Life is a Tropical Garden

By V.L. Stuart

In the tropics, the seasons have disappeared; you have never seen so much rain. Leaf-cutter ants strip trees overnight and things you always grew successfully don't seem to care much for the new climate. Things can get quite odd in the tropics and trying to adapt can cause some downright funny situations. Why even the "dirt" is different ...and

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen It Publications
• Release date: Dec 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781639844982

Book preview

1

Welcome to

Life is a Tropical Garden

I suppose a few words of introduction are in order ... like how did I get here? And by here, I mean, of course, the tropics.

When I first told my husband, Larry (aka Metric Man – he is a scientist), that I wanted to retire somewhere outside the States where outdoor gardening was possible year-round, he referred to it as one of your little enthusiasms. (I refer to that as, Moving to Costa Rica, Stage One).

I also bristled at the word little, so I ordered a map of Costa Rica. Not just any map, mind you, one of the giant National Geographic maps with only half the country on each side. I hung my huge map on our computer room wall and began referring to it during conversations. I started to look at Costa Rican homes for sale on the internet and corresponded with Moran Realty in Nuevo Arenal. Amazingly the owner, Terry, didn’t think that it was at all unusual to be having long-distance communication with a possible buyer. Instead, he encouraged my interest in moving.

This led my husband and me to Stage Two, which involved heavy sighs (his), much head shaking (his), and exasperation (mine). That’s when I bought the vacation tickets. One week on the beach in Costa Rica, which he had to admit was not a bad thing. That set up the next stage.

Stage Three was reasonably straightforward. I ordered books on CR (as we had now started to call it), including those on retiring in 1.) a foreign country and 2.) Costa Rica. I began to refer to our future as when we retire in Costa Rica, and he began to take it more seriously.

Stage Four was showing him houses that I liked, checking the climate in various parts of the country, looking at services, calculating expenses, and continuing to say, when we retire in Costa Rica.

Then, suddenly, movement! He asked, what about Panama? After two weeks in Panama, he actually agreed that CR was better, so I moved boldly to Stage Five – another visit, this time to look at houses in the Pacific coastal town of Jaco Beach.

Don’t get me wrong, Jaco is lovely – beautiful homes, great beaches. It is also scorching hot and very humid. Things rust in the salt air. Especially metal railings and cars. Our realtor actually confessed to us that she has the undercarriage of her vehicle steam-washed weekly to keep it from rusting. We both agreed that somewhere else in the country might be a better plan.

But that gave us another problem. Metric Man wanted a sailboat. He has always wanted a sailboat, and if it meant we could move to Costa Rica, I was willing to bribe him with a sailboat. Very well, where else could he sail?

Off we went to the highland area where there is a twenty-mile-long lake - Lake Arenal. The lake is man-made and tranquil, surrounded by rolling green hills, and has a volcano close to one end.

You may have seen the Arenal volcano in pictures of Costa Rica. It is one of the world’s most perfect and picturesque cinder cone volcanoes, a lovely pyramid of ash that still erupts occasionally. When it does, the peak glows red with lava as it throws that ash into the air. At night, that lava colors the clouds, and photographers grab their cameras. The Arenal volcano is not a particularly violent or threatening mountain but well worth a photo or two or ten.

At the other end of the lake is another volcano, although it is a bit farther away. This one, Volcán Tenorio, is not as benign as Volcán Arenal (as we call it in Spanish). Tenorio has been known to throw boulders the size of SUVs miles into the surrounding countryside. As you might imagine, we are not anxious for it to erupt, although the boulders usually fall to the south and west of us.

To get to Nuevo Arenal, we drove through Tilarán and over a small ridge of hills. As we crested them, there it was laid out ahead of us, shining in the sun – Lake Arenal. A perfect beautiful blue with the volcano at the other end. Three days later, after only seven hours of house hunting, we signed the paperwork. Yes, really! We found a home in a foreign country after only seven hours of looking (okay, you have to exclude the time at Jaco). Sometimes it’s just right.

Suddenly we found ourselves with six weeks to pack, put the house on the market, and move to another country! Like many of our contemporaries in the same ... mumble, mumble ... age group, we were downsizing our home. On the other hand, we were upsizing our land! After all, a girl’s got to garden, right?

