Project Bona Fide

The Jackfruit Manifesto

2012-01-26T21:58:00.008-06:00

Jackfruit, Artocarpus heterophyllus, is one of the most successful and strangest plants at Project Bona Fide. Jackfruit is the archetypal Permaculture Rock Star - a term I once overheard Chris using on a tour. Permaculture Rock Stars are multi-purpose crops that meet a wide range of human needs, are resilient, require minimal maintenance and provide environmental services. Jackfruit typifies this: it is a tree crop while a thousand uses, makes it through five month dry season, grows and produces rapidly, and helps out the overall system.

There has been an incredible amount of research, experimentation, and learning that has been done at the Finca over the past 10 years, but much of it only remains available to people that visit the site. This series of blogs is an attempt to rectify that - to share the best, most productive plants and trees we have found with all of you, for others farming in Nicaragua, for people farming in similar climates around the globe, or just for inspiration. Since I spend most my time at the Finca these days climbing, harvesting, processing, and getting covered in jackfruit, and having been named Jackfruit Jim, I figure it’s a good tree to start with.

The Tree

Jackfruit is a weird tree. I don’t know what evolutionary process or Hindu god dreamt it up, but it really shouldn’t exist. The fruit looks weird: it’s a large oval up to three feet long with a thick, green or yellow skin covered in small spikes. These fruits can weigh up to 110 lbs, making it the world’s largest tree fruit. The tree bears fruit on its stems, so you’ll often see two or three feet long fruit hanging directly off of a tree’s trunk.

Jackfruit tastes weird: its flavor was the original taste base for Juicyfruit. People either love it or hate it. But it can do an amazing variety of things. Its flesh, seeds, leaves, and flowers are all edible and used in a thousand different ways. Animals love all parts of it. The wood is prized for musical instruments in the Phillipines, and also produces a dye that gives Buddhist monks’ robes their distinctive orange color.

Originating the rainforests of Malaysia and India, jackfruit trees are medium-sized trees, 25 to 85 feet in height. They can be grafted, and many specific cultivars are, but ours are all grown from seed. All of ours are grown incredibly fast from seed - up to 2 meters per year - and incredibly easily from seed: planted in bags in our nursery, jackfruit seedlings are nurtured and watered for one year before outplanting. After that, we sort of ignore it and let it do its thing.

Liz with Jackfruit

We have a 5 month dry season here on Isla Ometepe. This is our biggest limiting factor in plant growth and species selection. Lacking water pressure for an extensive irrigation system, we need trees that do not need much water for five month periods, that are supremely drought-tolerant. Jackfruit is this to the extreme. We outplant seedlings at the start of the wet season, and give them a few buckets of water over the following dry season to help them establish. After that, we never irrigate them. Even in their second year in the ground, they can make through the 5 month dry season without damage. In fact, they seem to thrive with it.

And while they need to be weeded monthly for the first year or three, jackfruit trees, within 5 years, get big enough and drop enough leaf litter to shade out and suppress surrounding weeds. Thus, we don’t really need to weed or mulch the trees - they do it themselves. Intercropping jackfruit with nitrogen-fixing trees that are regularly pruned and mulched supplies the tree with all the nutrients it needs.

Right now, the only labor necessary in our 6 year old jackfruit orchard is harvesting and processing. We have to climb trees and find ripe fruits before the hurrakas do. And then we have to process them - separating good flesh, bad flesh, seeds, skin and core from each other, and boiling and peeling the seeds before using fruit and seed in an infinite array of manners. Its a labor intensive process, but we get lessons from the best:

The Thousand Uses of Jackfruit

For something that requires such little labor, jackfruit gives us a lot. Jackfruit trees provide pretty much every type of food imaginable. The fruit, ripe and unripe, seeds, leaves, and flowers are all edible. You could make a delicious three course meal using only jackfruit. Seriously - you start with jackfruit seed hummus or falafel, or maybe young leaf and grated jackfruit flower salad. The main course could be either unripe fruit and seed curry, a staple in southern India, or an American might want barbecue unripe jackfruit, as it has a texture resembling meat, with a side of mashed jackfruit, which is incredibly similar to mashed potatoes. And for dessert a cake made of jackfruit seed flour and jackfruit flavor, with a scoop of jackfruit ice cream. After dinner you can take home a jar of jackfruit jam, jelly, or chutney. Maybe dried and candied jackfruit, or a jar of jackfruit seed hummus. At Indian Jackfruit festivals, people share hundreds of different uses and value-added products for jackfruit.

Jackfruit seed hummus and jackfruit seed patties

Unripe jackfruit w/ mole sauce and jackfruit seed falafel

Just look at what the giant fruit can become. It can be a green vegetable or fresh fruit. The seeds can be roasted or turned into a variety of value-added products like hummus. The fresh fruit can become jam and jelly - and because the fruit itself is super sweet and its shell has a large amount of pectin, you can make the entire jam with no other additives. We add some cinnamon and ginger - both of which we grow on the farm.

Jackfruit trees also provide much, much more than food. The leaves and fruit make great livestock, pig, and poultry fodder. The timber is prized for construction, furniture, and musical instruments. The latex can used be used for gum - and the ripe fruit’s flavor is the original basis of Juicyfruit gum, meaning you can make your own Juicyfruit gum just from a jackfruit tree. The wood can also be chipped to produce a orange dye that was used in southeast Asia to give Buddhist monks’ robes their distinctive orange colors. We plan on experimenting with this in our sewing workshop at Mano Amiga.

Jackfruit trees provides many environmental services, increasing the overall health and productivity of a site while providing its diverse yield, if placed properly. With a thick, spreading root system and heavy leaf litter, jackfruit trees can help reduce erosion and run-off, especially on steep slopes. They also make a great windbreak - they can stand up to hurricane force winds with little damage, and because they bear fruit on their stems and not their crowns, they are one of the only fruit trees that can withstand heavy winds without production suffering. This makes one of the only food producing crops that can be used effectively as a windbreak, which is very important for smallholders whose crops suffer wind damage but don’t have the space to grow non-food plants.

Jackfruit Business

As more and more sections of our jackfruit orchard begin to come on line, we are beginning to start a jackfruit microbusiness. The seeds, which need to be boiled and peeled, have a texture and taste similar to chickpeas, and are delicious in hummus, falafel, and curries. We recently launched a jackfruit microbusiness at the Finca]] selling jackfruit seeds to restaurants around Nicaragua. We are experimenting with and perfecting other value-added products: jackfruit jams, curries, chutneys, and dried, candied jackfruit. As we begin large-scale processing at both the Finca and Proyecto Mano Amiga’s commercial kitchen, we can begin streamlining this process and bringing local community members into it.

Jackfruit seed hummus

Right now, we are working on a program to supply trees with value-added processing potential - mango, jackfruit, guava, etc - to local families, who will then sell the fruits directly to Mano Amiga’s processing kitchen. Jackfruit is ideal for this. It requires minimal maintenance and water, making it easy for families to grow, especially since many plots lack water access. The seeds and the fruit, both of which the tree produces abundantly, have high economic potential in value-added products, meaning nothing will go to waste.

Sciency Things

Jackfrut is a tropical and subtropical lowland fruit. It’s found all over the world - ubiquitous in many parts of southeast Asia, it’s also grown extensively in parts of Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, Florida, and Australia, with some found in Mexico. It thrives in areas below 1000 m high, with 1000-3000 mm of annual rainfall, on a wide variety of soils, as long as they don’t become waterlogged. It can even take a light frost (0 C), and can survive extended drought, especially if given some irrigation to help it establish for the first year.

Jackfruit is a medium sized tree, generally 8-25 m tall, and can grow over 1.5 m/year for its first 5 years. As an open-pollinated species, trees grown from seed are very variable in size, shape, and fruit quality. However, many different cultivated varieties exist, and there are generally two main types: one with a thin, mushy, sweet pulp, and another with thick, firm, crisp and less sweet pulp.

Jackfruit trees usually take four to fourteen years to bear fruit, and can keep producing for over one hundred, or even three hundred years. They generally yield between 150 and 250 pounds per tree per year, making it an ideal fruit for subsistence plots. Jackfruit trees are evergreen and respond very well to cutting and pruning. You may need to prune the bottom branches as the tree grows, but besides that, it needs very little labor inputs.

Jackfruit Systems

Jackfruit is used in many different ways at Finca Bona Fide. Our main jackfruit orchard is a developing food forest centered around the fruit. It is intercropped with a variety of other fruit trees, including mangoes, citrus, and bread of life, all of which will form the main canopy layer. In narrow spaces between jackfruit tree crowns, coconut, peach, and thatch palms are planted, so that their narrow crowns will eventually shoot past the jackfruit canopy, receiving all of the sunlight they need while providing little sun competition with the jackfruit trees.

In the more open spaces between trees, shade-tolerant plants, including cacao and kandis, begin to fill in the understory, taking advantage of the shade cast by the jackfruit trees. As the system grows, the bottom layer will be filled with roots including taro, ginger, and tumeric. In order to define paths and utilize the sunlit edges they create, all of paths running throughout the orchard are lined with pitanga bushes, a deliciously sour berry. Fertility for the orchard is supplied on site through a nitrogen-fixing tree coppice system that fills the open spaces between trees, palms and shrubs. While the system is young and still developing, it is on its way to become a functional food forest that can provide dietary staples, fresh fruit, value-added products, and an infinite diversity of other uses.

Elsewhere on the farm, jackfruit is used as a windbreak. A line of jackfruit, neem, and native fruit trees protect emerging ojoche (Brosimium alicastrum) orchard, and a triple line of jackfruit protects a young multi-species nut orchard. Jackfruit is also scattered throughout this other property - it’s the perfect tree here because we have no water access, and the trees need little water.

Jackfruit and Food Security

Jackfruit, with its diversity of edible yields, resilience, and self-maintenance, has incredible potential for building local food security in the tropics. There has been a recent resurgence of interest in jackfruit in Kerala, India, where it was once a dietary staple. While the tree has recently declined in popularity there, a number of farmers, NGOs, and government agencies are beginning to come back to the fruit. At yearly jackfruit festivals, people gather to celebrate the diverse uses and cultural heritage of jackfruit, to preserve its diverse genetics, and to eat, spread, and popularize the fruit. K R Jayan spends his time traveling around southern India on a three-wheeler planting jackfruit trees - the Johnny Appleseed of jackfruit.

While Jayan is having great success, and knows that the trees he plants will eventually be used, our situation in Nicaragua is different. No one’s ever eaten or seen jackfruit on Ometepe, save one farmer near Merida. As a weird-looking, strange-tasting, unique fruit, we need to introduce it to people first and see whether or not they like the taste (and/or economic potential) of the tree before we attempt to spread it too much, or we’ll end up with another noni - planted everywhere, used nowhere, rots on the ground and smells awful.

Luckily, people are starting to enjoy jackfruit. Every time I harvest and process a fruit, our local staff come over to take a piece of the flesh. The last time I started processing, Clemencia ran over, grabbed a piece, and stuffed another in her daughter’s mouth. “Es rico!” she managed to say between bites. People are asking for and planting jackfruit seedlings in their gardens and on their farms. Because jackfruit grows columnarly and produces here within 6 years, it doesn’t compete with growing space of other plants too much until it begins producing. In fact, if jackfruit is used properly - as a windbreak or to stabilize a slope, it can actually increase the production of other crops despite taking up space.

A bowl of fresh jackfruit

People are also interested in it for its economic potential. We are getting a very good price for the seeds, and are beginning to develop our jackfruit jams. As the community commercial kitchen approaches completion, we plan on moving large-scale processing there - jamming and canning different products from the Finca and from town for sale throughout Nicaragua. At the same time, we are recruiting local farmers who have a little extra land and supplying them with seedlings of jackfruit and other tree crops, the products of which they will sell directly to Mano Amiga’s commercial kitchen. The kitchen will then process the ripe fruit into hummus, jams, chutneys, and other deliciousness to sell throughout Ometepe and Nicaragua. Thus begins the Ometepe Jackfruit Revolution, lead through Mano Amiga’s community kitchen.

The kitchen also hosts our other main method of spreading the Revolution. We plan to start using jackfruit - the fruit and seed products - in Cafe Enfantil, our children’s nutritional programs run out of Proyecto Mano Amiga. You know, get em while their young. Get em hooked on this takes-like-juicy fruit, chickpea-and-meat-substitute, Buddhist-robe-making, easy to grow wonder tree. Most kids that try it at the farm like it already, now we just need to get it into more hungry young mouths. Then their families can plant it, knowing full well that their growing child’s belly will be overflowing with food in five years time.

Silvana likes jackfruit

Maybe one day we’ll have our own Jackfruit Festival in Balgue. Or, rather, we’ll have our jackfruit quinciera, a jackfruit coming-of-age party. We’ll feature that full three-course meal made of jackfruit and spend the rest of the day jamming, peeling, drying, processing jackfruit into a diversity of forms. As night comes we’ll have a dance party fueled by jackfruit wine, and spend the next morning recovering with jackfruit - the pulp and seeds are used to cure hangovers in Chinese medicine.

As lots of people in India are beginning to understand, jackfruit is an incredibly important tree for community food security. Jayan, explaining why he‘s planting jackfruit en masse around Kerala, says that “If it wasn’t for jackfruit many villages in Kerala would’ve starved in the days before Gulf remittances started flowing into the state.” As we enter a time of global economic and climatic uncertainty, coupled with the economic, environmental, and political issues that already exist in Nicaragua and much of the world, we need the most resilient, the most useful, the most solid, the most easy-to-grow food crops we can find. Jackfruit is an archetype of this. A true permaculture rock star, a tree for Saving Planets.

The more we can spread it through Ometepe, through Nicaragua, through Central America, the more de-facto food and economic security we can introduce, and that’s really what it’s all about.

But first we need to show people, to get them to like it, to plant it. Sharing the fruit with anyone interested helps. Exposing it to the younger generation helps. Maximizing the economic potential of jackfruit helps. Hopefully rambling about jackfruit as long as I have helps.

If you made it through all this babbling about a weird tree, maybe you agree with me that this is the most hopeful photo I’ve ever taken:

If that wasn't enough,

here's more information on jackfruit:

Fruits of Warm Climates Jackfruit Chapter

Agforestry.net Plant Profile - ridiculously in depth

Microbusinesses emerge at the Finca

2012-01-01T17:39:00.006-06:00

For the past ten years, we have been planting trees, experimenting with different crops, growing organic food, and cultivating connections in our local community of Balgue and throughout Nicaragua. As Project Bona Fide grows, as we build more solar, social and intellectual capital, as more and more trees begin producing, the potential for business ventures begin to emerge. Over the past few years, we have begun processing our plethora of mangoes into jams and chutneys for sale. This year, right now, we are launching two new sustainable micro-businesses: selling salad greens and jackfruit seeds and hummus to restaurants around Ometepe and Nicaragua.

