Casita Chuparosa

My biochar kiln doesn’t work correctly because the door does not seal tight, and too much air can get in, and smoke and gasses get out. To make charcoal or biochar, you need a fairly air-tight container, or the contents will just burn to ash.

First burn of the biochar kiln, showing escaping smoke around door

For a fix, I decided to use the old trick traditional cooks use when they want to keep moisture from escaping from a clay pot — more clay. Wet clay can be used to seal the lid. That should work on my kiln too. It doesn’t need to be 100% effective, just 90 or 95% will be enough.

But where am I to get clay? I’ve seen layers of clay in soil profiles in a lot a places I’ve lived, but we haven’t been here long enough to know where those kind of places are in this area. Probably plenty up in the mountains that are a 15 minute drive away, but I don’t even need to go that far.

Soon after we bought this place I tested the soil to see how much clay, silt, gravel and sand was present. That is a simple process (if you don’t need super-accurate results). I put a handful of dirt in a glass jar, added enough water to fill it, put on the cap and gave it a good shake. Then set it down. Most of what settles to the bottom immediately is gravel or sand. Above that is a layer that falls in the next 30 to 60 seconds, and that is silt. Everything else is clay, which can take hours or even days to settle completely. Our soil has about 50% clay content, 30% silt and 20% sand.

So the same process can be used to extract the clay from the soil. I filled a bucket half-full with soil, then added water and stirred it up good. I let it settle just 60 seconds, then poured the slurry into another bucket, without the sediment. After a few hours, the second bucket had settled (the clay is not so fine as to take days), and I poured as much of the clear water off as I could, which also takes away most of the plant rootlets and other floating organic materials. The thick slurry that was left I poured into a flat tray and set it out in the sun to dry off. That is all fairly-pure clay. When the water content gets to the right level I can twirl a chunk between my hands and make a rope-like strand, just as you would if you were making a coiled pot. That will seal the kiln just fine.

We now have three clumps of bananas. The biggest one, and the only one to flower so far, produces little apples. No, really, that’s what they call them. They are short, fat, sweet little bananas, and the local name in Spanish is manzanitas, which translates as little apples. But that is not what they make manzanita tea from, that comes from a different sort of plant altogether. But still nothing to do with apples.

Here is a picture of the papery flowers, each at the end of a new little banana. The purple sheath that encloses the newborn bananas makes a dramatic visual impact against the broad green leaves of the plant. As you can see from the photo, we have a coconut palm that took root near the base of the banana plants. Before we bought this place that was one of the few spots on the property to be watered regularly during the dry season — the coconut was one of four left there to root, with the apparent intention of replanting them elsewhere. When we found them, this one was too large to move, but we transplanted two others, and the fourth never sprouted.

Manzanita bananas with flowers

When we were here in May I cut some tree branches, browned banana leaves, and raked up some leaves from the fig tree to start a little compost pile. When we came back in October, there was a banana plant growing out of the middle of that pile. Not sure how that got there, or exactly what kind of bananas we will get from it, but I bet they grow faster than the ‘2nd clump’ as I call them.

The 2nd clump were just out of reach of the water hose when we came in May (I brought a longer hose this time!), and it has not gotten any fertilization. It did grow over the rainy season, but has yet to produce any fruit. The soil is very black, but mostly clay, and while some weeds grow prolifically, the bananas are lacking something in their nutrients needed for producing fruit.

The clump of plants in the photo get fish, chickent bones and other such goodies for fertilizer. Anything we can’t compost that is biodegradable, we bury in little holes, about 15 cm wide and 40 cm deep, with the top half of the hole filed with back-dirt, so they are too deep for the stray cats to dig them back up. Our first batch of holes have been located around that clump of bananas, about a meter away from the plant. One more such hole and we will move on to the 2nd clump.

One of the first things I did when we moved in here was to build a big pile of rocks near the back of the property. The neighbors were curious of course, and asked what I was doing. “Building an iguana house” I told them. They shook their heads and walked away, not sure if I was joking.

Last May when we were here for a weekend to pay the contractor for adding a bathroom to the house (there was only an out-house when we bought the place), I got the idea. The contractor left a huge pile of river stones in the street, left-overs from building the stone wall that fronts the road. We hired a couple teenagers to carry the rocks onto our property (not that anyone was complaining about blocking the road — that is just common practice here, people just drive around the piles of construction material. Within 48 hours a small black iguana came and took up residence in that rock pile. Here he is climbing the neighbor’s brick wall, which is next to the rock pile.

Blackie the Iguana climbing the wall

So those rocks are too near the casita, and black iguanas get really big (1-1/2 meters long, without the tail) so I figured we would move the rocks and the iguanas would follow. Iguanas, now plural, as during the intervening months two more iguanas have taken up residence on the property.

Anyhow, we thus established our credentials as ‘animal lovers’ among the locals (who have a very utlitarian approach to animals — iguanas are food). So when some neighborhood kids rescued a bird from a dog, they naturally brought it to us. Isabel has an old parrot-cage (she wants a parrot but we have never found one that we can be sure is captive-bred, and refuse to buy one captured from the wild), so she put the injured bird there, with food and water.

Cassique bites the hand that feeds it

Unfortunately, the bird was too badly injured to survive, but I did get the above picture of it. It appears to me to be a Cassique (Cacicus cela) sometimes called a Yellow-rumped Cassique, or Black and Yellow Oriole. They are very common around here, our big fig tree has a nest belonging to a pair of these, a typical dangling drop-shaped nest typical of orioles, truly a wonder of architectural construction.

The only problem is, according to the distribution maps for these birds, they are not supposed to be found this far north. Either my identification is wrong, or the maps are.

I had plans to post a wide variety of information on our progress refurbishing Casita Chuparosa, with before and after pictures, and photos of the iguanas who live in our yard, and all the interesting plants and so on and so forth — but today I think I’ll just talk about the beach a little. We spent much of the day on the beach yesterday, so the impressions are fresh in my mind. I’ll have to get all retrospective another time.

We drove down to Boca de Apisa, about four or five kilometers from here. I wanted to collect some driftwood to use as fuel for my new biochar kiln. We took along some woven-plastic bags like they use for farm grains and such, and Isabel had her little hand-cart to help her wheel the bags when they are full of driftwood. I use the large sized bags (about a meter high) and just carry or drag them back to the car. Her bags are about 3/4 as large, but still hold a good deal of wood — probably 20 to 25 kilos.

Here is a view of the beach where erosion has cut into the mangrove forest a bit, leaving skeletal trees on the beach:

Skeletons of mangrove trees on the beach

The sand of the beach rises to a sharp crest, beyond which it slopes gradually down to a lagoon, fringed with mangrove forest. The driftwood gets carried up to the edge of that crest at high tide each day, or thrown over it when there is a serious storm. We mostly collect the older stuff on the high side, as it is drier.

After collecting six bags of wood (all the car will hold) we set up our picnic under a little palapa someone has built for shade, eat our sandwiches, and relax. Isabel drinks some strange apple-flavored soy milk stuff, but I stick to good old Mexican beer. We take a dip in the ocean as it begins to get hot, but the relentless sun drives back under our palapa for a bit of a snooze. Rough work this collecting firewood.