Six weeks later, there we were, planted in Costa Rica with eleven acres of land to play with and no idea what gardening in the tropics was all about, and mostly just trial and error as a learning tool. After a couple of years, it occurred to me that I could share my trial and error gardening experiences with others who were new to the tropics and maybe throw in some humorous anecdotes about events that happened along the way. Jay Brodell of AM Costa Rica (amcostarica.com) agreed with me, and I was suddenly in the newspaper business.

So that’s where this book came from – my weekly columns and some addendums. They were (and are) fun to write, and I hope you find them fun to read.

2

Talking Dirty

When you start writing a column about gardening, people expect you to talk about the basics – like dirt. This can be a bit boring because everybody writes about dirt. However, for those who like to start with the basics, here we go.

If you’re a gardener, you turn your back on the umpteen number of unopened boxes in your new home, step outside, and look for a place to dig in the dirt. After all, the boxes will be there when it gets dark, so it’s an easy decision.

Me? I gardened in New Jersey, Ohio, upstate New York, and Georgia. Each area has its own environment, its own soil, water, temperature, and pests. And each has its own gardening demands. Gardening habits had to change for each location, but those changes were nothing compared to the changes required when we moved to the tropics.

This is the first time I have lived in a country with only two seasons, rainy and dry. Worse than that, we live near Lake Arenal where we have a rainy season and a rainier season, with a few weeks of dry weather that occasionally sneak in.

So, how do you garden in the tropics? First, the most essential element. Let’s talk about dirt versus garden soil. Dirt can be just about anything. Still, soil is composed of inorganic material, organics (think compost), nutrients, fungi, animals (think worms), water, and surprisingly, air. About 1/4 of garden soil is made up of air. Air for the plants and animals that live in the ground and air between the particles of dirt to allow water to filter to plant roots. Without aerated soil, your chances of growing anything is slight.

Some of our dirt here looks marvelous. I have a patch of rich-looking, black ground that I dig out to use as fill at low spots in the garden. There is just one problem. From the surface and down about 15 inches, there are no worms. None. And, no matter how good your soil looks, if there are no worms, your soil does not have enough organic nutrients (think compost again) to be healthy. Adding a commercial fertilizer will help plants grow, but it won’t give you truly healthy garden soil.

This is a problem all over the tropics. Why? Rain. After all, what do you think of when someone says, tropical vacation? Palm trees, right? Lush verdant countryside, right? And what makes it lush and tropical? Rain, the thing that makes the tropics tropical.

Funny thing about rain, it also washes nutrients right out of the soil.

Understand, I have no qualms about adding commercial pelleted fertilizers. No one has shown that plants can tell the difference between a prepared nitrogen molecule and one from rotted manure. However, many of my friends still shudder at the mention of pelleted fertilizers. Though I do agree with organic gardening friends who claim only fertilizers like compost provide an environment where worms can thrive.

So, how do you make healthy soil? In New York, it was dirt, peat moss, and composted manure. In Georgia, it was dirt, composted manure, and soil amendment. Here in Costa Rica, because of our varied environments, from black dirt to rusty red and from clay to sand, we need to make a lot of local adjustments. Healthy garden soil needs few additions. Sandy soil requires solid doses of compost and even some light clay to hold moisture. And clay? I had my clay dug out to a depth of about 8 inches. I crushed some of the clay and added it to my black dirt with a lot of compost. Why? Clay holds water and black dirt doesn’t. Yes, black dirt looks wonderful, but water goes right through it.

Pretty basic, right? Let’s plow ahead!

Let’s talk dirty. Well, no. Let’s talk some more about dirt.

At the most simple, dirt (the inorganic part of garden soil) is small particles of pulverized rock. Dirt can be white beach sand (quartz or limestone), black beach sand (volcanic rock), river silt (water eroded bits of various kinds of stone), the stuff you find in your yard, or even ground-up plastic.

I know that someone is thinking, ground-up plastic? and, yes, it is the size of the inorganic particles that is important. Grind up plastic to pieces of 1 mm or less, add organics, air, nutrients, and water and plants will grow. It is the particles’ size that matters, and that is why clay is such a bad host for plants.

Clay is a marvel. Its particles are so tiny that we have to use a