These will help bring more revenue to the farm, which will be reinvested in new infrastructure and projects, as well as giving us the ability to expand our staff. As always, our goal is larger, focused on community: once we find a product that tastes great, that sells, that is profitable, we will start integrating the project into Balgue, processing the products at Mano Amiga’s new kitchen, and, eventually, form a local co-operative to grow, process, and distribute products from the farm and town. In this way, we can begin to make an income from farm products, expand local economic opportunities, and provide people with delicious, organic food at the same time.

The Greens Business

For the past couple years, Nevis, Nolbert, and Erwin have been expertly managing the volunteer kitchen’s vegetable gardens, producing hundreds of pounds of organic greens every year. They’ve traveled around Nicaragua teaching organic gardening to different communities. They know how to grow delicious food. This year, we decided to turn this knowledge into opportunity, and launched an organic salad greens business.

Nevis, Nolbert, and Erwin are managing, harvesting, and delivering an organic salad green mix to different hotels and restaurants around Ometepe and Nicaragua. So far, they’ve delivered over 50 lbs of greens to Aqua Wellness Resort, Totoco Eco-Lodge, and Finca Magdelena. It’s a big project with a lot of work, but the greens business is flourishing.

Right now we have planted indian lettuce, vegetable leaf amaranth, katuk, Okinawa spinach, arrugula, basil, mustard greens, malabar spinach, and a variety of other salad greens. As the business grows, we hope to much of the island’s foreigner driven demand for organic greens.

The guys are thrilled about this project - they’re taking it on as their own business, working overtime, and producing an awesome product. And congratulations to Nevis, who recently became a father!

Jackfruit Seeds; Jackfruit Hummus

Jackfruit is one of the weirdest and most productive trees at the Finca. The world’s largest tree fruit, each tree produces hundreds of pounds of yellow, spiny, oval fruit that can weight up to 70 pounds (!). Jackfruit is an incredibly low maintenance tree - jackfruit trees need no irrigation throughout our 5 month dry season, and after a few years, their dense canopy and leaf litter mean that they require no weeding. The fruit and leaves make good animal fodder, the timber is excellent, the wood produces an orange dye that was traditionally used to given Buddhist monks robes their unique color. And it provides environmental services - jackfruit makes a great windbreak and helps reduce erosion. Jackfruit is a permaculture rock star. After extensive plantings in the past 8 years, we now have a jackfruit orchard fully on line.

The question now is, What do we do with all this jackfruit? We use the super-sweet, yellow flesh - which was the original taste base for Juicyfruit gum - in curries, and are experimenting with making jams and wines. The fruit can be cooked underripe as a green vegetable. Oftentimes, the urracas get to the fruit first, and it then becomes pig food.

What makes jackfruit a true permaculture rock star, though, and a potential tree crop, are its seeds. So far this season, we’ve found that each large fruit may contain between .5 and 3 lbs of the large, oval, starchy seeds, rich in vitamins B1 and B2. They need to be boiled or roasted before eating, but afterwards can be added to a variety of dishes, or ground and eaten like mashed potatoes. Their texture when ground is reminiscent of a chickpea, and we’ve been using them in hummus and falafel.

We recently found buyers for our jackfruit seeds - Aqua Wellness Resort has offered to buy all of our seeds to use in their hummus and falafel dishes. While they are labor-intensive to process, this presents an excellent business opportunity, especially because jackfruit tree require almost no labor to maintain. Thus, this year marks the beginning of our jackfruit seed business, and, hopefully, as we refine the process, we can start selling our own, farm-made hummus.

I (Jim) think, probably with a little exaggeration, of this as the start of the Ometepe jackfruit revolution. If the business model proves profitable - sale price outweighs processing time - we will start moving jackfruit processing to the community kitchen at Mano Amiga. People from Balgue have already started asking for and planting jackfruit, and if we can show that it is a profitable tree, hopefully more will be planted. It seems like a business that can scale up easily - the western appetite for hummus and mashed potatoes appears to be endless.

If this works, it not only builds local economic opportunities, but also increases food security and resilience in town, which, as always, is the long-term goal. Jackfruit is very durable tree, supplies many environmental services, and can be used in a variety of ways - a great addition to local homegardens and farms.

* * *

So that’s the start, the beginning of many soon-to-emerge microbusiness experiments at Project Bona Fide. And if experiments succeed, they’ll expand into Balgue. We’re trying different methods, different combinations, different buyers. Growing markets for organic food in Nicaragua; growing food; growing businesses; growing communities.

The Finca Expands: Animals! and Infrastructure Developments

2011-12-28T19:15:00.014-06:00

The past year has seen many new developments at Project Bona Fide. As the volunteer, service learning, and international educational programs have grown rapidly, we have added a lot of new infrastructure to keep up. With more people, we need more and better spaces for people to live, sleep, eat, play, shower, and, occasionally, have dance parties. In the past year, we have built or are in the process of completing a revamped kitchen, two new volunteer houses, showers, a freezer, and a well with a solar pump. We’ve also begun integrating animals into the systems here, and now have pigs, chickens, and pelibuey. The animals and increased infrastructure help expand our capacity both as a learning environment for Nicaraguans and international students and travelers, and our attempt to model sustainable, local permaculture systems.

New piglet

Infrastructure

We completely revamped the Bona Fide kitchen. The old stove was knocked out, which created a huge amount of space, and we built a rocket stove in the corner. The super efficient rocket stove will save us lots of firewood, and with a chimney, it eliminates smoke inhalation for the cooks.

Jan building the rocket stove

Video of the kitchen redesign

We stoned the floor of both the kitchen and added a roof and stone floor on the adjacent area, doubling the size of the kitchen and living area. We built a new tables, benches and lockers out of local wood to utilize the expanded space. The extra size came just in time - with our volunteer program full with 20 people in January, and over 35 people signed up for the permaculture course, we may have 60 people eating lunch at Bona Fide in February.

The floor being stoned

To keep with the ever-growing popularity of the volunteer program, we added two new volunteer housing spaces. The Casa del Sol is a traditional thatch structure, built out of wood, bamboo, and stone harvested from on site, and roofed with local grass. Lower down on the property, we built a six-person dormitory from our own stone, wood, and bamboo, nestled in the middle of our oil production plot. These combine to give us 10 more housing spots for future volunteers. We are finishing construction on a new, larger, more private shower as well.

The casa del sol

The new dorm, under construction

As the farm continues expanding, with ever growing orchards, gardens, and food forests, our water requirements keep increasing. This is somewhat offset by taking trees and bamboo clumps off irrigation as they mature, but, still, we need a lot of water. All our water currently comes from the same small pipe like every other household in Balgue, and, as anyone who’s been to the farm knows, water in the dry season in a big issue. To fix this, we recently dug a 5 m deep well at the bottom of the property, and installed a solar-powered pump that sends water up to the water tank in front of Chris’ house. This has multiplying benefits - not only do we have more access to water, we have multiple sources of water, increasing the farm’s water resiliency, and we will use much less water from the community water system, which is already stressed.

Well, solar panel, and pump

The other new construction projects are for the newest additions to Finca - domestic animals. Over the past year we have begun integrating pigs, pelibuey (short-haired tropical sheep), and chickens into our permaculture systems. These animals will play a very important role on the farm, recycling wastes, building fertility, weeding, and providing an abundance of products like meat, eggs, and milk.

Pigs

The pigs were the first animals to arrive at the farm, and live in an enclosed stone pig pen with a wallowing pit. We started with a pair of piglet siblings, eventually slaughtered the mature male, and replaced him with another male piglet as our now gigantic female goes on a series of romantic dates with pigs from town in an attempt to get pregnant. With a steady diet of fish bones, grains, leftovers, jackfruit, and mangoes, our pigs are pretty happy.

Pigs are perfect permaculture animals for us. They are great recyclers - converting food and crop waste into high-quality meat and fertilizer. Besides a small amount of sorghum, everything they eat comes from the farm. They give us a lot of meat - the pig we slaughtered produced over 100 pounds of pork, and we had pork roasts on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and for Clemencia’s birthday.

Pigs gorging themselves

A pig forage area is currently developing - a mixed fruit and nut orchard with a madero negro (Gliricida sepium) living fence border. The bottom layer will be filled out with taro, providing grass, fruit waste, and tuber forage. A movable electric fence system will also allow them to be pastured in different areas with abundant food depending on the season - during jackfruit season, they will be rotated through our jackfruit orchard, and during mango season, through our mangoes. Once we begin rotating them, they will become literal pig tractors - rooting, tilling and fertilizing land that we can then plant directly into.

Pelibuey

We also have two pelibuey - hairy sheep from tropical Africa that can withstand the intense heat here. They are rotated through pasture with a solar-powered electrical fence system at the bottom of the property. During the wet season, a month or two into the dry season, there is plenty of ground cover for them to eat. However, pasturing animals here is difficult here because for the final three months of the dry season, there is no groundcover. No pasture. To prepare for this, we have planted large forage banks of Taiwan grass and created an alley pasture system lined with ojoche (Brosimium alicastrum) and moringa trees. This system will take a while to mature, but in the short term we have plenty of leguminous trees and Taiwan grass as dry season animal fodder.

The peliguey require little maintenance in the wet season - watering twice a day and rotating once a week. However, once the dry season hits, they time required to feed them twice a day begins to add up, and we are starting the think that the pelibuey outputs (meat) do not outweigh the labor and space needed to help them thrive. So, we are thinking about getting a cow and calf at the start of the next wet season. They’ll require the same amount of labor, and more food in the dry season, but give us fresh milk daily and a huge amount of long-term meat. As they rotate through the pasture fields, and through our rice, corn, and sorghum fields after grains are harvested, they constantly fertilize the soil. Short rotation animal grazing is one of the most proven and productive methods of building soil fertility, which would not only help our annual fields regenerate more rapidly, it would also provide a model of regenerative cattle rotations to the local area.

Chickens

Chickens are a brand-new addition to Finca Bona Fide, with 11 arriving in the past two weeks. We should have over 20 laying hens in the next few weeks, which will provide eggs for the kitchen, fertilizer for the garden beds, and can be utilized in our chicken tractors for garden bed preparation and weeding.

The chickens will spend most their time in our new chicken coop, built with materials from on site. We are currently finishing building their cob nest boxes. As our animals mature and are slaughtered, we are going to have a plethora of meat here. While we plan on experimenting with different drying and preserving methods, we are also building a a new structure at the bottom of the property to house a meat storage freezer.

Our new chicken coop and chicken tractor

The introduction of animals at the Finca has been a lot of experimentation and a lot of work. As our understanding and talent with animals keeps developing, the Finca will be that much closer to meeting its goals of modeling sustainable, local food systems, minimizing off-farm inputs, creating high quality food, and developing potential sustainable business options for both the farm and local community.

2011 Plantings

2011-12-22T13:37:00.009-06:00

We had a very productive planting season at Finca Bona Fide. We planted over 5,000 trees, shrubs, grasses and tubers since the beginning of June. These continued to fill out emerging systems and began developing new ones. The plantings filled in the understory and empty spaces between trees in our establishing orchards, began developing 1) an animal forage system, 2) a native nut orchard connecting two patches of remnant forest, 3) a small citrus orchard, 4) a native fruit tree orchard, 5) a "show and tell" banana plantation that will transition into a native fruit orchard, as well as starting a greens business, planting windbreaks, and scattering hundreds of nitrogen-fixing trees to continue building fertility on site.

Overall, the numbers are:

350 coffee shrubs (Coffea Arabica)
150 chocolate trees (Theobroma cacao)
145 coconut palms (Cocos nucifera)
125 native fruit trees (Pouteria campechiana, Chrysophyllum cainito, Pouteria hypoglauca, Annona reticulata, Pouteria sapota, and Spondias purpurea)
300 ojoche/Mayan breadnut trees (Brosimum alicastrum)
250 Okra tree/Moringa (Moringa oleifera)
1100 nitrogen-fixing trees (Delonix regia, Senna siamea, Leaucaena leucocephala, and Acacia mangium)
800 bananas and plantains (Musa sp.)
Hundreds of pigeon pea/gondul (Cajanus cajan)
400 pounds of taro (Colocasia esculenta)
200 katuk shrubs (Citrus sp.)
100 jackfruit trees (Artocarpus heterophyllus)
over 100 Surinam Cherry/Pitanga shrubs (Eugenia uniflora)
600-700 plugs of Vetiver grass (Chrysopogon zizanioides)
hundreds of clumps of Taiwan grass (Pennisetum purpureum)
20 plus Ackee trees (Blighia sapida)
150 Neem trees (Azadirachta indica)
15 plus Guava trees (Psidium sp. (4) species)

Filling in our Food Forests

As many of the orchards planted in past years at the Finca begin to mature, we start to see spaces between the crowns of trees that let sunlight in. We went through these spaces and planted understory trees and shrubs that are either need or tolerate shade, and coconut palms that will eventually rise above the crown of our fruit trees. In the understory spaces we planted 350 coffee shrubs, 150 chocolate/cacao trees, and a handful of kandis/gamboge trees (Garcinia xanthochymus) and salak palms (Salacca zalacca), matching the available light and space with the characteristics of each species. In the very narrow spaces between emerging crowns, we planted 145 coconut palms, as their narrow trunk and relatively narrow crown creates little light competition with the fruit trees as the palms mature.

On paths throughout the Finca we planted hundreds of Surinam Cherry/Pitanga shrubs (Eugenia uniflora), taking advantage of the sunlight and edges created by the paths. This delicious snack fruit produces fruit multiple times a year, so planting them on paths ensures that we know when they are fruiting.

Throughout all of our orchards, bananas and pigeon pea/gondul were planted. They were often planted as part of an establishment guild near 1st year fruit and nut trees to provide shade, mulch, wind protection and a yield of bananas and gondul's edible pea. Gondul is an excellent plant in an establishment guild: it fixes nitrogen, rapidly provides shade to protect tender 1st year fruit and nut trees, produces edible peas in about 8-9 months, and is extremely drought tolerant. While gondul shrubs/trees can live for many years, at the Finca they are generally blown over by wind after one or two years.

Finally, nitrogen-fixing trees were scattered in open spaces throughout the farm. Nitrogen-fixing trees are the essential to maintaining productivity and fertility on the farm – they fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil, making it available to other plants, and, after 2-7 years, can be routinely pruned to supply biomass and nitrogen-rich mulch. They also cast a layer of shade, which preserves soil moisture, extending the growing season of plants and lessening the effects of our 5 month dry season.

Native Nut Orchard

On the western edge of the property below coconut alley, patches of forest have been left alone to regenerate themselves and are now beginning to develop. To connect these two forest patches, over the past 3 years we have been planting an orchard of ojoche/Mayan breadnut (Brosimium alicastrum). This orchard will create a habitat for wild animals, forage for domestic animals, and a low-maintenance zone 3/4 tree-crop orchard of the highly nutritious ojoche nut.

