white, purple and green

We spend a good portion of each day at the new house. Today we arrived a bit late, but were happy to see a great big pile of white marl had been delivered as promised.

We used marl from digging the septic tank to fill in the rocks before the floor was poured. It seemed like a good idea. But we also need marl to plaster the walls of the house. We have a marl pit on the property. But to carry the marl all the way to the house in buckets would have taken forever. We could have dug another hole, but it would have to be roughly as big as the hole for the septic tank, and that took a week more or less to dig.

An opportunity arose for us to obtain marl for the cost of renting a truck to haul it in and two guys to work a day loading and unloading it. The marl is possibly better than the marl in our marl pit and we took the opportunity.

Here Canelo inspects the White Marl.



One of the reasons we go every day is to feed and give some attention to Enki, our new dog. There are two other dogs on premises. Neither is ours, but they hang out there. Canelo lives about a mile away, or rather he did. He still goes home, probably every day to get fed, then he comes back, to get fed again.

Also hanging out is a little black female dog. I think her real name is Negrita, but we call her Dainty. She is supposed to be in Chan Chen, a village about 5 miles from Chakha'asi. She belongs to the night watchman. He originally brought two dogs to help him guard, and he eventually took the other one home. He apparently took this dog home too, but she returned, covered in mud and wet. Apparently she crossed a swamp to return. He wants to keep her, but I think he will need to carry her back and chain her where she belongs for a week or so.

We call her Dainty because the name fits her well. She does not like to sleep on concrete.



Of course our favorite on site dog is our own dog Enki. We found Enki about a week ago starved on the side of the road. Enki was and still is in bad shape. We have been feeding him up and we gave him a dose of Ivermectin, a drug that kills worms, mites and the critter that causes mange.



A week of good feeding, daily affection and attention have done wonders for Enki's spirit. However, as he grows stronger more problems become apparent. Just as in Enlil's case, as he gets stronger his immune system seems to kick in. The result is copious quantities of mucus.

At the same time, he gains the strength to scratch at wounds and sores. This opens them up. This is probably good, when starving, the wounds just stopped bleeding, but did not really heal. Now stronger, the dog is scratching open old sores that had just crusted over. Now with good nutrition, maybe they can heal. However the dog is still weak. We have sprayed the wounds with Ixcanan tea, but he licks that off. We are not able to watch him as closely as we watched Enlil when he was recovering, so something else seemed needed.

He has enough wounds, and large enough wounds, that there is a danger of the wounds becoming fly infested as well as massive infection. I spoke with a veterinarian here and she suggested I spray all the wounds with Gentian Violet. This is a dye, that like many other dyes was once used, and still is used in some places as a medicine. In this case it is supposedly effective against gram positive bacteria.

Purple Medicine




Enki shows other signs of old traumas. I am not a practitioner of Canine Phrenology, however his skull seems ridged as if it was once shattered. It does feel symmetrical, and the dog did not seem to mind me touching his head at all, in fact he craves such contact, but then I did not press hard to see if the underlying skull moved at all. It is possible that he was hit by a car at some point. He also has a long scar from his back down his side. This could have been an old machete wound.

Before you get outraged that someone would harm a dog in such a way, I should say that I have on a number of occasions seen dogs either singly or in groups attack bicyclists. On several occasions I have yelled from the car to scare dogs that were harassing someone on a bike, and once I thought I might have to hit a dog with the car so that a bicyclist would not be pulled off his bike.

Bicyclists, and most of the population uses a bike, generally carry a stick to thrash dogs that want to bring them down. Some, perhaps those who have already been dragged down by aggressive dogs carry a machete. It is a very common occurance to see a bicyclist peddling furiously, with more than a shade of fear in his face, as dogs chase him.

Enki is not currently an aggressive dog. However Enlil once seemed particularly docile. Now that Enlil is in good condition, it is necessary to chain him if anyone other than the members of the household are to enter the yard. At one time Enki may have been a dangerous dog.

Green all around.

We also spend a great deal of time gardening. Here is the path we have worn to the garden site in the south.



Here we are growing only red beans. These are not kidney beans but a smaller deep red bean. We have three plots here, we are experimenting with spacing. We presume and hope that these are bush beans. Here Dainty inspects the spacing of the red beans.



Most of the gardening is happening East of the house. Here we are trying to grow black beans, by the book so to speak.



And also we are growing more red beans with chaya and squash.



Also East of the house, we are growing rosita beans.



In fact we are growing a lot of rosita beans.



Today Christopher, Johnny and I opened up a new row East of the house. This time we are planting pinto beans. Pretty ones, brown and red.



West of the house we have planted purple corn. We continue to plant in an ever enlarging square every other day or so.



We started planting corn several weeks late, but some has already sprouted.



As the corn sprouts, weeding becomes tremendously difficult. The young corn looks very much like the grass. We can tell the two apart, but we have to weed slowly and not quickly rip out any grass like plant.

As we expand the corn square, we run into bushes and such. Leguminous trees we prune and leave in place, but bushy shrubs have to be chopped out.



With regard to weeds, we have no choice but to consider the grass an ally. The grass grows fast, high, and began growing right after fire swept the meadow, without any rain, suppressing most other weeds. It pulls up by the roots easily, and makes a very handy mulch.

In contrast to the grass, there are several other weeds that are harder to deal with. The worst of these is a bushy little plant with pretty crinkled dark green leaves and small white flowers that dry into pretty miniature dandelion like seed puffs. When we pull this plant, the stems almost always break off, and the plant regrows from the roots. The stems broken from the roots finish ripening their flowers into seeds and then dry out. We are currently dealing with this by raking these plants hard, piling the rakings over the roots, letting them dry and burning them in an effort to kill the roots and the seeds. At the very least this treatment slows the plant down long enough that the grass can overwhelm it and choke it out. At least that is our hope.

Although we can not be certain of the outcome, we appear to have hit upon a method that allows us to transform grassland into bean field with alarming ease.

One of us pulls up a bunch of the good grass leaving a big hole where the roots were. Another of us drops a bean in the hole and we shake the dirt from the roots onto the bean. Then we toss the grass bunch with the roots resting on the previous bunch of grass, and the leaves covering the bean and the dirt. We can do long rows like this, planting, weeding and mulching within arms reach.

The beans end up buried deeper than they ought to be, but the soil above them is shaken from the roots of the grass. The beans seem to have no trouble pushing through the loose soil and the dry grass leaves.

We do not dig to plant beans. We use only a pair of gloves and a bag of beans. One of us has dispensed with even the gloves as the hands have grown harder.

As we use entire rows of grass as mulch, it seems important to preserve a number of rows in grass to provide seeds for next years grass. These grass rows we actually weed keeping them free of less amenable weeds.

The grass also grows tall enough that it can serve to prevent different kinds of beans, squash and possibly even corn from pollinating uncontrollably. We may be able to grow various varieties with out having them cross randomly with other varieties. This might allow us to grow hot peppers and still save seeds from sweet peppers, and maintain numerous varieties of beans.