Boats jockey for position

          Every day is market day in Bluefields when fresh food is delivered by boat directly from the source to the buyer.  Most of the food sold at the wharfs consists of very fresh picked bananas, oranges, lemons, plantains; and very freshly caught fish and shrimp. 
     Most everything for sale in Bluefields arrives in town by water.  Some of it gets flown in, but that consists usually of small stuff - not things like cars or king sized mattresses or roofing materials or new tires or a new couch.   Now that "the road" is finished more material will travel to town by truck; but the road is new and not totally reliable during the rainy season.
     There are several wharfs throughout the city, all with boats positioning themselves as close as possible to buyers.  This wharf is in the heart of town adjacent to the main market.
     Sellers and buyers know each other and shop daily for the freshest produce for home, hotel, sidewalk market, or restaurant.  

Let me out of here!

     Does not want to take "no" for an answer.
     This is on the upstairs porch at Hotel Caribbean Dream on Bluefields' main drag and from here you can get a pretty good view of what's going on in the center of town.

     And "no"...you can't get off the boat until we get to False Bluff.

Building materials

     Wood cut to order for framing a new building and the incredible 'new' cementitious roofing rest in a shady spot at False Bluff before the stuff is needed.  
     The climate along any body of water is rough on everything, even housing.  Along the Caribbean, salt-filled breezes tear the paint off exterior walls and the sun fades colors fast.  Metal roofs rust away regardless of how often they're painted.    Maintenance only does so much.  
     Cementitious roofing, however, can have the color impregnated throughout and won't need paint for years, if ever...and then not because of the salt in the air but from the bleaching sun.
     The roofing, though of a pretty standard widths, is offered in multiple lengths so there's very little waste in installation.

     The ridge caps, which are also cementitious,  are awesome - in the literal definition of the word: "extremely impressive or daunting, inspiring great admiration."  Some are shown here being loaded into one of a two boat caravan taking material to False Bluff.

   

     There's a photo from this earlier post giving a close up look at the roof material, minus the color...although I can't imagine anyone wanting a grey roof:  
http://www.falsebluff.com/2017/07/so-much-for-watching-zinc-rust.html

     One of my goals in life is to never, ever, build anything that has a roof with valleys...amen.

Leaving facebook

We thank you for following our story on facebook, but we’re going to leave there real soon.

With that said, we hope you stick with us to keep up with the really incredible journey, because we sure aren't leaving False Bluff. We have plans and people to introduce and plants to grow; and as we learn, we'll share.

The False Bluff story and new pictures will continue be just a click away at www.falsebluff.com, especially if you bookmark us. We've tried to post weekly and haven't missed that mark by much.

Send us your questions and comments at falsebluffnicaragua@gmail.com

Through a fence in Bluefields

     Gardens in Virginia are governed largely by the weather, as are gardens in Bluefields.
   The big difference is the weather...

    I don't think many Virginians would anticipate orchids blooming year 'round in the front garden.

Mother's in the nursery

      From Wikipedia:  "A Mother plant is a plant grown for the purpose of taking cuttings or offsets in order to grow more quantity of the same plant."
     The first season after planting this rooted cutting of a very young oleander mother, she has adapted nicely to her spot in our nursery.  She will have a pale yellow blossom.

     The second season shows the growth of the 

plant (right side of photo).  She's tall and ungainly but....

     ...she's ready to donate cuttings.

     Taking cuttings from the our mother plants will not only give us additional plants to use and sell, but will help shape the plant for more propagation. 
     (By the way...I spent a few minutes deciding whether this post should be titled "Mother's in the nursery" or "Mothers in the nursery."  Either fits.)

The working life of a coconut palm

     When a coconut tree begins to bear fruit (coconuts), it doesn't stop until it's dead.  The tree's production may differ with time, or with the weather, or with ill health.  But the tree's purpose in life is to make coconuts, whether anybody uses them or not.
     This photo sums up the work that's constantly in progress, showing the stages involved in producing coconuts throughout the life of the tree - from the top, or crown, down...always.  
     At the highest producing point of this tree are the flowers, those sprays of yellow (another spray of flowers can be seen to the right of those bright yellow ones).  
     Just below the flowers are the new, small, coconuts themselves that come from the flowers (and barely visible to the left of those babies are some infant coconuts).  
     In the bottom tier shown are coconuts that are nearing harvest time.  In fact, some of these coconuts are ready for harvest, depending on the coconut's intended use (but that's a whole 'nother story).

.