To protect and aid these young trees in their development, we planted hundreds of nitrogen-fixing trees around them as an establishment guild to provide nitrogen-rich mulch, biomass, shade, and wind protection. Chris has noticed in over the past few years that even 7 year old ojoche trees were susceptible to falling over as the intense December trade winds pound the farm from the northeast. To mitigate this, we planted a multi-species windbreak that protects the developing ojoches. Directly north-east of the orchard, there is a line of fast-growing Taiwan grass as a short term windbreak and animal forage bank, followed by a row of wind-resistant native fruit trees, a densely planted line of the incredibly resilient neem tree (Azadirachta indica), whose leaves and fruits make an organic pesticide (and spermicide!) and will eventually provide quality timber, finally followed by a line of jackfruit until our annual grain fields begin.

Rotational Grazing System

Near the bottom of the property, below our annual fields, there is an area that had been left to regenerate itself for the past 10 years. However, there has not been much regrowth taking place, and the forest is struggling to reclaim the area. As this past year has seen the birth of integrating animals into the Finca, we decided to turn this space into a rotational grazing system.

Rotational grazing here is difficult: for the final three months of the dry season, the ground is patched and all groundcovers have died. So in our system, we planted alternating lines of ojoche, moringa trees (Moringa oleifera) and melinche/flame of the forest (Delonix regia), creating pasture alleys between the lines. All three species have evergreen, high protein leaves that make great livestock fodder, and moringa leaves have been shown to boost animal milk production. As the system evolves, they will be pollarded above cow and sheep browsing height, and will serve as our animal fodder bank for the end of the dry season.

We currently have a electric fence rigged up to a battery and mini solar panel. Two and a half peliguey - the female is pregnant - live in this area and are rotated weekly by volunteers. Future plans may involve cows. At the edges between the pasture field and the forest, we have planted lines of native fruit trees canistel (Pouteria campechiana), nispero (Manilkara zapota) and caimito (Chrysophyllum cainito).

Taro: Underground Food Storage

After years of experimenting with taro (Colocasia esculenta), a shade-tolerant understory tuber, we are serious about using this crop for its ability to store more or less infinitely underground. This year we planted 400 pounds of the starchy tuber, which will multiply itself underground to over 1,000 pounds. Much of it will be left in th ground as a "survival bank" - emergency food in the case of natural (or man-made) disaster, and will also be used in our kitchen to replace potatoes. Taro, plantains and cassava will now provide all of the starch for the volunteer kitchen from on site.

Taro reproduces many new baby plants from its corm and is very easy to propagate. We plan on covering much of the understory layer of the farm with taro - to supply tremendous amounts of food, fill in the understory of our orchards, and use taro's large leaves to act as a living mulch, protecting soil and retaining moisture.

"Show and Tell" Transitional Plantain Orchard

Near the bottom of property, very close to the road where many villagers pass daily, we planted a "show and tell" demonstration orchard. Over 800 plantains were planted in a field, resembling a normal plantain monoculture, but with a variety of native fruit trees as well. The idea is to model how to transition from a plantain monoculture to a diverse plantain-fruit tree polyculture over time. As the fruit trees mature, the bananas will be thinned and mulched until, over a decade, the system transitions fully into an orchard.

Small Citrus Orchard

Every year we plant a small orchard of about 25 citrus trees (Citrus sp.) to test new varieties and seedlings. These are organized in small blocks of 20-25 trees in order to isolate and mitigate pest and bird issues. In this way, we are hoping to develop more resilient varieties of citrus for Ometepe.

The Other Land

Finca Bona Fide's property is broken up into two plots - our main 26 acre property, and then an 19 acre property to the east, with our neighbors Ben and Sarah in between. Because the other land has no water access and is a bit far to carry buckets of water, we are experimenting with resilient and drought tolerant varieties of trees. This year we planted a range of native fruit trees canistel(Pouteria campechiana), caimito (Chrysophyllum cainito), cinnamon apple (Pouteria hypoglauca), custard apple (Annona reticulata), sapote rojo (Pouteria sapota), and jocote (Spondias purpurea), jackfruit, ackee and moringa trees to test their drought tolerance. We also cut a handful of neem trees and used the timber in our construction projects, which has opened sunlight for many young trees to grow and thrive.

Other various plantings:

We planted a triple line of jackfruit below and east of coconut alley to serve as a windbreak to protect and emerging nut orchard. Jackfruit is an excellent windbreak tree, and because it bears fruit on its stems, fruit production is not strongly affected by winds. The jackfruit also provides and animal forage, pig food, long-term timber, and potentially an orange dye that can be used in a sewing co-operative that is developing at Mano Amiga.
Over a thousand nitrogen-fixing trees (Delonix regia, Senna siamea, Leaucaena leucocephala, and Acacia mangium) have been planted to build edges with fast growing species, create shade edges as a rain stretching technique, and fill in open areas in our agro-forests as the overstory matures which will provide nitrogen and biomass for mulch in years 2-7.
A line of ojoche was planted on the banks of our cebrada, or seasonal stream, to build a riparian buffer strip and reduce erosion, while extending a wild-life corrider as well.
Hundreds of cutting of Taiwan grass were planted as both windbreaks and dry season animal fodder, and over 500 plugs of vetiver grass were planted in areas we noticed water runoff and soil erosion taking place. Vetiver, an amazing grass, has an incredibly dense and deep root system which can limit runoff and erosion by more than 70 percent.

We had a great planting season and achieved all of our main goals. Now, as the dry season comes on, we are turning our attention to watering, gardening, and harvesting.

The Bona Fide Blog Rebirth

2011-11-02T14:02:00.018-06:00

Hello everyone.

I'm Jim. I'm interning at Project Bona Fide and will be updating this blog for the next couple of months.

Although this blog hasn't shown it, Project Bona Fide has been humming with activity over the past 13 months. There have been two Permaculture Design Courses, one at the Finca and one at Rancho Mastatal in Costa Rica; an undergraduate University of Vermont course taught at the Finca; and student groups from West Vancouver High School, Corpus Christi College, the University of Guelph, and Where There Be Dragons came and worked at the Finca and Mano Amiga. Buildings have been constructed, animals raised, rotated, escaped, and eaten, thousands of trees planted, businesses planned, fruits harvested, eaten, and jammed, and a countless supply of volunteers working alongside our local to develop the farm.

Over the next week, we'll show you what's new: new buildings, new plants and systems, new community projects at Mano Amiga, and, for the first time, animals at the Finca!

But first, a thank you: without the amazing support fund-raising from West Vancouver High School and Corpus Christi College, much of the development of Project Bona Fide you'll see below and in upcoming posts could not have taken place. Thanks guys!

And thanks to all the volunteers, interns, service-learning and university groups who have visited, worked, sweat, laughed; thanks to everyone who helps keep PFB going and growing!

Now, some pictures

Building new garden beds

Stoning the kitchen floor

New Cob Oven at Mano Amiga

Kitchen Redesign gets underway

New piglet at the Finca

Chris, Mitch, UVM students and Osa

Pitanga

Silvana, Clemencia's daughter, writes in
the kitchen during a day off from school

Learning about patterns during our PDC

Clemencia starts off our kitchen redesign with a sledgehammer

Volunteers making mango jam

Building our chicken coop

Araza fruit

2010-09-30T18:51:00.005-06:00

Greetings all,

New work moves forward at 'el centro' 'casa amarilla' or as we know it, Casa Mano Amiga. A group of 3 architecture students and one visiting individual from the UK have been investing their time, heart and hard earned fundraised funds to move the community commercial kitchen forward. Kudos to these four! Labor on the site is a great amalgamation of local volunteers, the Brits, and a core group of three masons from Project Bona's Fide's training programs.

Meanwhile the rain continues, one can see Osa reclining in the water, kids playing in the water, actually playing in the stream that normally is 8" deep is now close to 4 feet deep, rains continue as well, we just got hit with a tropical storm last week, Bona Fide lost some trees, no damage to structures either gracias a dios.

This coming week we expect piglets and start moving forward with integrating animals into our systems.

Thanks to all,

Chris Shanks

Another gap in the posts. Alright, here we go!!!

2010-09-21T16:25:00.010-06:00

Well friends and supporters of project Bona Fide,

I wish to say I am a slacker, but for those of you who know me that is just not true, busy as a bee is the truth here at Bona Fide, also with formerly broken computers and broken cameras, neither the tropics or myself is easy on either btw do not ever go swimming in the Rio San Juan with your digital camera (well I fell in stuck in the mud and toppled over to be precise)

Lots to say not sure where to begin, has been 2 full months since my last post, in the first two above slides you can see photos of our Beloved Kris Falls AKA hombre pequeno AKA Tiny Many (not small TINY!!) doing his simultaneous translating gig, these shots were taken at Rancho Mastatal, an education and learning center focused on community work, permaculture, natural building and food preparation. In July shorter after my last post I had the opportunity to teach a 15 day Permaculture Design course to 19 individuals from 7 countries. Spanish and English were the lingua francas of the day and students worked hard on redesigning two overgrown non functioning valleys full of old orchard trees into climate adaptive multifunctional agro-forest systems integrated into a permaculture landscape. Just after the course students and I traveled around CR sourcing seeds for Rancho Mastatal and Bona Fide. We visited CATIE, Finca La Loma Botanical garden in Puerto Viejo and various outdoor markets for seed and plant stock. Dancedown in Puerto Viejo was also an excellent way to ease out of 15 hr. days. Rancho MAstatal and Project Bona Fide will be joining forces by creating a joint apprenticeship program, information and skills share as well as introduce a yearly PDC out at the Ranch taught by yours truly and ranch staff and of course Kris Fallas.

Following a return to Bona Fide in early August I came back to what were experiencing in CR as well. Almost record level rains, lake level is as high now sept 21st as it was in late October of 2008, that was a record year, we are already seeing the town River in Balgüe go from 10 feet wide to over 60 feet. The upriver bypass to cross the Balgüe stream has already been cut, the ferry dock is under water so is the ferry ticket office. Wow. Let us not even get started about the road, well OK here we go. Positive: adoquin paved road is on its way, supposedly to Balgüe, certainly to Santa Cruz at least, they have already reached almost to Santo Domingo, they are working 7 days per week since April. So far so good. Neg: as for the rest of the road to our town is pretty much the worst I have seen it. No upkeep done for almost 2 years. Rains that flooded the town's catholic church and moved 50 kilogram/hundred pound plus boulders meters/feet down the road, in many places exposed on the road to seasonal quebradas all material is gone, just rocks remain, A joy to ride on a motorcycle, worse in a truck. ;)

On the upside heavy rains are helping along heavy rice and corn crops, beans are suffering from dampness though and our sorghum actually started to sprout on the seed head ha! We have had good harvests in the annual fields and we are overall pleased with this year's annual food production efforts. On that note we have to date planted over 100 coffee, 100 cacao, 500 nitrogen fixing trees, 300 hundred fruit trees, over two acres of pigeon pea and hundreds of nut trees, bamboos, scores of coconuts, hundreds of thatch palms and a partridge in a pear tree :)

This year we opened up some formerly monocropped land that grew over with cover cropping vines and scrub trees, the land is now in pigeon pea legume cover crops, with many fruit trees planted underneath to be shielded by the pigeon pea in their first year to reduce or eliminate irrigation needs. On the same note a large native fruit and nut tree planting was carried out to connect two zone five forest areas and form a more cohesive and coherent wildlife corridor.

Starfruit abounds, ackee just began, guavas are dropping, rollinias and guanabana and caimito are flowering, canistels are swelling on the trees as are all manners of citrus..same to be said for Jackfruit, gardens resting at the BF cocina, pumping down the hill at my Casita...

Peppers Peppers Peppers, that shot of myself and my 9 varieties of hot peppers is just part of the story, processing continues with hot peppers dried, in oil, and in vinegar.

ANIMALS ANIMALS ANIMALS!!! End of 2010 and all of 2011 is the epoch of integrated animal systems at BF. Pigs coming, rabbits, chickens, guinea fowl, and DUCKS. )

As per remaining fotos:
Orange fruits: Wild Jocote, native genetics that produces our cultivated Jocote. Tasty!!

Church shot: Ernesto Cardenal's peasant church on Solentiname island Mancarron, where campesino led masses helped inspire art, revolution, and change. Grafitti courtesy of corrupt government that is no better than who they replaced decades ago. Oh well. Punks.

Thanks all for your love, presence and support,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director Project Bona Fide

Been too long>>>>

2010-07-16T09:06:00.010-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Been too long you all!! I know everyone is trepidatiously awaiting a laundry list of excuses. Only one though. After almost 5 years of bulletproof service and hard work my apple G4 died an honorable death. Cause of death:broken motherboard. Gracias a dios though a skilled Nicaraguan computer tech was able to convert the hard disk into an external hard drive. The computer's data was backed up by the best and most recent copy is in the USA.

Well and oh well to that. Bona Fide has been a right busy busy place in the last 60 days. Please allow me to elaborate:

Renovation and expansion of Bona Fide educational and dormitory facilities:

Hilton rebuilt with new posts and foundation work, new roof and floor in process, will house 2-3 people year round. Oven structure built from Bona Fide wood and bamboo, tarp roof, will be used to generate microbusiness with oven, demonstrate oven's utility, entertain and inspire visiting groups, diversify and support food processing year round on site.

Creation and execution of processing aspect of Bona Fide's work in post harvest handling:

BF purchased large pots, 250 jars, utensils, and spices to begin making jams and chutneys. 2010 has seen 150 jars filled with jams and chutneys and 2011 is projected for 800-1000 as well as marketed label and website for BF economic on farm independence.

Tree planting:

Reclaimed 2 acres of secondary growth BF land, all ecologicaly important trees left on said 2 acres, rest planted in conjunction with fromer cover crop, velvet bean with pigeon pea as quick overstory crop to shade emerging trial orchards of: rambutaan, pulasaa, and pili nut. All 3 south east asian nuts (1) and fruits (2) are experimental for the region and have food security and economic promise for Ometepe. Further more hundreds of native fruit trees, thousands of native legumes were also planted as part of our guilding and forestry initiatives on the land. 700 grafted fruit trees as well as the BF nursery are also now available to the community as well as technical advice for their use as of July 5th 2010.

Service learning groups:

Univeristy of Vermont, UC boulder (Colorado) McMaster (Canada), Frederick High school and Al-Campo international have all passed through and participated in planting, community service, and other support.

Layout of new experimental species and plant combination trials at BF land:

New plant species interactions, new species especially legume trees intermixed into the annual grain polycultures and new management and pruning techniques are being trialed this year.

