Grow

Our mango tree is finally producing.

The rainy season has been teasing us for weeks. Little droplets of rain, or cat-hairs, as people here call them, mist the air for ten minutes, just enough to barely dampen the ground. But the daily short, torrential downpours that are typical between May and November have refused to make an appearance so far this year.

For farmers, this is not good. They depend on the regularity of the rain to nurture the beans that they plant at this time of year. For weeks, they held off on planting, waiting for the crop security that daily rain brings. But they could only wait so long without missing their chance – and a huge portion of their yearly salary – completely. Even though the daily rains still haven't begun, farmers have finally started planting in the hopes that the rain will come soon.

Today we took a walk in the countryside just outside San Nicolas and ran into a friend of ours. He showed us the field of beans that he had planted about two weeks ago. They were small, four-inch sprouts, and he said that if the rains don't come soon, the sprouts will dry up or get attacked by insects.

Beans are the staple, of course, of the Nicaraguan diet, and this impending shortage has already upped their price from 14 cordobas (54 cents) a pound to around 20 cordobas (77 cents) a pound. This might not seem like much, but when people's daily incomes are so low (see our blog about this) and when an average family consumes several pounds of beans per day, this is a fairly significant increase in price. Not only will the absence of rain affect the salary of the farmers who plant them, then; it will also affect all Nicaraguans who eat beans (which is all Nicaraguans).

Nicaraguan flag in the garden helps the plants grow!

When rains are cooperating, however, the earth here is amazingly fertile. You don't even need seeds – you can just cut off a little stub of a tree branch and plant it in the ground and an entirely new tree will take root and grow.

Last weekend we spent the day at a hostel at the crater lake Laguna de Apoyo. I noticed some flowers that I liked planted along the path to the lake, so Davie went to work furtively uprooting a few of them to take home and plant. At the most inopportune moment, one of the hostel staff appeared and asked if everything was all right. I tried to shield Davie's work and said everything was fine, but the dirt-encrusted flowers in Davie's hands made it pretty obvious what we were up to. “You know,” said the hostel worker, “They will survive better if you just put them in a jar with some water.”

Hanging garden made by Davie.

So apparently everyone does this here. When you see a plant that you like growing in someone else's yard, you just clip off a bit of it or uproot a little sprig and plant it in your own yard. People can afford to be generous with their plants because they know that if they ever want more of it, all they have to do is cut off a little bit and replant it.

Being a transplant myself, I rather like the symbolism of this. Here is a place where I can be uprooted from the life I know and be replanted. Here is a place that is receptive to new growth, where I can generate new roots and thrive in a new environment.

Our back yard is certainly proof of this principle. For years before we got here, our back yard was the repository where sucker-wrappers and rum bottles landed when people carelessly chucked them over a fence. Since we got here nine months ago, Davie has worked in the yard almost every day, raking and building paths and planting nubbins of tree branches here and there. And the earth receives them all and regenerates them all and grows them all, so that now, instead of a trash dump, our yard has become a garden.