Our Mexican Garden: Its Fruit Trees

We are at 5000 feet, and not that far north, just outside Guadalajara at Lake Chapala. We have quite a few fruit trees on our quarter-acre, because the Mexican man who owned this place for over 40 years loved to plant trees.  Here is one of several papaya trees.  This one is female. Others are male, and there is a hermaphrodite (no kidding) with produces much smaller fruits.

Our lemon tree produces at least a few lemons each week, year round, but now in the winter, it is really going to town. We are always giving lemons away, as we get about two a day at this time of year. When I took this photo, the tree had hundreds of lemons on it. Some fall off while green, but many turn yellow before falling off. We never bother with a ladder for the high ones, just wait for them to fall.

You can't really see the bananas here all that well but I thought that the poinsettias growing over six feet high might be worth showing as well.

 

 

 

 

And here are those bananas, getting pretty close to ready. It's feast or famine around here with the bananas -- we've been buying them at the market for months. Friends are coming from Colorado soon, and I am hoping that the bananas will be ripe for them. Once they begin to ripen, we pick the whole thing and give away a lot.

I didn't get photos of our loquat trees, our one little mango tree that hasn't done anything yet, our pistachio tree, our lychee tree, or our pomegranate trees. Nor our young avocado tree -- avocados are actually fruit. Another time!

Some Christmas Thoughts in Mexico

Today is a day of celebration of one of the world's greatest messages. As Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus, what this means is both universal and unique for each person.

To me, the essence of Christianity is the universal message to love our neighbors as ourselves -- a message rooted in Judaism and shared with all the great religions and ethical teachings.

It's a lovely phrase and an enormous challenge. When Kelly and I wrote our wedding vows long ago, we promised to respect each other's needs and wishes as equal to our own. We've kept that as a goal, though of course we have often done otherwise. Very often.

If it's as challenging as it's been with one beloved person, how well have I done at loving my neighbors, some of whom I don't even like? Nowhere near 100%, that's for sure... so forgiveness is mighty welcome. How will I express this love in the future? I've been reflecting on this.

And that's where Mexico comes in. It's my home. My neighbors are mostly Mexicans -- people of a different culture, people of different economic levels, people who speak a different language -- and often way too rapidly for me to get all they are saying! But many of my North American English-speaking neighbors also come from very different backgrounds than Kelly and I do.

Diversity like this means I encounter people regularly who see life very differently than I do, and so I am always trying to respect everybody's right to their own viewpoints, choices, and lives... even when I don't agree with them!

Beyond that, I celebrate what I see around me. It's easy to celebrate the stunning beauty of Lake Chapala, the kindness and spontaneous warmth so characteristic of Mexicans, the climate here, and much more. Other things do present a challenge. I'll keep working on it, in my life and here in my blog. Jesus left us a lot of good advice about how to work on it. Merry Christmas, everyone!

Our Mexican Organic Vegetable Garden: December Report

We added four organic vegetable beds to our yard this past summer, with brick or block walls and some really good compost that a man in nearby Jocotepec delivered to us. By the time we got the beds created, it was way too late by US standards, but we decided just to see what would thrive.

Here, lettuce on the left and carrots on the right are going strong. You can't see the daikon, cilantro, or kale. That's a little dog statue from Colima at the corner. We had two rare hailstorms one December day, but all the hail did was poke some holes in all the leafy greens.

This is our largest bed. The tall bushy vegetation is a bunch of cherry tomatoes that are not doing much, but then we are having nights in the mid 30s to mid 40s. Next to the tomatoes are snow peas that have about stopped blooming but gave us a prodigious harvest for weeks. In front, we had green beans which are now done but we still have cucumbers, chard, kohlrabi, and a zucchini-like squash called zucchino -- it, like most of our plantings, are heirloom non-hybrid seeds so we can save seeds for next year. There's an adjacent bed with five artichoke plants coming along nicely.

 

This squash is turning out to be something of a wonder. It is producing numerous long, curved zucchinos. You can sort of see three of them toppling over the garden wall here, all the way to the ground... that turned out to be a problem, as worms got in the ones resting on the ground. The statue is something we got locally, representing the rabbit in the moon (that's what they see) with a female figure.

 

 

 

Gardening in a tropical paradise at 5000 feet elevation is not all easy, though. There are a number of bugs to compete with, and we don't always win. Here, you can see what was done to our nasturtiums. All those stems once had leaves on them -- eaten by caterpillars. Kelly has picked hundreds of them off. They also like the arugula (rocket) we have there, but they completely ignore the basil and carrots nearby.

 

 

We are happy with our gardening experiments so far. The zucchino wrapped around my neck measured 46 inches... it was delicious, stir-fried with other veggies.

In case you wonder how we clean our veggies here: if we just pick a handful of something, we usually rinse it in bottled water. But when I process as much as you see in the photo or more, it would use a good bit of bottled water, so I rinse things in our tap water which is not safe to drink. Then I fill an enamel basin I keep just for this task with the tap water and add the requisite number of drops of MicroDyn or Albiosan, both available at grocery stores, usually in the produce section. The produce sits for about 20 minutes in this bath and then I have a dish drainer I use for clean produce. This system seems to work fine.

Just a Walk to the Market

This morning I walked downtown (8 minutes) to our weekly tianguis or market here in San Juan Cosala, by Lake Chapala. (Regular readers, do you ever get tired of my working the location into the first paragraph of most of my posts? It's because people come here from searching all sorts of topics online.)