Expansion of Bona Fide's land use on the farm for new crops experiments:

Pruning, planting, and harvesting for a BF future :)

Thanks to the generous donation from WHY and the Hard Rock cafe Bona Fide has cranked up a number of notches our facilities to host overnight guests, students, volunteers and interns. Interns and volunteers alongside our paid local staff are an extremely important part of our work. Through a well thought out division of labour much of our tree planting, new crops systems layouts, and all our food processing is done by volunteers. This division allows our local crew to maintain existing systems during the lush growing season as well as the dry season.

BF looks forward to the last half of the wet season (so far so MUCH rain !!) for planting understory and root crops and receiving new volunteers and programs as we move into the 'fall.'

Thanks to everyone for their ongoing support and confidence,

Chris Shanks

Co-director and Farm Manager

Rain Rain Rain. Yipee!!. Get your green on Nicaragua!

2010-05-16T13:55:00.007-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

After a fairly mild dry season and the poor showing of the 2009 wet season we are happy to announce the beginning of the wet season for 2010. After the last two weeks of brutal humidity in late April we welcomed 3 solid rains from April 30-May 2nd. It is nothing short of amazing to see the changes that rain water brings to the landscape. I cannot say it enough. One can water a plant well week in and week out with only marginal results, then an inch of rain falls and it goes crazy. There is powerful alchemy in the nature of rainwater. Please check out the final foto of this 5 foto spread to see the gorgeous sprouts of native grass coming up under a large guanacaste tree, a native legume of truly epic proportions. With the beginning of the rains we have been busy busy at BF beyond preparing the site for the rains and our irrigation and normal farm work. The first rains for us signal the time for pruning all of the coppiced and pollarded nitrogen fixing trees to stack and pile firewood for late 2010 and 2011 as well as gather dry wood from the previous year to have loads of dry fuelwood stored for the long rainy season. This year we undertook a significant coppicing and pruning of legume trees in our mango orchard as well as down by the silvo pastoral pig system and rambutan trials area.

DOWN WITH BAMBOO:

Finca Bona Fide is quietly logging some nice structures featuring a heavy emphasis on bamboo, Chris' kitchen, the community oven tarped building as well as the Tom built 'Casa de Amor' as well a various and sundry beds and an excellent chicken house. We here at the farm are really excited about working with our own homegrown bamboo, learning its uses and flexibility and working with local builders to diseminnate it use further.

In the upcoming weeks planting will begin at a large scale, we have gotten 24 Jocote (Spondias purpurea) in the ground and we are clearing and preparing for pigeon pea plantings as well as other cover and or nurse crops.

Please do your rain dances!!

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director Project Bona Fide
Farm Manager

Rains are a coming!

2010-04-30T11:24:00.006-06:00

The end of April brings the much awaited rains. It has already rained twice here, about 3 weeks early this year though we are still awaiting the BIG downpour that ushers in the wet season. We have had a few overcast days of late and the weather has been fine. Each night brings a show of thunder and lightening with the onset of the nightly fireflies as well. This dry season has been fairly mellow, we have had some plant loss but not much and that which we have lost is attributed to inferior fitness and genetics for the site so the weeding out process AKA die off is actually welcomed. The oncoming wet season brings the promise of piglets in our new pig corral which is featured in the first 2 photos on this blog update. The corral has a wallow that will drain via a 3" pipe to a large banana circle where subsurface piggie wallow water will feed bananas year round. We will also have the option of using the manures for our annual field crops as well.

A New Guinea hen house is also on the ready and we just need to track some of these elusive West African birds down. They are superior to chickens as they are better pest and tick eaters and they do little scratching and are much more garden friendly.
The final foto commemorates our 5th annual seed exchange overseen by: Nevis, Maria, Norbert and their students from Vermont, Kate and Walker.

Thanks to all of you for your hard work. Each year more and more great information, food, and plant material is shared.

Best to all and thank you Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Chris Shanks
PBF co-Director
FBF Farm Manager

Bona Fide in Haiti and the dry season continues on.

2010-04-07T05:12:00.004-06:00

Greetings BF friends and supporters,

I have just returned from Haiti after 9 days just outside of the coastal city of Leogane. I brought thousands upon thousands of seeds collected from our local community in Nicaragua as well as seed produced on site at FBF. My trip brought me through Panama where customs was hapy to support trees and seeds for Haiti and waive me through customs with a smile and wishinng me luck in Haiti. Haiti was amazing in hope and devastation. I was deeply impresses by the strength and beauty of the people and the hope infused in that place.

Our team of 2 Americans and one Frenchman plus over a dozen small children helping filled over 1500 bags and seeded them in the nursery we built up. Local seed sources we located and seeds were collected for: cover cropping, fruit tree seedlings, and erosion control. Base mapping and master planning was done and big plans are developing.

Many thanks to the Haitian people for their welcoming smiles, to all volunteers for being in Haiti and for supporting her.

As for Project Bona Fide:

The dry season continues we are thankful for our volunteers and apprentices and interns for supporting the farm whilst I have been away. It seems though the rains will come early this year and BF is gearing up for college groups (3) in May as well as planting season.

Thank you for your support.

Best,

Chris Shanks

Solar Library in Las Cuchillas!!

2010-03-16T21:35:00.003-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

This last week saw the the installation of a super efficient LED solar electric light system up in the Las Cuchillas cloud forest village, which is w/o electricity. The library is not only used for study but also cultural events and community meetings. Walker Brown, Kate Bolton, Jeremy and yours truly participated and the apprectices flexed their new solar knowledge muscles in the name of learning and outreach. Watering and dry season work continues, bio-char creation continues, and seed collection for the Haiti trip for nursery establishment looms as thousands of seeds are collected.

Best,

Chris Shanks
C0-Director Project Bona Fide

Permaculture course 2010

2010-03-05T17:42:00.006-06:00

Photo above: Making Bio-char with bona fide timber produced in renewable timber systems based on coppice and pollard system type management. Thanks to Shad for his help with our first charcoal making episode.
Above pictured: Fran and Guillermo with a 40 pounds Jaquero/Jackfruit!!!

Same jackfruit pictured with a plantain bunch and our first significant harvest of canistel or Pouteria campechiana. A tree crops candidate.

Permaculture students and botanical ninjas of peace hard at work on a vaulted locally fired brick oven with a cob insulating layer mix. Design courtesy of Michael Judd and cob goddess Rachel.

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

WOW! February felt even shorter than its 28 days. The month blew past whilst we held our 7th annual Permaculture design course. We hosted 18 people and had folks from: Canada, USA, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Germany. Thanks to all who attended, contributed, taught, shared, cooked, led work projects, and coordinated. This year saw the return of Reed Aubin to the Ometepe PDC scene. Reed brought 4 years of experience since his last visit to the course and to the translation experience whilst Tiny Man and Reed together provided a dynamic duo of new ideas, teaching and mirth. After 15 days we were quite exhausted and a few days of relaxation were called for. A trip to the Rio San Juan was in order and was made. The Rio San Juan is a must see for all folks who have the time to make it out to this percious SE corner of Nicaragua.

Many Thanks to all and more frequent updates to come.

Best,

Chris Shanks

El Berrinche eco-celebration and BF!

2010-01-31T10:15:00.007-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide Friends and Supporters,

This last week was spent mostly in Granada, BF staff was recharging as well as participating and admiring the 5 day eco-festival with art and music called 'El Berrinche'. 10 days ago David and Norman, master mason's from Balgue and the chief ninjas on Chris' building team spent 7 days in Granada working with the artists and building the featured cob oven. They returned 3 days ago for the festivities along with Cat, Rachel, Steve, Jackie, myself as well as the inaugural apprentcies, Walker Brown and Kate bolton who will be with us for 3 months after a 3 week stint in El Lagartillo's languague school: 'Hijos de Maiz.' Yesterday Jackie and I did a pizza making workshop and we have been supporting the group in other ways with logistics and advice for sometime. Artists, acrobats, clowns, musicians from over 12 countries came with a special focus on Central American participants. Fire, stilts, drums, flips, workshops in local barrios and lots of eco-educational fun was to be seen and experienced and the final night culminated with 'Cuneta Son Machin' one of the most popular Nicaraguan groups in the country playing a hour long show with hundreds dancing at a free all ages event where children and adults played side by side.
Huge thanks to Diego of the Theater School of Comedy and Mime as well as Benjamin Wheatley our friend and gracious host for our opportunities to participate and for great lodgings. We hope to support this event next year as it grows and evolves.

Until next post,

Chris Shanks

2010-01-27T17:42:00.006-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide Friends and Supporters,

Been a but quiet here on the ole blog range of late. Busy daze with lots of neat projects unfolding. This week we feature the month long project led by our administrator, Evelio Hernandez, the thatching anew of our beautiful 30' diameter classroom space with local grass from the area as well as our own land. The cutting, carrying, curing, tying, and thatching of this structure is A LOT of work and we extend a heartfelt thanks to our local team for all the overtime they put in as well as hard working volunteers and friends who made it all happen since late last December. A nice holiday treat!!

This thatch job comes well timed with the last local vines twisted and tied as we prepare for our 7th annual permaculture design course. This year we have folks from 5 different countries participating, the US, Canada, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica. We welcome Tiny Man, Jackie Pitts Ashley Carter and Juan Jose Calero to our staff and are looking forward to a great course.

The final foto featured is the newly christened garden down at Casa Albergüe. Greens are coming prper this year thanks to Nevis, Norbert and all volunteer effort.

Upcoming posts will feature the 'El Barrinche' eco-festival in Granda this coming weekend January 28-30th with music, forums, costumes and art performance. It will be a blast.

Cheer to Diego, Ben and the entire Casa botellas crew for organizing hundreds of folks for a festivsl for thousands!!!!

Coming up to the holidays. Still going strong!

2009-12-13T18:40:00.005-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Busy Busy daze here on the farm as the gardens are growing, mulch is flowing, seeds are sowing. NOTE: Huge Huge ups and thanks to Baker Creek Seeds in the US of A for their generous donation of over $650.00 in seeds to our community garden project in conjunction with Dig!, the BF community center and BF's own test gardens on site at the farm. Congrats go out to Norbert and Nevis for their hard work up in Leon training a local Leones about OG gardening as well as setting up for its second season an amazing urban garden that supports local food production for the Bigfoot Hostel.

Rains are still falling sporadically and the dry wet season has been somewhat salvaged by late season rains (and our Sorghum crop too).

This coming week is the last full workweek for BF staff from Balgue as well as our international volunteer and intern staff.

Let's keep the good vibes going for 1-2 more soakings before we set in for the DRY period.

Please be well,

Chris Shanks

Co-director Project Bona Fide

WHATS UP!! the dry season. Goodness por todos los lados

2009-12-06T12:35:00.002-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide Friends and Supporters,

Well folks, I have been lax and I deserve at least mild castigation for being derelict in my blog updates. I hope we have not suffered too great of waning interest and I hope to win back our followers with more regular updates from now on. I am surprised by the number of folks looking in on the BF blog and I am grateful for it.

OK with that on the table let's get after it.

The month of November is always busy at Bona Fide, garden preparations, summer mulching preparations, irrigation system repair and upkeep plus planning for the upcoming permaculture course, working with new interns and gearing up for the busiest time for volunteer help. This past November and going right into the beginning of December have been no different, if anything perhaps more busy as BF forays into the support of a Commuity Garden at the BF community center, pending school groups, our biggest organic grain harvest to date plus what to do with so many papayas, bananas, starfruit and passionfruit. Eating them helps.

On top of all of this I find myself neck deep in for profit design projects. These projects not only help this almost 8 year and running volunteer pay the bill but also are opening doors for markets for organic produce and meats as well as regional connections that promote wellness, community building and right livelihood.

I find myself between the BF farm and two large design projects and little time to slow down yet the excitement of all the work we are all doing and how so much is coming together on the farm is fantastic. BF is close to developing some processing facilities for fruits (canning and ferments) as well as exploring some new building techniques to develop infrastructure as well as futher developing our local and regional community ties. Good time to be in Nicalandia with so many good folk.

A big shout out to Roundover Rachel, Cat, Steve, and Eva for ninja intern skillz and what they bring to our work. Same for our wonderful and warm local staff as well as to Michael Judd and family, (now in Nicaragua!!).

Pictures and more textual goodness to come next week.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Project co-Director
Site Manager

Community planting for Watershed Protection

2009-10-27T15:16:00.004-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

This week's update features Bona Fide's leadership role and collaboration with the water committee of our local community, Balgue.

Project Bona Fide has been working with and alongside our local water committee concerning the reforestation of one of our important micro watersheds around our community.

In collaboration with community members including committee chairman, Luis Damian BF planted over 100 native fruit, nut, and hardwood trees (grown in our nursery) to provide erosion control, shade, wildlife forage, and protection for the vital spring 50 yards below that provides water for over 1500 community members. We did this in accordance with Nicaragua law, the environmental ministry, MARENA allows for plantings to protect watersheds for 50 yards in all directions from the source.

The trees were also fenced with chicken wire in order to protect them from roaming domestic grazing animals. The trees will be cared for in the dry season by BF and its volunteers.

Thanks to all especially BF volunteers and the Balgue water committee for their efforts.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-director Project Bona Fide

Healing Hands, Travel, RAIN!!!!!

2009-10-09T11:10:00.005-06:00

Greetings Project Bona Fide friends and supporters,

I would like to almost entirely devote this week's entry to four exceptional women.

Our BF friends and neighbors, Dee and Kim

Our friends from town, Lydia and Sineada

It all started like this: Kim and Dee were housesitting for our dear Neighbors, Ben and Sarah Slow whilst they were welcoming their newborn daughter into this world. Dee and Kim were caring for the home and sharing animal care duties and other chores with Lydia and Sineada who work at Ben and Sarah's farm. All 4 women became close. Both Kim and Dee are certified and trained massage therapists. They wanted to leave something lasting and generative to the community they grew to love. Massage is what they chose to give. Over more than a month in many long and grueling sessions they taught traditional Indian Head Massage to Lydia and Sineada and worked with them to ground the program in the Community Center in town, structuring the econimic system to benefit the masseuse, the Center, and to support the ongoing work of the masseuses and their needs for materials. WELL DONE!!!

In other news:

RAIN RAIN RAIN. Por fin (finally) our rain dancing has paid off with more than a week of consistent moisture our last year's plantings are being finished and our annual crops are being well refreshed.

I am ON THE ROAD traveling in the mid-west of the US of A visiting agro-foretry sites, farmers, and friends, out to learn and absorb. Many thanks to all who have provided a place to stay, a cold beer, a good bit of conversation, speaking engagements or otherwise.

Pictures to come after the trip.

Best to all and thanks for your support,

Chris Shanks

Dry season in the Wet Season. Keep on trucking!