They're getting used to us

     Hurricane Joan in 1988 did something hurricanes rarely do: she jumped over Central America from the Caribbean to the Pacific, getting a new name when she did so. Joan-Miriam was the final hurricane of the Atlantic hurricane season and the final named storm of the Pacific hurricane season.  

     And she was a real bitch by any name.

     Part of the damage she did to Nicaragua was the destruction of almost all of what fed the monkeys and for decades most people in the area thought all the monkeys along Nicaragua's Caribbean coast had died, either as a result of Joan's killing winds or of starvation that followed the loss of their food sources.

     I'm glad to say they didn't all die and they're making a comeback.  Here are some of our locals on one of their well traveled overhead routes...this byway across the canal not too far from the house.

      It used to be that when the monkeys saw us they screamed and swung.  Not so much any more.  Now they just sort of hang out and watch what we're up to.

El Nido

     Almost finished...

     The Nest, our small library and game room, will be parged and then painted.  
     Shady space below for chairs and hammocks.  
     The Nest is much closer to the beach than our first building.

Leaving Bluefields

     One of La Costena's small planes rises over Bluefields and the bay on its way to Big Corn Island, then passing over False Bluff as it heads east across the Caribbean - about 20 minutes from Bluefields to Big Island.
     We can tell the approximate time of day based on the sound of La Costena's planes overhead - because they're the only planes in the sky in this part of the world.

Extraordinary Jose

     I've known Jose for years.  I've watched him grow from boyhood to manhood.  He's taller, more responsible, learned, and with plans to head to medical school.  
     I will gleefully celebrate as he goes forward. 

     (And thank you for the bracelet you made me.)

The False Bluff journey

    
     "Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision."                 
                  Ayn Rand

Guess what

     ...lives inside this seed.

     I never would have guessed that a sea turtle lives inside each of these seeds; but Mr. Lawrence on Big Corn Island knew there was a turtle in each and he skillfully coaxes them out, one at a time.

     Lawrence Dacosta Downs is an artisan and over the years I've purchased some of his beautiful hand made jewelry.  But when I saw one of his turtles I knew I had to have one. Thanks to Mr. Lawrence I now have a whole bale of his tiny turtles.  

     When you visit Big Island, Rowena at Sunrise Hotel in South End can help connect you with Mr. Lawrence.  'Ena and Mr. Lawrence are two more of the extraordinary people on Nicaragua's Caribbean side.

The nursery expands....

     Much of the decision to open a plant nursery was self-serving: I need salt tolerant landscape plants and was pretty sure there are other people who want the same thing.  
     Setting space aside for growing plants was no problem and so the nursery was laid out in a space south of our existing buildings near where visitors step off the main pier.  
     The immediate challenge was to locate and establish 'mother' plants, the either highly or moderately salt tolerant plants from which we could propagate plants for use at False Bluff or for sale.  Locating such plant stock continues to be a problem although our inventory is growing.  Even in the United States very few nurseries specialize in salt tolerant plants.  In Nicaragua, so far we're it; and we're not up and running yet.  
     Even in the nursery oriented town of Catarina in Nicaragua's west side I couldn't find any salt tolerant plants...hibiscus colored like I've only seen in catalogues - yes; roses - yes, although not rugosa which is sometimes called the beach rose.  I couldn't even find oleander, a very salt tolerant and a very showy shrub.  Most people who shop in Catarina don't need - probably haven't even thought about - salt tolerant plants, so it make sense the people there don't waste their time and money growing things people aren't going to buy.  
     But over time we have gathered some highly and some moderately salt tolerant landscape plants.  Not all of the plants we've added have showy blooms - some of them have showy foliage instead.  And a few of our plants were added simply because of their root systems, things like like sea oats and vetiver. 
     And, of course, as the inventory of plants has increased, the size of nursery has increased.

     Our mother plants are thriving and growing in our coastal environment; and some of them are even supplying us with cuttings to root;  and the sea grape seedlings (that came from seeds harvested from plants at False Bluff) are more than ready to plant or sell.

 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

     The picture of Winsome shown in the December 25, post was taken when she was five months old.  She's now nine months and weighed in at the vet's office last week at 90 pounds.  She's good company.  

        The short video below was probably filmed in Europe and has most likely outlived its featured Dogue de Bordeaux; but the grace and playfulness of the breed show clearly.

  

Maybe blooming next month?

     Ha! Probably not - but at the rate these things are putting out new growth, who knows.
     Last month I described propagating an oleander by tip cutting and included a picture of the new plants I had just potted.
     Just weeks later the amount of new growth is pretty astonishing...am only showing one of them but they've all grown at the same rate.  This is fun.