I almost got attacked by a cat first thing. It was hissing at another cat or a dog under a truck and considered taking on my ankles.

Narrowly escaping that hazard, the rest of the outing was a piece of cake. I chatted with a Jehovah's Witness. She didn't say she was till I asked, just said she loved to talk about the Bible with others who speak English.

At the market, I sat down behind the stall of a friend of mine, Connie, who was looking especially beautiful today. I've written about her before... she and her mother sell plants. We chatted for a while. Then an American friend I hadn't seen in several weeks came by. I wandered down along the stalls with her a friend of hers. Learned that another friend of ours had gone back to the US to see about making some money. Got invited to a Christmas Eve party. Bought some produce from our usual vendors, Blanca and Carlos. When I commented on Carlos' beard, he said it was for the cold weather.

At another stall, I bought two wooden picture frames. I asked the vendor where they were made and he said in Michoacan, a state nearby. He lives here and his family is there.

While picking out a Mexican Christmas songs CD, I was greeted by another Mexican friend. Jose also commented on the cold.

As I wandered home, stopping in at the tortilleria for a stack of fresh hot tortillas (2 pesos, about 15 cents US), I reflected on cold weather. Taking off my long sleeved shirt because I was too warm, I thought: this ain't it.

Learn Spanish After 50... or 60!

When I ran into Beatriz Siliceo at a party recently, I took advantage of our meeting to ask her a few questions about learning Spanish. She's a bilingual Mexican who is so at home in English that she does translations and has taught English as a second language. I had met her a time or two before, when friends of mine were studying beginning Spanish with her in San Antonio Tlayacapan, here by Lake Chapala. I had been pleased to see verb charts on their refrigerator.

I hear so many older foreigners here in Mexico saying how hard they find it to learn Spanish. While I have noticed that sometimes I learn a word on Monday and can't remember it Tuesday, I think that also happened when I lived in Spain when I was 25!

So I asked Beatriz, "Do you find that people who are about 60 have any more trouble learning Spanish that, say, those who are about 40?"

"Not at all," she said. "Motivation is far more important than age."

My experience in Mexico is so much the richer for speaking Spanish. Just recently, I spent some time with a delightful Mexican man who didn't speak English. When I apologized for my fractured verbs and lousy accent, he said (in Spanish) "But we can communicate! That's the important thing!"

I also think that the little hassles of everyday can be much more severe if you live in Mexico or any Spanish-speaking country and don't speak Spanish. Recently I called the electric company to report a power outage, certainly far easier with a modicum of Spanish than not.

If you are in the Lake Chapala area and want to learn Spanish with Beatriz, her email is beatrizsiliceo at hotmail dot com... I put it that way because you can figure it out but there is software that searches the net for spammers, looking for email addresses.

Wherever you are, whatever age you are, do learn more Spanish! Here's a page where I review

my favorite downloadable program to learn to speak Spanish.

Potter Ken Edwards Visits Us

Before Ken Edwards returned to Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, which is now his home base, he and Joel Godinez came out to our place for lunch and lots of talk about websites, blogs, pottery, and such. This went on in a lively mix of English and Spanish, with Ken's, Joel's, and my laptops spread across a long worktable we have.

Here Ken is describing a good way to take a picture of several people -- to get one to point at something all are looking at. I like having a picture of Ken with his pottery in use on the table in front of him! (We're on our front porch here, which is why there are bars on the window behind us.)

That photo doesn't do justice to Joel's good looks, so here is another:

Joel is like a son to Ken, running the factory here in Mexico, and an extremely fine artist in his own right. He showed Kelly and me some photos of him with President Calderon, where he was receiving an award a couple of months ago, for a gorgeous pot he had created. He came in third in all of Mexico in a competition of thousands of potters. When he gets more details up on his blog, I will link to it.

At the Ken Edwards Factory in Tonala, Jalisco

Last week, we went to Tonala to meet Ken Edwards, famous for the stoneware pottery that his various businesses have created here in Mexico for many decades. At first, Kelly and I heard the story of how Ken Edwards got started in stoneware in Mexico -- the link takes you to that blog post, with an 11-minute mp3 file of part of the interview.

After we talked, we went next door to the factory and Ken showed us around. It was evident what good relationships he had with the workers. He goes back decades with many of them.

Here, he stands in front of one of the kilns. Unfortunately, I've forgotten the details of what was unique about this particular kiln, but he had invented some aspect of it! Everything they do is reduction stoneware.

The shelves (and parts of the floor) were full of pots that had been fired but not yet glazed.

 

 

 

 

The men who paint the charming designs on the pottery work together; there were about six of them.

They hold their brushes in what we would consider an upside-down position, which Ken had discovered actually works better for accuracy!

Here is one of the large stoneware pots soon to be fired again.

Where is Lake Chapala?

Technorati Tags: Lake Chapala,Guadalajara

People are always asking me where I live. Here is Lake Chapala relative to Guadalajara. I just discovered I can embed Google Maps in my site! San Juan Cosala is to the west (left) of where the town of Chapala is marked.

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And here the green arrow points to Guadalajara. We're pretty far south of the border. By the time any hurricanes might get here -- and ones from the Pacific do bring us a lot of our rainy season rains -- they have lost a lot of steam coming through the rugged mountains! If there is a big white box over the map, I don't know if there is a way I could have gotten rid of it but just click on the X in its upper right corner to close it. You can probably move the map around with your cursor to see further in any direction, or use the arrows. The + and - will take you closer in or further out.

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