2009-09-30T11:37:00.005-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

The dry season in the middle of what is supposed to be the wettest part of the rainy season continues. We received rain on Saturday and a heavy set of rains on Sunday of this past week, it felt like the entire island of Ometepe breathed a collective sigh of relief as the rains deeply refreshed important crops of rice and people's second crop or 'postrera' of beans and corn. Famine is being combated already in Guatemala and food shortages based on this surely global weirding influenced weather are already being predicted both nationally and by the United Nations via a visit here by a food security expert just 14 days ago (see Nica Times for the article).

On the positive side the drought resistant system that we have innovated at BF in the annual field trials area seem to be resisting the drought quite well, were are probably losing more corn crop to slippert fingers than drought stress, though comparison with last year's harvest will only paint the full picture. It is extremely interesting to note the contrast of this year wih last years as last year it was so wet that some bean crops rotted or were damaged by rot and now they are threatedned or have been damaged by drought. SO it goes.

As for pictures: Please enjoy a shameless shot of some hermoso maiz that Norbert and Nevis have been harvesting as well as pipian which is the white squash below, kind of like a white variety of summer squash. The bundles of drying plants in neat rows are sesame plants, harvested and drying on the concepcion side of the island ready for transport to Leon to be dehulled and then exported abroad. It is a shame we do not even have the means to process sesame on island, soley an export crop, could be a future food/calories producer for sure though if we had the simple durable machinery... Last foto, corn and rice, grown together on a somewhat steep hillside that is left in partial timber and is grazed in rotation when cropping is not present, nice local and simple and effective agro-silvo-pastoral system. Cool.

Thanks for your support,

Chris Shanks

Harvest begins...

2009-09-06T08:39:00.008-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Hello everyone. Well now its dry. No dry time when the usual patterns predicted and now it is dry. The coast and here in Granada from where I am updating have been unseasonably dry, Ometepe much better but this last week gave us sunny weather great for certain kinds of work but hard on planters and farmers. Good weather to dry beans though which brings me to the first foto, the START of our red bean harvest at BF. OG red beans. Whoo hoo!!

As I continue you those of you who have had the distinct pleasure of meeting our kitchen manager, Clemencia will recognize her in the foto that speaks to a big BF theme, abundance. All of the pictured food is BF grown, you will notice multiple varieties of squash and cucumber. So far so good, not buying much more than salt for the kitchen now, BF coffee, BF rice, BFcorn and VEggies. NICE work to everyone who has nade and is making this possible. One wil also notice the foto of younf cron as the elote ready, young corn that can be eateb con and all in soups or stews. Yummy or picadillo. Yum.

Lotus, oh yeah, that is the flower and plant featured in the last two fotos. No wonder it is the enduring symbol for the buddha.

Well folks, I gotta run. See ya on the isla!!!

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director Project Bona Fide
Chris@projectbonafide.com

New growth and agroforest management

2009-08-23T07:48:00.006-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

These last 3 weeks have been busy friends, a lot of traveling for BF and for one's living, keeping the balance. The 'veranito' or mini summer has ended and now its dry. Ironic that when it was supposed to be dry it was not not and now in the supposed wet times sunny with wind, nice weather though for working and the trees are loving it. Anticipating dry weather, our Escuela de Campo students left their intercropped annual grain fields with a 'living mulch' layer between the corn and rice so our sensitive crops are still faring well, cucurbits like pumpkin, cucumber, and squash are begining to produce and the corn field is tasseling, we are just readying for the first red bean harvests, should be some pics next week!!

This week's update is all about GROWTH, now that we are about 1/2 of the way thru the wet season new plantings and older ones are all sprouting. The top two bamboo fotos feature healthy and vigourous shoots rocketing upwards on Bambusa stenostachya and what I believe may be B.tuldoides, we call it Hondureño as that is where I collected it from years ago. The beautiful red new leaves in the singular foto below is the first new growth on the cacao we planted, its looking very healthy and HAPPY!!

The last two fotos of pruned (pollarded) trees with our volunteer coordinator, Martha Fuchs in it for scale and her nice smile and the pile of pruned woody biomass show the abundant harvest we reaped from maintaining an area of planned living fence for animal/tree systems planted called the 'pig system', this site had tree planted around it over 3/4 of an acre 4 years ago and now with our first pollard we have reaped dozens of cubis meters of woody biomass. Happy bread/pizza oven for all the sustainably grown carbon neutral firewood we have produced. One has to wish others would see how easy it is to grow wood here and how you do not need to cut or gather it from the forest. Oh well, with time the paradigm will shift 'si diosa quiere.'

Thanks everyone for reading.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director Project Bona Fide
Chris@projectbonafide.com

The rain keeps going, the crops growing, seeds flowing!!

2009-08-03T20:07:00.005-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

These past few weeks have been busy and the weather has been excellent, wet enough for the crops but sunny enough to work, we have been planting some but as we are in the midst of what we call the 'mini summer' from the middle of July to the middle of August we have been taking it slow. Fortunately the rains have been better than average during this normally dry perios and as one can see in the left hand foto our rotating annual system of the traditional local crops: corn, beans, squash, and rice are THRIVING!!. Thanks to the hard work of Nevis, Aleida, Roger, and Norbert. We are already havesting pumpkins and our beans are looking good, corn is coming up and folks have now moved to the interplant stage where we are experimenting with species of intercrop legumes (hyacinth bean, black eyed peas, red beans, mung beans, and Mucuna). So far so good. As for the othert two fotos I am featuring a shot of an immature fruit from the Mangosteen tree, why you may ask?? Well because each time I come to Costa Rica to collect seeds for our nursery and Agro-biodiversity program the little feller is almost never ripe. Pretty though. Mangosteen is known as the 'queen of fruits' and is extremely popular in SE Asia, if you are from Canada and reading this sometimes you can find it in the large Chinatown areas of major Canadian cities. Go for it!! The last foto is of course a gratuitous shot of our cute doggies frolicking on the coolth of the day before it all heats up. This coming week we are looking forward to beginnig to resume plantings with layout for some native tree plantings as well as welcome some new volunteers.

Thanks evryone for your readership and suppport,

Chris Shanks

Café, fare thee well to Cat, (until you come back).

2009-07-18T14:56:00.008-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

This past week was in great part about coffee. One of the world's most coveted resources, still picked by hand world round, fuels economies of developing nations and satisfies the caffeine cravings of the Western world. Coffea arabica, or café in Spanish is an important crop in Nicaragua, especially in the north where it is a cornerstone of the economy, Ometepe though is no slouch, producing its fair share, many tonnes which are organic. Bona Fide has some few dozens of producing plants, this year as part of our understorey planting strategy we have put in close to 150 plants of both Coffea arabica and Coffea robusta. We plan on another 50-100 more in the coming weeks. We hope to produce enough to meet our consumption needs as well as our anticipated comsumption growth plus sell some value added BF coffee to help support our work here in the community. The lovely foto of a sea of red and yellow flags shows the tight plantings and shady area that is needed for a shade grown coffee environment, you do not need a lot of space for many coffee plants. The wonderfully shaped cone like flower bud with the 'lily' pads in the background is Nelumbo nucifera or Sacred Water Lotus, a key image in the Buddhist faith, also medicinal and edible, actually every part can be eaten. The root especially is favoured in many styles of Asian cooking. This blossom is our first and will produce a lot of seeds to continue our research into this promising crop for both food, medicine and the ornamental trade here in Nicaragua. The stone spiral you spy in the following foto shows the finishing touches going in on my new shower, sure to be an outdoor experience bar none. Kudos to David, Norman, Vienel and Martin for their attention to detail and craftmanship. This kind of stonework is a skill we are building to take advantage of the profusion of stone all obver the island to stimulate jobs and local economy here on island thru the development of skills and private business with social conscience.

The final image is a gratuitous foto of my darling baby girl, Osa. Gets cuter everyday.

Last but not least one bit. Farewell (for now) to Cat McGill, our dynamic garden co-manager and baker w/o peer. Cat will be back in 5-6 weeks after a tour of the US, weddings and visits. Buen Viaje!!

Thanks Bona Fide friends and supports,

-Chris Shanks

Cocoa or Cacao or cacahuatl

2009-07-10T17:14:00.003-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Cacao or Cocoa, one of the most desired and traded substances in the world, always a shortage, always desire for more. Theobromine is the name of that game( it is the drug part of chocolate that brings us joy), Theo (god) broma (food) Theobroma, the latin genus of the chocolate tree means literally food of the gods. I think most of us can agree it was aptly named. The adjacent foto is NOT a BF image, not yet at least. As our close blog readers may already know BF has fruited cacao and the region we are in has a histroy of its use historically and up to the present. It was used as money here, the cacao bean, which is where chocolate comes from(beans inside of colored pods). The image I am using speaks again to two major major BF themes: diversity and abundance. BF sowed all the seeds we produced form our small cacao crop, we also planted 150 more trees from other sources to total close to 200 cacao trees planted. The quantity of these tasty and useful trees represents a major milestone: UNDERSTORY. BF's determined and agressive agro-reforestation program has hit the milestone of having canopy, vertical architectural space that allows for the utilization of understorey trees to be cultivated below the shade of the trees, above. Cacao is one such crop, so is coffee, there are many others like patchouli, vanilla, ginger, turmeric, taro, thai ginger, araza, kandis, to name a few. This last week was our first significant understorey planting. Thank you to Hector, Martha, Cat, Mark, Kirstie and Marcia for your planting skillz, thanks to the BF personnel for prepping the site!!

In this last week BF also had significant help from volunteers both international and abroad concerning upkeep at the community center, work done on the gardens and nursery and of course ongoing house construction by a crack team of ninjas for Chris' house (seperate but worth mentioning as it directly relates to my general health and happiness).

Thanks to all.

Thank you to all BF supporters for all your help and advice and presence over all these years.

Best,

Chris Shanks

Mangoes and Planting vetiver. Los Viejos (Baile)!!

2009-07-03T16:12:00.007-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Been a while since I have had a chance to post, pido mil disculpas por eso, planting season is FULL ON and this means Chris is a super extra busy man, laying out agro-forests, landscapes and gardens at BF and all over Nicaragua for my business here. Well here we go. The first foto is one of a bunch of teens dressed as old men and women (it is all guys), It is ' La baile del Viejo y La Vieja' which consists of a lot of rump shaking and old man cane shaking to modern music, it is a hoot to watch and many folks gather for this display, we were lucky enough to catch a few dances (see Osa as she looks on, she is the pupppy) when we were setting up for the 3rd annual Tree exchange in town. The 'open field' foto is a before foto of our 1.5 acres of annual demonstration cultivation planted on contour, with water rentention measures such as stones and vetiver on contour as well as cover cropping, mulching, NO BURN, and crop rotation. This is a model system co-developed and peopled by our Escuela de Campo members. This year Nevis is in charge of this field and Aleida the new field system on the 'other land' as we call it. Happy smiling people foto with my ugly mug included features a portion of BF staff taking home fruit trees from the BF nursery and beyond as part of their 'perks package' as BF employees, employees have first pick from the nursery of plants for thie home gardens and land.

'The smiling kids and teenagers foto' that also features Katie and Paco shows the folks who drove up to the finca in order to help us bring trees down to town for the 3rd annual tree exchange. We do this exchange each year after the rains have fallen as an extension to the seed exchanges we have in May. This year was really cool as folks I first exchanged trees with are coming back to me and telling me how healthy and fruitful the grafted citrus and avocadoes are that they asked for 3 years ago, fruit treee success takes years as does the feedback, know it is coming, now they tell their friends, soon hopefully we will be working with A LOT MORE trees to SHARE!!!!

The last two fotos feature a recurring BF theme, ABUNDANCE. Our food safe is featured with a cornucopia of BF fruits, local fruits and very little else. SWEET.

The shameless mango pile foto speaks for itself. Do not worry, there is tons more out there. Literally, actually TONNES!!!!!

AWESOME,

Bring on the abundance and we will find a way to put it away for a rainy day and share our success with our friends here for a more diverse and fruitful approach to food security for our region and BEYOND!!!!

Be well all and thank you for your support,

CHRIS SHANKS

Trees

2009-06-12T15:17:00.006-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Anyone ever wonder what a half a million seedlings looks like? Well wonder no more as those rows of green in the two garden looking fotos are actually seedlings. A nursery owned by 3 brothers and their father, they collectively produce close to one million trees per year. Yee Haw!! This year BF bought some cocoa/cacao trees as well as a few hardwoods and other goodies for a coppice firewood system we are trialing with $$ from the UVM CUPs grant.
The theme of this last week has been trees and plants, personally I have purchased about 13,000 for BF, the community, and private clients for Living Systems Solutions, my for profit socially responsible business. It has been one heck of a week!! What I do not have a foto of, though what I would like to share is a tale of two ovens. One in the community, one at BF, each baked 50 loaves of bread to make 700 sandwiches for 'Dia de Los Niños' Children's day last Saturday. Totoco eco-lodge donated the wholesome flour and BF donated sustainably produced fuelwood, our oven and the sweat and tears (from smoke) of our volunteer staff, thanks Cat, Martha, Clemencia, Charlie, Kirstie and anyone I forgot, (sorry).

Good work all around. Wish we has more nurseries like that and more crazed tree planting ninjas.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director, Project Bona Fide

New Tools, Fences, Fruits and goodness

2009-06-07T15:37:00.009-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

I am updating you all from the city of Granada, in the midst of the national hipica, a horse/cow boy culture centered gathering that consists of beautiful horses with usually drunk riders prancing about in the street much to the adulation and joy of the rest of us. Hipicas are held all around the country and many are still extremely traditional and a true cultural experience. This one seems to be more like a beer commercial, but I digress.
The first foto featured is one that celebrates a 20 month process of building a home here amongst the place and people I came here 7 plus years ago to serve. Everything in the house has been done by hand and it has been a joy to work with the 3-5 men who have helped as well as dozens of others who have contributed in many other ways. It is going to be one heck of a house warming in August when we are done.
The gratuitous shot of new growth on an avocado celebrates the coming of the rains and honors the goodness of all things that grow green.
The two fotos below feature a new species of Theobroma that I found yesterday buying plants for BF and the community among others. It is related to cacao for sure, what it is exactly I am not sure. There are 5 species of Theobroma recognized in Nicaragua. Two of them I know well, the other three this one initially does not seem to be. Apart from this in the region I was in the fruit is well known, especially by the older generation. What I do know is I am am planting a lot of it in the nursery. This may be a rare sub-species or undescribed botanical gem. Quien Sabe?

For those of you who know our kitchen manager, Clemencia, well your lucky as she is one of our most valued staff members and friends. Clemencia is featured with scores and scores of suriname cherry/pitange/Eugenia uniflora. This fruiting shrub bears 2x yearly and this year we have scores of bushes fruiting, THOUSANDS of fruit, our biggest harvest EVER!!!

The group foto featured here shows our UVM agroforestry course with volunteers and local staff showing off our much valued and appreciated donation of a top of the line Japanese pole pruner with a 20' extension, Felco loppers of two sizes for tree pruning, plus loads of replacement blades. This donation was made possible by Michael John Sullivan and his family. THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH.

