25 March 2015

Beach finds

     You never know what you're going to find on the beach.


     And sometimes even after you find something, it takes a closer look to figure out just what it is you've found.... This turned out to be a sort of shovel or scraper.


13 March 2015

Food - but what is it?

     We've planted a lot of food-producing plants at False Bluff.  To name some, we've put in coconut, papaya, mango, sugar cane, quince, soursop, banana, peppers, passion fruit, oranges, lemons...you get the idea. 
     And now we've planted seedlings of this small tree but I at least have no idea what it's called.  I first saw the fruit hanging from a tree in the yard of a Bluefields' friend.  Of course at the time I didn't know that what I was looking at was fruit, or more specifically, a huge seed pod.  The tree shown here's about four years old.


No, those aren't snakes hanging from the tree.


     They are long pods with a very tough corrugated skin.


     When the pods are opened, they're filled with puffy things. 


     The seeds themselves aren't edible.....


but the sweet, puffy covering is...kind of like cotton candy. Very sweet!


     This is a really bad picture, but the seeds above were at False Bluff less than a week and they had already sprouted and ready to pot, in anticipation of going into the ground and adding to our collection...





02 March 2015

House lots and termites

      In 2014 we had seven house lots surveyed.  We then marked each corner of each lot with a wooden stake.  Each stake was completely painted with oil paint - twice - before the appropriate lot number was painted on the stakes, one numbered stake for each lot's corner. For being done under fairly primitive conditions the stakes looked nice and the sky blue color showed up really well.



     In 2015 we replaced all those stakes because the termites ate right through both layers of oil paint and much of the wood.  We replaced those nice wooden stakes with nice PVC stakes - again, one stake for each of the four corners of each of the seven lots - with numbers.



     Let's see what the termites do with these babies!