A typical hardware store in RACS

     I've never shopped at a hardware store in Bluefields where the staff was anything but genial and anxious to help.  This store is near the Santa Rosa bridge on the way to the airport.

     RACCS, or RACS in its shortened form, stands for Region Autonoma de la Costa Caribe Sur.  
     Up until a few years ago it was RAAS, which stood for Región Autónoma del Atlántico Sur.  I think someone somewhere simply made a correction: Nicaragua's east coast is on the Caribbean not the Atlantic.  Been that way for a very very long time.     
     All of this RACS stuff just refers to the southernmost of Nicaragua's two autonomous regions.

Propagation by seed....making more and more plants

     Though with a most innocuous bloom, the sea grape plant itself is beautiful...in an earlier post I described it as sculptural, which it is.
      It's also an excellent plant for conservation purposes with a huge root system.  In most places along the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua and on both of the Corn Islands, there are laws against its removal.  We have several large plants which add interest and beauty to our landscape - and the seeds from our plants have provided young plants for us to use and eventually to sell.
     Initially we sowed the seeds in a minimally protected area - a 'tent' made of a discarded shrimp net - and the germination rate was high, producing hundreds of seedlings. 

     After nearly two seasons in their tent, the seedlings were dug and planted, three to a bag.  In most of Nicaragua plastic bags are used instead of plastic pots.
     The young plants spent a season in their bags in a protected space as shown below and then the bags of plants were placed in the nursery, fully exposed to the weather in which they'll spend the rest of their hopefully very long lives.

     The picture above shows only a small number of the baby plants we bagged.  

Propagation by tip cutting...another way to increase our plant nursery stock

     At False Bluff we're working with several methods of propagating plants, one of which involves what's known as 'tip cuttings.'  Here's the result of an experiment with tip cuttings in Virginia.  
     A tip cutting can be a piece of a plant's stem or of its root.  My experiment was done using the tips of stems on an oleander plant.  Most cuttings are stem pieces; and after the stem is cut to the desired length, all but a few of the leaves are removed and often the very tip of the stem piece as well (routine removal of the tip encourages early branching of a new plant). 
     Tip cuttings are mere 'pinchings' from the ends of stems so that, ideally, when cuttings are taken, the tips of each cutting can provide an additional opportunity for a new plant.  In other words, you cut a piece of stem  say 7" long.  You remove all but a few of the leaves from the piece of stem closest to where the stem was attached to the plant; and then you pinch out the very tip of the stem.  
     The bared end of that piece of stem, the piece with no leaves, is then stuck into soil, kept sheltered, and watered; and eventually should form its own roots, thus becoming a new plant (often before sticking the cutting into soil the bare end is treated with a rooting hormone).  
     In the past we've discarded both the leaves we strip from the stem and the tip of the stem we've pinched out.  Often that tip has flower buds and those are removed because a rootless piece of stem will spend its energy on getting the flowers open rather than on forming roots.  
     If I wanted stem cuttings for their flowers, I'd cut the damned things and stick them in vases in the living room.  What I'm doing here, on the other hand, is all about facilitating the making of new plants.  
     Using both the longer stem cutting and the formerly-trash tip of that stem as a second cutting gives us twice as many opportunities at propagation: the piece I cut on purpose and the piece I used to throw away.
     In this example I never actually cut anything but literally pinched off the final 2" or 3" of tender growth from ends of some branches of an oleander plant with a deep pink double blossom.    
     After removing a flower-bud sprout from each of them (another pinch), I rinsed and then stuck the pinchings, plant end down, in a small clear glass jar with just enough water to cover the ends...and put the jar in a north facing windowsill and waited.
     And waited.
     And waited.
     And then I waited some more.
     Every few days I would empty the water, rinse the ends of the pinchings, and put enough fresh water into the jar to cover the ends again.  There's a reason, related to oxygen's beneficial effect on root formation, for changing the water rather than simply replacing what evaporation takes.  
     I hadn't made a note of when these went into water but after what seemed like a long time I noticed the beginnings of roots, small enough to not to even be visible in the first picture.

     And then one day there were enough roots to remove these babies from their water world and plant them in very friable soil.  All five pinchings had rooted; the two that had the least root system shared a pot.

     

    

     The cutting with the least root system didn't survive and a second plant succumbed to cat intrusion.  The remaining three cuttings aren't cuttings anymore but tiny plants with a measurable amount of new growth.

I'm stuck with a bucket of water....

     ...and a pile of sand while everybody else is swimming. 
     The Caribbean's behind me with really high waves today and nobody'll give me a surf board.