Last but not least. HUGE THANKS to Charlie and Vienel, a team of one US citizen and one local stone worker, working 5 days a week to finish the community fence for the BF community Center. Thanks you two. Big thanks to Charlie for spending a month of his university vacation wrestling concrete posts and big stones. Vienel you rock, congrats on your leadership on this project.

Thanks to all you all out there in the big WORLD,

Chris Shanks
Co-director Project Bona Fide

Education and RAIN at BF

2009-05-30T09:19:00.007-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

This last week and half saw a visit from ten students from the University of Vermont who completed a 3 credit course on agroforestry at BF. Instructors Chris Shanks and Mike Blazewicz were on hand to utilize the living classroom that Finca Bona Fide has become. We were fortunate to have the rains fall during the course and we were able to do some plantings as well as see cover crops we planted spring up. The processes observed between dry and wet season was informative for the students as was the different ages and concentrations of different trials systems on the farm. BF was happy to work with local restaurants and local lodging options to spread out the funds we brought to the island and we enjoyed the hospitality of Doña Coco and Doña Inez in their tropical homegarden systems. Bona Fide is excited to work with the University of Vermont further and to offer up more courses to expand our educational offerings as part of the vision for our work.

The beginning of the wet season has been early this year, it actually began to green up in mid April which is abnormal to say the least. Rain for the last week has been key to putting all winter wet season plans into action. Seeds are sprouting everywhere and volunteers are busy rescuing seedlings and getting them potted up for plantings. We have already planted pejibaye or peach palm to replace those damaged or killed by rats in the dry season, one of our main cover crops, pigeon pea has been sowed in the dry times and now it has already sprouted, literally many thousands of pigeon pea are growing all around the farm, at this time of the year, the growth is fast and daily. Amazing to see.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director Project Bona Fide
Chris@projectbonafide.com

2009 Bona Fide Seed Exchange

2009-05-19T11:04:00.006-06:00

On Sunday, May 11, the annual “Intercambio de Semillas” – Bona Fide Seed Exchange – took place on the streets of Balgue. With the help of countless hands, from Javier hauling a truckload of plants from the farm to town in his vintage 80s Toyota 4x4 to the grandmotherly Doña Ines blasting Nica pop to attract people in the heat of the afternoon, everything went off well. Key to the show were Nevis, Maria and Aleyda of Escuela de Campo, who prepared numerous treelings, seedling medicinal plants, and packets of seeds to exchange for bags of rice, mangos, cacao beans, and most interesting of all, a freshly caught fish!

Every year the seed exchange offers us a direct opportunity to share some of the research and work we are doing on the farm with local communities. Posters and flyers placed in key towns on the island advertise the event – though quite a few of the people who come are those simply walking down the street who stop by to see what is going on. From the nursery, we share both locally popular fruits like nispero and mamey, as well as new varieties that are doing well on the farm and hold potential to be good food resources and opportunities to improve plant diversity in the area, like jackfruit and pitanga. As many people are unfamiliar with these plants, we explain to them how they are grown and how their fruits can be used – for example in juices, which are extraordinarily popular in the hot days of summer. From the garden, we share a variety of legumes that grow easily here and add nitrogen to depleted soils, in addition to different herbs and vegetables that we have grown and collected seeds from. And from the medicinal garden, we share plants that broaden the selection of natural remedies available and can be used to combat common illnesses.

While we hope eventually to attract crowds of people eager to discover the latest varieties of plants and trees coming from Bona Fide, the highlights of last Sunday came in small doses. Watching a 12-year-old girl come in search of a specific plant and then go down the line of trees and name almost every one of them – something not even I could do at the beginning of the day – is inspiring. Or seeing the delighted smile as a gentleman walked off with four trees he had come specifically seeking in a bucket on his shoulder. Or best of all, spending the day managing the various exchanges while out of the corner of one’s eye catching continuous glimpses of the breadfruit tree Doña Ines traded for three years ago, now rising above the roof of her house and producing fruit that, she happily explains, is “ricissimo” – absolutely delicious!

This blog contribution was written by Catherine McGill our garden co-manager and attache to the Escuela de Campo. Thanks to Cat for all her hard work. Much appreciated.

New additions to BF!!!

2009-05-12T21:26:00.006-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Well I have been back in Nicaragua for about one and half weeks, and yes the internet world is SLOW again. Everything else though is moving quickly. Whilst I was away our diligent crew of interns and volunteers under the careful tutelage of David Ortiz finished our new bread/pizza oven with a tiled finish to the pizza prep table, we re-used broken tiles from my house construction to eliminate building waste. This project was carried out as an exercise in design/build of bread ovens with natural materials to a high end finish, my for profit venture, Living Ssytems Solutions provided the funding in hopes that the skills gained by local folks and the showpiece space of having the oven at BF will attract future clients and create more well paid local employment on the island. Well at the very least we will eat lots of pizza with our friends. Same can be said for the worm bin which is the zinc roofed long narrow structure featured in another foto in this week's update. We just put over 3 pounds of worms in there and Nevis made a bed of dried manure and finished compost. Those wormies are happy!! We are hoping to use the black gold produced by our new friends to take the food gardens and medicinal production to another level. Nice work all!

One of the last two fotos feature the final tile roofing of my porch on my soon to complete home at BF and hopefully a new sense of peace to come along with it as I finally move into my new digs after living, camping, and sleeping all over the farm for over 7 years. Yeah seven. The small thatch structure with a black plastic finish is our new mini solar barn for wood drying and storage, no more moist wood winters for BF!! Congrats to Hector, our new local project leader and volunteer MC. Same to be said for Martha Fuchs our current volunteer coordinator who helped Hector knock out this new much needed additions.

Well folks new additions to our growing project. Come eat pizza and we will throw the scraps to the wormies. One big cycle. Sweet.

Best to all and thanks for your support,

Chris Shanks
Co-director, Project Bona Fide

Updates, Collecting and More!!

2009-05-01T05:35:00.006-06:00

Greetings Project Bona Fide Friends and Supporters,

One important development in communications in Nicaragua as of a week or so ago. If you are calling Nicaragua for whatever reason (hopefully to send us love) you must now dial an '8' before the 7 digit mobile number and a '2' before whichever land line number you call. Just so you know.

Since my last post I have traveled down to Florida to spend time with my family. In my 4 days here I have visited 3 botanical institutions: The Fairchild Botanical Garden, The Montgomery Botanical Garden, and The Fruit and Spice Park of Homestead FL. I have been collecting plant material for ex-situ conservation and newcrops/food systems development for Bona Fide at 2 of these sites for over half a decade. My visit to the Montgomery Botanical Garden (http://www.montgomerybotanical.org) was my first. The MBG is invite only, it is a former estate which is now a NGO dedicated in great part to the preservation of palms and cycads. they have the largest collection of cycads in the entire world, a huge part of the worlds genetics for cycads as well as the safeguards for the continuance of these species is being caried out by MBG and its allies. I was fortunate enough to spend a half day with the Manager of Collections, Chad Husby PHD. Chad was extremely gracious and I thank him wholeheartedly for his time and energy. This visit has begun what we hope is a long collaboration with MBG and other allied institutions. This newfound affiliation is a great 'leg up' for Bona Fide in terms of our work in ex-situ conservation and Newcrops development.

The evolving Bona Fide website. The BF website has grown in the last few weeks and we thank Matthew Homeijer, our web ninja wizard for his time and creative energy to make this happen. Mat is a busy man working in the big city, NYC. He is also a father of a very rambunctious 2 year old, Silas. We have named Silas our 'manager' for website updates, his picture is featured this week. Usually we do the updates while he naps.

Other photos features: the yummy looking fruit is a Pakistani Mulberry, a cultivar of Morus nigra that can have fruits up to 4" long. They taste amazing. Not really a lowland tropical fruit but for the tropics at elevation, the sub tropics and other climates they are incredible. Traditionally in Pakistan and Afghanistan they were dried for eating whilst traveling. The photo of seed drying shows the spoils from collecting in the last 3 days. The aerial shot is a view of MBG and its grounds which is 120 acres.

Hope everyone is well, thanks for your support,

Chris Shanks

Community Center Fence, RAIN, and thanks.

2009-04-26T06:36:00.003-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

I write you from a balmy New York city, having sated myself on temperate spring flowering displays in both the Brookyln botanical garden and the NYBG in the Bronx. Both amazing, two great days full of trees and learning. I have spent the last 2 weeks on the east coast seeing family, meeting with Michael Judd our co-director and strategically planning BF's direction for the rest of the year and the coming year. Bona Fide's website has some new faces, with a brand new 'Escuela de Campo' page and updated FAQ pages plus a new FAQ page and NEW intern pages. Please check them out. Our web NINJA master, Mat Homeijer has been busting his butt between a full time job, childcare, life, and helping BF. THANKS MAT!!

Now a big thanks also to The University of Vermont's Service Learning Program or CUPS for the GRANT we received to fund and maintain a native timber coppice system for polewood and firewood production. This is a first step of many of Bona Fide's foray intoo thr grant world and larger co-operation with other organizations. Many thanks to Michael Blazewicz for co-authoring the grant with yours truly. THANKS MIKE!

RAIN. Yes RAIN. It is the driest period of the dry season yet we received signifcant showers last week for durations of one half hour or more. This coming wet season could be very interesting. We shall see.

The Community fence project at our community center is slowly shaping up with Vienel, an assistant mason from Chris' team leading a group of community volunteers in erecting the fence. Vienel has been working for over 6 weeks on forming and curing the nearly 60 (8 foot) concrete posts with various community supporters, now we are putting them in the ground
. We hope to have the fencing in in a few weeks and to begin planting the garden, shade trees for the playground and medicinal plants for the community when the rain becomes steady in about 3 weeks.

Best to all and thanks for your support,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director, Project Bona Fide

Costa COllecting, new OVEN and more!!!

2009-04-13T17:49:00.007-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

I salute you all from the good old US of A, here in the great Garden State of New Jersey. Spring has sprung here and tree are budding out, willows have leaves, and flowers are beginning to abound and are in full bloom in NYC and other heat island affected sites in this zone. I just saw my twin nephews a few days ago, it certainly put me in a daze. Children surely are one of the best reasons to plant trees and cultivate abundance.

Well now for some reporting on BF doings, of which there are many. BF agro-forestry research and trials efforts were bolstered in this past week with my quick trip to Costa Rica to find the elusive pili nut (Canarium ovatum and communis) These species are only found in one botanical garden in all of Nicaragua and Costa Rica to the best of my knowledge and basing my calculations of ripeness and seed availability from the January CR trip I was correct and my travels yielded close to 60 viable seeds. This high fat and protein nut was once tested side by side by USDA with the Macadamia nut for commercial suitability. Guess who won? This nut though is grown and sold on a commercial scale in South East Asia. We have high hopes here for its success on a home/community scale at the very least. Orchard trials should begin in July-August of 2009.

Well wind farms. Cool. Local wind farms, even cooler. Amayo SA wind project, a collaborative project between US and Canadian investors along with Nicaraguan backers, stalled for over 2 years by antiquated MARENA regulations, but persistence pays off, a over 40 mega watt project that will provide thousands of homes with green juice as well as:

Located in one of the best wind resources in the North American continent.
Amayo will reduce 120,000 tonnes of carbon emissions each year.
Arctas secured $72 million in project finance debt from regional development bank.
Erection complete and will be fully commissioned by March 2009.
When commissioned, plant will be nearly twice as large as next largest wind project in Central America or the Caribbean.
With 2.1MW per unit turbines, Amayo has only MW-class turbines currently installed in region.

Cool. Beautiful. Independence rides the wind. Word. Palabra.

The new BF oven has been fired and it is SUPER!!!. Thanks to Darif, Kim, Dee, Martha, David, Ryan and everyone else for their efforts. Special big thanks to David Ortiz and Martha, our tireless insulating cob layer cobbers!!!

Well a few other references, the rack of greenish red fruit is a full mature rack of pejibaje fruit (Bactris gasipaes) a prominent species fo interest for BF for trials, BF has already fruited this species and is making selections, this is an off season rack that was purchased at a market in CR for a song, halved and had its seed removed, this will provide valuable genetics for future projects.

The killer orange flower is Brownea macrophylla from the legume family, a beautiful flower found on our more serious collecting mission. Enjoy.

Last but not least. I am not sure who this guy is. Definitely a hippie!!!

Well its me, circa 4 years ago, collecting durian in flavour anticipation in Vancouver, Canada.

Durian is being trialed on the farm for the future alongside greywater trials. If you do not know why do some homework on durian you all.

Thanks for everyone's attention.

Best,

Chris Shanks

Co Director, Project Bona Fide

Las Cuchillas clothing and BASEBALL GEAR intercambio!!

2009-04-02T11:43:00.007-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Chris here reporting from the isla in the midst of the 'Dry' season. It rained last night, now when I say this I do not mean a few drops or a tease, I mean a true 25 minute plus rain with 1" of soil penetration, in my 7 years here this has been the weirdest and most extaño dry season or verano EVER, and seems to me quite strange for the elders i have spoke to as well about this, the lake is finally down enough for fishing and local fisherfolk are out once again plying their trade.

Well, here is to Sam, Ryan, Darif and Sally from BF and the whole West Van crew from West Vancouver Canada that brought baseball equipment and clothing to the isla. The BF crew hauled the lot of that gear up to Las Cuchillas, a small cloud forest community of 300 hardy folks living 300 plus meters up on the volcano w/o electricity. There was a baseball gear and clothing exchange and BF received eggs, coconuts, cut pictures from kids as well as some songs, poems and BIG THANKS. Anf BIG THANKS TO ALL who participated.

As for this weeks shameless fruit shot, we have what I believe to be Annona reticulata or custard apple or anon as it is know here, a tasty relative of the sugar apple and soursop or guanabana as it is known here.

As for the other shots we a a new post sleeve/post base interface shot as a advance in Bona Fide appropriate technology, essentially what we have is a moat that keeps termites from crawling up the post, this allows us to use ast growing termite susceptible soft woods for building instead of slow growing hardwoods, ongoing testing is a must as is a small drip system that will fill each moat all at once. We gotta a new oven, thanks to David Ortiz our master builder plus Tom Watts Nielsen, Darif, and many others who contributed in brick carrying and mud mixing, THANKS!!!!! The new oven should do 4-5 pizzas at once and up to 15 loaves of bread. Bona Fide!!! Well the last shot is a shameless promo of my new house going up, I wanted to share the afternoon light on my porch as we get ready to put tile on the roof, thanks to my builders: David, Norman, Loco, Vienel, and everyone else helping me make my home here.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director, Project Bona Fide
Chris@projectbonafide.com

Painted playground, post madness, OAKS!

