

I have been cleaning, weeding, adding fertilizer (broken down coffee refuse, chicken and cow poo, worm casting soil) and moving dirt to fill holes, create beds, and start new things. Its a lot of work, and I think I may never have truly clean feet again in my life, but the upside is eating lots of fresh veggies and fruit I am growing. There has not been a week without bananas since I moved here, and the racks just keep coming...

Still have to work within reach of the hoses, because even though we are getting some rain, its not happening every day or nearly enough yet, and things that can't get daily water will dry and die.

This week, I put in about 12 baby papaya trees, 8 passion fruit vines, 3 cashew trees and some pitanga (sour Surinam cherry – yummy for pies and juices) and am contentedly watching my first two pineapples and 8 eggplants growing! I am also doing a lot of transplanting, as things get too large for the greenhouse. Blooming right now are some terrestrial orchids, some purple things and gardenias - it's starting to look like a garden around the house. I also had a heavenly treat, with a night blooming cerius that went into bloom last Friday. If you have not seen and smelled this flower in real life, let me tell you, it is something spectacularly amazing even to non plant lovers...When I lived in Philadelphia in a previous life, people would have parties and open champagne when theirs went into bloom.

I have enlarged my “family” - besides the now hundreds of earthworms very happily chewing up my fruit and vegetable refuse and gifting me with primo fertilizer, I now have three hens to feed and care for. They produce eggs and fertilizer. The girls are named Little, Noodle and Funky. Noodle is the tan one, who at present is the only one laying. She is also the Houdini of the bunch, she escaped at dusk the other night, to sleep in a tree. I keep them confined to a hen house, since I don't want them scratching around in my baby plants and pooping in the house. We (friend Veronica and I) worked her back towards the hen house, where we were able to finally catch her by dropping a small blanket over her when she hid in the beans. For a while there, it was a humbling experience, feeling outsmarted by a chicken!

On my right brained side, there are the English classes I am teaching. One group is total beginners, (What is your name? How are you? Do you like apples? Nice to meet you!) and the other is low level intermediates, or advanced beginners. This group had a picnic Saturday, since we had a lesson about picnics and foods. It was fun, and culturally instructive for me...boys wait to be served, and “help yourself” is truly a foreign concept...

When I 'm done for the day after my gardening workout (hey, you try swinging a hoe or moving 20 wheelbarrow loads in 2 hours and tell me how you like it!) I plop into one of the hammocks with a fresh fruit juice and a book, and am quickly toast or in afternoon nap land.

At night, as I write this, all I hear are the night insects and the occasional chattering of the iguana who helps with insect control in the house. Occasionally there is a car or motorcycle, a dog barking or someone's music. A funny thing that happens here is people play their stereos really loud when they are having sex. (So the neighbors don't hear?) So every once in a while, the music will go on loud enough to hear it, but it usually only lasts about five minutes...