Digging In and Planting It Up

'Tis the season of fall here in Misiones, and we have been busy with our interns prepping the garden beds and planting all the winter goodies, including elephant garlic (above.)

We super jazzed our soil, adding Paloma's composted cow manure, decomposed sawdust, our own humanure compost (10 months of cooking!), plus some tea dust. Our bed were double-dug last year, so this time around we just used the spading fork to turn in all the goodies and loosen up the clay chunks.

Planting included carrots, fava beans, caulifower, broccoli, lettuces galore, arugula, rocket, parsley, and a whole lot more herbs and veggies. We received some seeds from afar to try out here, next to our regionally-adapted varieties. We are also experimenting with some winter-loving tomatoes (is there such a thing?) and some peppers.
The interns started a lovely garden of their own, with lots of seeds and plantlings.


The kitchen garden is getting love too. We hand-water with our river water when it doesn't rain for a few days (or weeks...)

Chicken update: We have 11 new chicks, 10 of which hatched in the forest under two mama hens hiding out from us and the predators. Now we have a lot of chirping going on!

Our new building, the bathroom for the log cabin is just getting started. Here is the first part, leveling the site.

...And getting it flat and prepped for its adobe walls.

The floor (red of course!) and the door.In the Kitchen: Peanut Butter making! It is local peanut harvest time and we are taking advantage and grinding up some jars of goodness. (Our peanuts did fairly well, but we are saving our peanuts as seed for next season. Our neighbors had a good harvest, so we traded some peanuts from them for our grinding.)

And apples too... lots of applesauce for the palate. Mmmmm... Good way to make use of rainy days.