2009-03-28T09:40:00.010-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Chris here saying a big 'Hello' to all. The last week or so since my previous posting has been full of a lot of good work and a lot of comings and goings. The farm has been very full with a lot of eager and helpful volunteers and we are happy to have them.

In the series of fotos featured this week we share (finally sorry all) a bunch of images of the 'West Vancouver High school' or West Van as they are known that has come to visit and support community projects in Balgüe for five years. In the last two years these intrepid students and their group leader, Greg Cormier have been very supportive in the development of the the community center the Bona Fide has in our local town. This year the group focused on helping us to begin our Pueboltel homestay program, raised money to build a VERY STURDY fence around the community center to discourage livestock from destroying all plants planted as well as support our Cafe Infantil and of course paint our new playground all sorts of cool colors with lots of local kids helping a long the way. Local kids and West Van students found out quickly how sticky oil based enamel really is. Nice handprints everyone!! As for the following fotos apart from our super cute kidz painting montage we have a pink flower and fuzzy looking fruit that is of all things, PEACH, yes real peach 'Prunus persica' I saw it at about 5500' (1600 meters) in Miraflor reserve in the cloud forests of Northern Nicaragua, ditto for the oaks leaves shown (1 of 4-5 species, true Quercus) And of course the mango featured is a early bearing variety that BF has identified as a under utilized local species with a lot of promise. Plant it up!!
Next week we will despedir some long time staff and show some PIZZA fotos of our new oven.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-director, Project Bona Fide

BLog update a long time coming...

2009-03-18T08:47:00.006-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

We are a bit behind on the blog these days due to high winds. High winds and waving trees contribute to spotty internet connections and loss of connections equals inability to update the blog. Nevertheless we will persist. Much is happening here on the farm, late February saw the first visit of my mother, Candace Shanks who has been a contributor to BF’s work via supporting fundraising efforts, awareness, organizing, and not the least hauling dozens of bilingual children’s books to the Balgue’s library at the community center, YEAH MOM!!!

This week’s features are Sapotaceae family DIVERSITY. The three exotic looking fruits in the posted fotos are 3 botanically distinct pecies. Trick is that only 2 of them seem to be known to general science and fruit species diversity. Seems that we may have a distinct sub species of Pouteria zapota or perhaps a different species occurring in the Masatepe region of Nicaragua not far from the colonial town of Granada. Go DIVERSITY!!!

We are all TIED UP here, that is in the ‘love shack’ that is to say that volunteers and interns have been working diligently on the new staff housing facility lovingly dubbed the ‘Love Shack’ as it is being built by our resident English couple, Tom and Eira. This building is built with bamboo from the farm, all the wood is from the farm and the thatch that will make up the roof was locally obtained. It is going to be a beautiful building. Congrats to all who helped with this effort of harvesting, drying, splitting, and cutting up a lot of bamboo PLUS tying all these bamboo members together with thousands of feet of tarred twine. NICE WORK. Pictured in the ‘Da shack’ is Shane and Jonah and pictured sawing is Sally, our new community support intern.

The last two fotos illustrate BF agricultural research and food systems development efforts. The curiously looking tomato like fruit is related to tomato but is actually a botanically distinct species. In efforts to grow tomatoes organically in a challenging climate and soil that seems especially hostile to the nightshade family save hot peppers (they are native here!!) we have been conducting trials of 8 varieties of tropically adapted tomatoes as well as 3 botanically distinct species. So far so good, we think we will have made some selections in the next month. Last but not least is the featured foto of one of our dozens of cinnamon trees that flower this time of year. Flowers bring seeds and seeds bring sharing of this valuable spice for both food and medicine.

Cheers to all.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks

Co-Director Project Bona Fide

Chris@projectbonafide.com

2009-03-18T08:43:00.001-06:00

Permaculture course all wrapped up!!!

2009-02-20T17:35:00.007-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Happy birthday to Eira, thanks to a wonderfully eager staff and a small error we ended up with 5 cakes to celebrate the birthday of our resident hobbit and do all wündergirl, Eira who is the volunteer coordinator as well as the community outreach coordinator. Kudos. Thanks to small errors that bring 5 cakes. No cake was wasted in the eating of this mistake. Pictured with Eira is of course the one of a kind, wünderkind himself, 1/2 my size, twice my brain power, our Permaculture interpreter extraordinaire, my ‘mini me,’ Tiny Man, AKA Cris Fallas of Costa Rica. People of Bona Fide, we salute you Cris.

Thanks to the early risers on the 2nd to last day of the course for your help in carrying the final piece of the playground puzzle to the community center grounds over 4 months later, a barel of excuses and a lot of blackouts our playground is complete. Thanks again to the Knorr family for your support.

Who is that man in the hole? Answer: Don Agustin Contreras, our local well digger. Along with two Bona Fide staff members we have been digging for over 3 weeks, we hit water almost a week ago and now we are very close to being able to set up our pumping system. Thanks to everyone for your support.

As the course finishes up we prepared for our design projects. You will see a foto of Lydia, a young mother from town who completed the design course, she is pictured above talking about her design project to the rest of the class, also pictured, Tiny man's back. Lydia is also the woman pictured in traditional dress doing folkloric dance for the talent show, also pictured is Ebbie Slow (6yrs), local resident and comedian.

Last but not least, my ugly mug as pictured from a Jackfruit tree(Artocarpus heterophyllus). I hardly ever post fotos of myself as I am usually taking the fotos and Michael and I love this one so why not. Gotta love jackfruit, biggest fruit on E-A-R-T-H. That is the kind of tree that can feed a lot of people, One mature tree can produce over a ton of fruit/seeds annually. WOW.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director Project Bona Fide
Chris@projectbonafide.com

Permaculture Design course IDEAS, Sharing!

2009-02-15T07:11:00.007-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

It has been exactly 2 weeks since my last update. It has also been two weeks since our largest Permaculture course here at Bona Fide has begun. I see a pattern there. We are very fortunate to be sharing ideas, cultures, making friends and extending networks with people from: Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Canada and the good ole US of A. We are 32 folks, from 8 countries, all walks of lives, youths eager to learn and more seasoned folks eager to share, we all have a lot to offer. We are especially honored to be hosting 2 Mayan youths from SE Guatemala. These two gentleman and their travel companion and staff member, Karyn Stein come from the Asociacion Ak' Tenamit (New Town). We salute you.

As the course begins to wrap up and 5 design groups are eagerly sharing ideas and putting it all on paper we are ready for a bit of a rest before the next step. But no rest for thr WICKED (HA!!), as we will host a whole slew of course participants as BF volunteers, crank out a bunch of cool projects, finish the 'Love Shack' and hopefully get some worms into their new home we built for them.

Is that what it looks like??, red luscious and juicy, YES it is!! Bona Fide's first organic tomato produced in out tomato culture experiment being conducted by the Escuela de Campo staff and Chris. So far so good. Eggplants coming soon. Go team Garden.

Now what? What's that? Egg fruit or otherwise known as canistel, sapote amarillo or sapote mico or AKA Pouteria campechiana. An excellent fruit introduced to Nicaragua in pre-Colombian times and a hopeful one for BF food security and research work to work with and reintroduce into the local diet. High in bete carotene and vitamin A, can be made into savoury pies or blended with whole milk. YUM!

And this? Crazy looking red fruit with cerebral cortex looking yellow food matter. ACKEE!!
Blighia sapida, from west Africa, brought over by African folks who were stolen from their countries, cooked with salted codfish in Jamaica and favoured above almost all foods, perfectly drought hardy to our climate and potentially poisonous if not eaten at the right time. WOW.

Last but most definitely not least NEVIS AND MARIA IN THE HOUSE!! (or classrooom that is) Both Nevis and Maria have been participating in the PErmaculture design course as occasional students and TEACHERS, each one sharing the finding of their research projects with the class, Nevis spoke about soil fertility, the role of essential macro and micro nutrients in the soil and how to rectify deficiencies organically. Maria spoke abour intregrated pest management as a transitional system to all one to convert to organic methods w/o loss of production. Nice work! Aleida will be presenting sometime this week as well on her work with medicinal plants.

Best to all,

Chris

Trips ABROAD, Black Gold, Pizza, Chocolate!!!

2009-02-01T07:19:00.008-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

Since my last blog update we have been very busy both on and off the farm. The ‘Escuela de Campo’ group of 3 local students and their 3 counterparts from abroad traveled off island on their first field trip of 2009. The group traveled north through Jinotepe up to the Masatepe region where they visited Campos Azules one of the INTA national experimental stations for Nicaragua. The group received a tour of the site, the experiments being conducted, methods being employed, as well as techniques for post harvest handling. Afterwards the group traveled to the nursery and farm of Juan Jose, the nurseryman who traveled to Ometepe in December to teach the ‘Escuela de Campo’ a grafting workshop. The group stayed in San Marcos for the night and then visited ‘Rancho Evenecer,’ an integrated animal, worm compost, biogas, and horticulture site in the town of Ninquinomo.

Whilst folks were traveling off island, folks on island were busy whittling away at the many pre-course tasks for preparation for the 2009 Permacultue Design Course held at Bona Fide. Thanks to Tom, Jonah, Joe Kablino for helping us get ready. We expect 28 students from 6 countries. 6 Nicaraguans will be attending 5 under full scholarship plus one gentleman from Guatemala as well. Our course is structured so that full tuition students help pay for scholarships with their course fee. The course will be translated simultaneously from English to Spanish and Spanish to English by ‘Tiny Man.’ From Costa Rica.

What are those folks doing to our beloved bread oven!! DESTRUCTION AND CHAOS!! Well knocking it down after almost 5 years of loyal service was fun, a bit sad but it was time to move on, all good things come to an end as they say. We are building the better mousetrap so to speak, doubling the size of the oven and building a large 1meter by 2 meter prep table to boot, a nice opportunity to expand and have more capacity to make PIZZA!!. Talk about professional capacity building strategies, this one is made of mud.

Speaking of mud, or more to the point soil, the bones of life, the foundation of food, black gold, the web of life, terroir. Well Bona Fide is going into the business of black gold, David, Norman, and Vienel just finished the details on a worm compost bin that will be used to build fertility in the nursery and the garden. We are excited about changing our banana peels into worm castings, the most coveted and well balanced type of soil additive more or less known to soil science.

The namesake of the town of Granada, (Spanish for Pomegranate) fruiting at Bona Fide for the first time. The first fruits are only tennis ball sized but they are a great start. I love surprises.

Bona Fide chocolate? Yes. I just rode 2 plus hours on my motorcycle with 65 pounds of chocolate. Why? Many reasons. To make it short, $$$$ and therapy. Don’t ask about the latter. Funds raised from the sale of this chocolate will be dedicated to scholarship for two students from ‘Escuela de Campo’ for their university schooling. Further donations always accepted OR just eat your way to donating by buying chocolate. Thanks to the folks at El Castillo Chocolate Company for expediting our order and giving us a good price.

Hey, last but not least whatsoever. KUDOS to Nevis and Jackie and all other volunteer support on the garden. Best it has ever looked in the last 3 years.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director Project Bona Fide
Chris@projectbonafide.com

1 YEAR anniversary and JACKfruit!!

2009-01-23T18:02:00.001-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

WELCOME HOME!!

This week that has passed saw Michael Judd, Bona Fide co-Director and US based fundraiser and administrator and family (Chris and Carolyn Judd) plus Lady Eve arrive at BF, traveling lightly (just under 500, yes F-I-V-E hundred pounds of luggage) Not all swimsuits and towels either, on the contrary Michael arranged for yet another donation of much needed vitamins and medicines for the Café Infantil nutrition program and lugged them from Maryland to here on Ometepe. Many thanks to these valiant folks especially Chris and Carolyn who not only have made numerous visits to the island and this year in the ‘El Centro’ community center gave its first quilting workshop over a 5 day period, but also work very hard in the US to support BF fundraising efforts. Kudos to all four of you for making the journey.

HAPPY ONE YEAR birthday to our community center. If you take a moment to view the before and after fotos of the center you will see a dramatic change in the exterior but the exterior is just where it begins as one would see inside the building a library on the second floor where before it was vacant and littered with refuse, one would be able to use the internet, charge educational tools/computers, and work on the center with power tools thanks to the complete wiring of the building as well as its grid connection where before there was no light or power. Much has changed both inside and outside of the building with the addition of the playground, holding of numerous classes in English, environmental education, extra help in mathematics as well as art and music PLUS library hours for the public. Much has passed in just one year and there is A LOT to go in the development of the site. Thanks to EVERYONE from volunteers and interns to local supporters and educators as well as Eira Kedward, TALICA, the Knorr family, West Vancouver High School and everyone else…W/O you all we would still be sanding the first boards on the second floor paint job. Thanks again.

Big Change BIG BOAT

I just crossed Lake Nicaragua yesterday on the new ferry, El Rey de Cocibolca (King of Lake Nicaragua). This ferry, imported from Holland is serving the new port of San Jose del Sur and will run 2x daily. Besided carrying up to 16 cars/light trucks and up to 1000 people it is owned and operated by the local government and NOT a private business like the Ferry in Moyagalpa. It is also cheaper. I highly recommend it to folks coming to the island as you will be supporting local government, spending less money and you will also be 10km closer to the Maderas side if you are headed to Bona Fide or Totoco or Zopilote or the playa or Merida. Save money, save gas, buy local. Sweet.

What is this crazy yellow fruit that looks like an alien creature recently eviscerated?

Well actually its Jackfruit/Jaquero (Artocarpus heterophyllus) Bona Fide currently has 6 trees (of about 80 and counting) fruiting at 4.5 years of age which is better than average, selections for breeding/fruit quality are already being made, featured in the two fruit fotos are from the first named variety on the farm, ‘La Hannita’ in honor of long time friend and supporter of the farm. Eating jackfruit is fun, the fruit tastes like Juicy Fruit gum, the seed lightly boiled and peeled tastes like garbanzo bean, great for soups, stews and such. Guess what? You can make hummus out of it. YES. HUMMUS. Well it may not sound like a lot since you can buy it just about anywhere in the USA, Canada, or Western Europe but here hummus is as scarce sub zero temps, well not anymore. WHO knows what crazy fun tasty recipes we will come up with with all these new fruits, nuts, veggies, seeds and leaves we grow. Nice. Very nice.

Where is this beautiful beach?

The gratuitous shot of the Nicaraguan Pacific coast is actually about planting seeds, garden seeds for the record. Chris via his business, Living Systems Solutions is in negotiations with the eco-resort community of Aqua SA to aid them in working with local farmers near the coast to begin a subscription farming/CSA venture for the promotion of organic agriculture and local employment. The BF farm school, Escuela de Campo will be involved in training locals on the coast in nursery development and garden design and implementation. These jobs will be paid positions that will show the students at our school the value of their skills.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director Project Bona Fide
Chris@projectbonafide.com

First Bona Fide group of 2009 and SEEDS!!!!

