Greetings! My name is Will, and I’ll be tagging along with Jenny for the rest of her travels through the Yucatan. Like Jenny, I’m a graduate of the same teacher training program (UChicago UTEP) where Danny is currently studying. Next year, I’ll be teaching Earth science at Kelly High School in Chicago (Go Trojans!). I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to study the natural history and horticultural practices of this region of Mexico, and can’t wait to bring some of what I learn back to my classroom next year.
On my first full day here on Holbox, I had the unique experience of swimming with the largest fish on Earth. I couldn’t have asked for a better, more relaxing start to my stay here. Jenny assured me, however, that we would be hard at work the following day, at Daniel Trigo’s organic garden and orchard. Certainly the hard work part proved to be true- but I also found that tending to a garden here in the Yucatan could be nearly as exciting as swimming with the whale sharks.
When we arrived at Blat-ha, we greeted Daniel and some guests and discussed the MHG back in Chicago as well as some books describing the plants of the Yucatan and thousands of years of Mayan agricultural practices (more on these in a later post). But soon the topic turned to the work at hand- today, Jenny and I would be maintaining a worm-compost culture and harvesting various chiles and chaya, a vegetable that originated here in the Yucatan.
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| Finding the worms |
To help continue Daniel’s vermiculture, our first job was to sift through about a half of a cubic yard of post-compost dirt and pull out all of the red wigglers (Eisenia fetida) we could find. While these worms make for excellent composters, they prefer an environment high in decaying organic matter (like vegetables and other compostables) to soil. Daniel was also worried that the worms experienced too much heat under the Yucatan sun, and wanted to concentrate whatever live worms were left. We found more living worms than we bargained for, ranging in size from only a few millimeters (presumably newly born) to several inches long (presumably reproductive). The next day, we found our concentrated colony of red wigglers happily eating away at compost in the Blat-ha kitchen. Then we used the remaining post-compost soil to help nurture the garden’s pineapple plants, after a bit of weeding.
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| Chaya Success! |
After describing his composting system and inquiring about Jenny’s students’ system back in Chicago, Daniel asked if I knew how to pick chaya (Cnidoscolus aconitifolius). I was eager to learn, but didn’t realize that delicious chaya plants have at least two defenses against harvesting their edible leaves. The first are spines on the underside of the leaves, which I easily avoided using Daniel’s technique of folding the front side of the leave around the leaf stem before picking. The other defense is a milky-white sap (similar in appearance to milkweed sap) that irritates the skin. By the time I finished harvesting 50 or so chaya leaves, my hands felt like they were on fire, though a simple rinse immediately eased the discomfort.
After the harvesting lesson, Janny, Daniel, and I talked chaya for a few minutes. First, while not common in Chicago, we know of at least one chef who manages to grow the plant in the city. One day, Jenny and her students hope to have a healthy chaya plant growing in the Mexican Heritage Garden at school. Second, it is generally recommended that the highly-nutritious chaya be cooked before eating because of the potential release of poisonous cyanide from the raw leaf. However, Daniel, and many others, apparently ignore this advice and prefer the raw leaf. Hopefully in moderation! And don’t try this at home!
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| Chile Harvest |
The chiles in Daniel’s garden were ready for harvest. Fortunately, Jenny, wondering how the chile plants her students have been growing since February were doing back in Chicago, was eager to pick dozens. When we asked what kind they were, Daniel said that he wasn’t sure, because they are likely a hybrid, several generations in, perhaps a mix of jalapeno and habanero.
The following day, in addition to tending to the pineapple plants and trimming down an abundance of native goldenrod, Jenny and I went on a mission to gather some natural fertilizer from a ranch down the road. We were told that if we asked for the “miel de Daniel” (“Daniel’s honey”) the proprietors would point us to their dried horse manure. Walking back from my second trip to the ranch, as a large iguana crossed the sand road in front of me from one thicket of palm trees to another, and with the blue-green waters of the Gulf of Mexico not fifty feet from me, it struck me that I never thought I’d have so much fun hauling a wheelbarrow full of horse poop.
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| The secret ingredient of any successful gardener |
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| Freshly weeded and fertilized pineapples |
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