2009-01-12T16:39:00.006-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters,

2009 has started with a BANG!!, well more like a wet thump, the sound of water hyacinth being plopped into a 5 gallon bucket and hauled off to mulch our perennial food gardens, medicinal herb collection OR our beautiful annual garden of delights!! (better known as vegetables). Thanks to Dawson College of Montreal, Quebec for helping out on the farm and going on an extensive tour of the finca and the community Center in this last week. Congrats to Tom on leading his first tour of BF. Nice one.

*The water hyacinth (Eichornia crassipes) featured in the group foto of folks wallowing in the agua (with the pond featured and smiling faces) was started from just a few plants 5 months ago, this particular species multiplies itself by orders of magnitude to fill closed bodies of water with nitrogen and protein rich organic material that is fit for mulch, forage, cordage, or as a water filter/clarifier.

Well last week and into this week has found me, (Chris) and Jackie Pitts on a whirlwind tour of Costa Rica reaching out to agricultural institutions, private collectors, and relying on the generosity and acumen of fruit and vegetable vendors throughout Costa Rica. We have gone coast to coast, spent a day in San Jose combing the markets, braved poison dart frogs (see ominous red frog foto) (actual size 1.25cm or 1/2") as well as actually ominous spiny palms (see foto, OUCH-OUCH, I still have scars, that is Salak palm (Salacca edulis) by the way as is the reptilian brown looking fruit featured in the other fotos) to collect fruit, nut, herb, timber, multi-use, and biopesticide tree seeds for our nursery which serves Bona Fide, the local community, and sells trees to expats to support its work. We have managed to purchase, trade, collect, and otherwise obtain seeds from CR to expand our nursery, visit our friends down here in the 'Rich Coast' and make new ones.

Please enjoy also the foto of a nutmeg seed (part you grind up and cook or bake with is inside the brown nut) and Mace( a spice), the brown seed with the red 'web' is actually fresh seed of the nutmeg tree with the 'aril' or 'fruit' of the nut making up the actual spice called Mace. Cool huh??

Thanks to all who shared their knowledge, seeds, and love for plants with us and thanks to Jackie for being a humorous and knowledgeable travel companion.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director, Project Bona Fide

Happy New YEAR!!!! Feliz año nuevo!!!

2009-01-05T16:51:00.006-06:00

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

2008-12-21T10:17:00.006-06:00

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

2008-12-15T16:29:00.006-06:00

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

Library opening at 'El Centro' in Balgue

2008-12-08T18:39:00.005-06:00

These last few weeks have seen a lot of growth and improvement at the community center. On Tuesday, December 2nd we had a 'soft opening' of our 2nd floor library space. Thanks to Eira, Natasha, Sue Ellen, Patricia, amongst others the community center got an interior sprucing up. Tom, Amory, and Chris built shelves and we all got the books on them. A NEW FACE TO THE community center, thanks to Marta, Maximillian, and a whole gang of local children, we have a new face to the community center, we loved our first initial paint job but we think this mural says a lot more about us, we have been seeing tourists stopping to take photos of late so it seems we have done it well. Congrats to all!!!

We now have regular library hours, local volunteer help, classes offered by local educators and computer classes we well.
The playground that was envisioned by Heather and Ken Knorr is slowly but surely being installed, we now have a swingset, monkey bars, and see saws, we are awaiting a slide, hopefully before the navidad festivities. The farm is busy now, with all interns present and we are getting ready for a new year of learning and cultural exchange.

Be well,

Chris Shanks

Getting our playground on!

2008-11-27T12:26:00.003-06:00

Rice is Nice

2008-11-26T20:19:00.001-06:00

Hey all,

Enjoy some short footage from our organic rice harvest.

Best to all,

Chris

Late November update

2008-11-22T08:51:00.009-06:00

Greetings all!!,

Chris here once again, poised at my G4, posting images and text like nobodies' business. Days have been overcast and cool here, perfect for getting our garden started for the winter months and for germinating seeds in the BF nursery. The last 10 days have been great. We harvested our first OG rice crop last week. Nevis, the team leader for this project coordinated our local crew plus a crop of eager volunteers to cut, carry, thresh and haul our nearly 300 pounds of rice uphill to the kitchen area to be dried and then milled. It was a hot day for harvest but the dryness accompanying the heat was great for post harvest handling.

This week we also managed to begin the installation of the playground at the community center, so far the see-saw and monkey bars are in, in the coming week we will have a swing set and a slide. Thanks to Delvis the metalworker, his crew as well as david Ortiz our crew chiel and Martin 'El Loco' for their help during the installation.

Much work has been happening down at the community center, the library is just a week away from opening to the public and folks from BF and TALICA are woring hard to make this happen. Thanks to Sue Ellen and TALICA for their hard work and support. We will feature fotos in the next posting that highlights this.

Pejibaye (peach palm) or Bactris gasipaes, yep, that is what that is in my palm. first fruits (4) from a BF research project on food security that has been in process for 4 years. We have now identified 2 seperate pejibaye palms of the 100 we have planted so far as having flowering and fruiting cycles that follow the rainy season. This allows these palms to produce a crop w/o irrigation. Now we can reproduce these varieties for greater distribution to the community and broaden our food security palette of species we offer. We are excited here, four years is a good space of time to wait to get results. Patience is a virtue.

Scope out the pitanga fruit as well (pictured as a singular fruit in my palm). Yum. In English we know it as Suriname cherry or in latin, Eugenia uniflora.

Best to all, enjoy the pictures, stay warm in the North!,

Chris

Mid November update

2008-11-16T13:27:00.006-06:00

Greetings Bona Fide friends and supporters. Long time no see. Chris here, I have been away from the farm for 4 weeks and I just arrived back here a week or so ago. BUSY HERE!!

We are gearing up big time here for our 3rd year with our Farm School, the Escuela de Campo. Nevis and I just had a Sunday afternoon meeting. We will be growing a lot of species and varieties that have done well in the past this year, using our saved compost, manures, and more fertile soil due to cover cropping to enhance production. The EDC will undertake a trial of tomato varieties adapted for the tropics and run a number of trials that will employ organic soil conditioning as well as nim seed cake to discourage the persistent soil bacteria that stymies our work with nightshade family plants other than hot chiles. The EDC students will also work in the nursery and with medicinal herbs and will both give and receive workshops in town and at BF. EDC will also undertake individual research projects based on Permaculture, agro-forestry, and market evaluation for sale of BF crops produced.

Finca Bona Fide is loaded (with fruit that is)!!! As you can see in the foto, we have been harvesting ripe and green papaya for fruit and for green papaya salad (YUM). BF chiles and fresh herbs make an excellent green vegetable salad for dinners and lunches. As the papaya season progresses fesh papaya will go down the hill for the children's nutritional program, Cafe Infantil. Featured in the 3rd fotos that shows four fruits (from top left to right clockwise: Araza, Rollinia, Purple passion fruit, and sweet startfruit) What do all these yummies have in common?

Both the araza and the rolllinia are newcrops introductions to the island as part of our food security efforts, the purple passion fruit and sweet 'Kari' starfruit are new varieties introduced to the island from existing species, the passion fruit should have better market appeal whilst the sweet starfruit is superior to the sour ones found on island due to the taste and the lack of need for sugar to make fruit juice from it.

WHAT ARE THOSE KIDS DOING??

The little guys and gals featured in the planting foto are planting live stakes from a spiny cactus like plant in an effort to begin to fence out pigs from our community center in Balgue. The center will be outfitted with a PLAYGROUND this week, so keep your alls eyes open for this upcoming addition to our work. HUGE thanks to Heather, Sarah, and Ken Knorr for helping to fund raise for this project, Heather was also on the ground to organize the materials and labor.
The kids cannot thank you enough!!

The island is SINKING?

Well....No, but we recieved more rain this year than we have in over 2 decades, more than 1992 when Hurricane Mitch dumped over a yard/meter of rain on us in just 3 days. WOW. The lake level is higher than most folks can remember, for those of you who have visited here, the river Balgue, usually a stream about 6-12" or 15 to 30cm in 3 plus feet, a meter DEEP! I have to ride my motorcycle on a new stream crossing upstream to get across. It is wild!

We are excited for the upcoming arrival of both long term volunteers and 3 staff members, one new this year and two returnees.

It is going to be a fine 2008-09.

Best to all,

Chris Shanks
Co-Director Project Bona Fide
Chris@projectbonafide.com

Late September UPDATE

2008-09-26T16:10:00.002-06:00

Hey BF friends and supporters,

Well I am back in the good ole US of A for one month. I regretfully left the farm the farm 3 days ago for the east coast and beyond.

Tom, Eira, Katherine, and Heather will be manning the 'fort' whilst I am gone and Vienel and Roylin have our backs.

I would like to fare thee well Rachel, our latest and one of our greatest volunteer coordinators. Rachel was with us for over 4 months and she kept up and vamped up our Sunday art program started by Katherine Young in March as well as supported the development of our library and helped out with English classes at the 'Centro.' All that and she led the volunteers in daily work and kep our kitchen running. Kudos to Rachel and good luck in Canada. Stay warm.

In other news both Rachel and Heather used the much appreciated donation given by West Vancouver high school students for needed medications. The ladies went all the way to Managua to commercial pharmacy to get the best prices. HUGE thanks to Aleida, a member of our farm school and a nursing candidate for facilitating the putting together of the medication list and helping locate the lower cost pharmacy.

In other news we were (David, Vienel, Norman, William and I) able to complete the first covered ferrocement water tank with our BF team of masons for a private client that is a BF supporter. This 13,000 gallon water tank is for domestic water and will be 100 percent mosquito larvae proof (no fish in here to larvae!!) Hopefully this tank will serve as amodel for next generation water systems for communities all over the island and further.

With our corn crop harvested and nearly 450 punds of grain to eat and store our cover croppped field is starting to reclaim the corn patch. velvet bean (Mucuna pruriens) that was sown previosly is starting to take over as the picture shows (see corn stalk).

Last but not LEAST!! MYCELIUM RUNNING:

Whilst planting some peach and african oil palm species we came upon a lovely patch of mycorrhizae fungi. This clever little patch of ultra beneficial soil borne organisms was cozying up to a mulch pile under the deep shade of a 6 year old mango tree. This is the largest and healthiest patch of such beneficial soil organisms I have ever observed at BF. A sure sign of soil and site regenration. Go soil MICROLIFE!!.

Thanks for reading and be well,

Chris Shanks
Co-director Project Bona Fide
Chris@projectbonafide.com

Mid September BF UPDATE!

2008-09-15T05:43:00.007-06:00

Greetings all,

Last week was a bit of a doozy! I (Chris) spent 13 hours running around Managua is one of the more challenging days I have had here in Nicaragua over the last 6 years. Customs, shippers, warehousers, a BIG mess that FINALLY yielded 1700 books for our new community center. Whilst I was battling bureaucracy and paperwork folks here on the farm were busy. Rachel's parents were visiting from the US and they jumped right into seeding in the garden, building beds, planting lemongrass and making a WONDERFUL African groundnut stew with local chicken. Tom, Eira, Rachel, and Heather have been kicking butt up here on the farm and down at the center in town. Heather and Eira especially are becoming increasingly more active and interactive with the Cafe Infantil and along with Rachel in the English classes that are being held at the community Center.

I have been busy tracking down breadfruit trees to plant, palm seeds to sow in the nursery, building a ferrocement water tank. and POR FIN, getting our new to us 250 watt wind generator mounted on its nearly 40 foot tower (13m).

ITS GUANABANA SEASON!!!! Sugar apples are coming too and we are still chowing mangoes. I estimate we have harvested one ton of mango this year from our orchard.

Nevis, Aleida, Rachel, her folks, and others harvested our corn this week. Once it is dehusked we will have harvested almost 400 pounds of OG corn for our food for this upcoming year. That is A LOT of Tortillas.

Congrats to Nevis and Aleida for such hard work.

SWEEEET!!!!

Best to all,

Chris Shanks

Chris@projectbonafide.com

Project Bona Fide Update

2008-09-07T08:28:00.003-06:00

Greetings all,

We want to welcome Eira and Tom from the United Kingdom to our staff. They will be here for 6-12 months depending on whether we can keep them well entertained.

Tom will be picking up a building project that was started in February. We are going to be harvesting wood for posts and beams for a neem wood structure with a full bamboo and grass roof. The structure is circular and will serve as staff housing.

Eira is delving right into community center work, coordinating some of the harvest from the farm so it finds its way to the table at our children's nutrition program.

Heather and Rachel have finished the 6 sets of book shelves and I go to Managua tomorrow to hopefully after (4) trips LIBERATE 1800 used books from Spain to get our library on line.

Farm is looking great, guanabana fruit is getting close as are sugar apples, we are just setting up to plant the last few hundred trees.

The garden will be partially replanted this coming week as well and we plan a general community center clean up with members of the community.

My (Chris) house is on its way and the DOME is up. Many great things happening.

Bona Fide VIDEO

2008-08-27T19:40:00.002-06:00

2008-08-25T15:27:00.004-06:00

Kids from the community center at this past weekends tree exchange. We exchanged 200 fruit trees from our nursery. Pictured also: Flora, Heather, and Rachel. Thanks ladies!!!

A Bona Fide Weekly update!

2008-08-25T14:13:00.002-06:00

Greetings Permaculture fans and Bona Fide supporters!!!,

Chris Shanks here updating folks on the comings and goings of Finca Bona Fide. We are going to try to do this weekly and we will see how it goes. Please send along feedback.

Well the last week in August is a busy one. We are finishing up almost three months of planting cover crops, corn, beans, rice, dozens of species of fruit and nut trees, legume trees, multi-use palms, bamboo and medicinal plants. Currently we are gearing up to finish a large wildlife corridor enhancement plan that includes 9 species of native fruits and one species of native nut. We are doing all of this whilst we finish the shelving units for 2000 used books from Spain that we will pick up this week. We just had a visit from Ken Knorr who along with hs daughter finished closing in the second floor of the community center. We now have power there and the work is moving forward faster with power tools from Chris' workshop. Tomorrow (tuesday the 26th) we will plant African oil palms, coconut palms and native thatch palms to finish up our agricultral reforestation efforts on a 2.5 acre piece of BF that we are currently reforesting.

The farm is producing nicely right now with guava, passionfruit, the last of the mangoes, coconuts, araza fruit and edible leaves.

Chris is heading to Leon this weekend to do some private consulting and he hopes to meet with the IPM (integrated pest management) researchers up in Leon to talk to them about giving a workshop at Bona Fide.

Be well all,

Bona Fide Team

Project Bona Fide Mentioned on NicaPOD

2008-06-23T01:18:00.003-06:00

Many thanks to the kind folks over at NicaPOD (Nicaragua Picture of the Day) for including us on their site. We're always interested in and supportive of people putting out the good word on local Nicaraguan goods.