She sits in the top of the greenest tree
She sits in the top of the greenest tree
She sends out an aroma of undefined love! It drips on down in a mist from above!
The soil is so fertile it’s almost vulgar. At night I go out and smell it, or maybe “huff” is the better verb, given how deviant it feels to lurk among the shadows in a geosmin euphoria.
I made some plans for what to grow. The land to which I have access is municipal; I do not own it. But empty land doesn’t bear the same foreboding aura here that it does in the States. Nobody will yell at you or issue a ticket for making cordial use of unoccupied land.
Bananas were first, because they are so easy. It is a copy and paste job. An empty lot nearby featured a thriving grove, so we dug up rhizomes and hacked them to pieces with a machete and buried them. That was in July. Two months later a litter of baby plants caroused in the sun. (You can see a few below.)Their stems raced skyward; their leaves broadened into solar panels.
The new bananas valiantly abided a hurricane and an earthquake. From us they required nothing, so we moved on to the next crop.
A low-effort way to make planting decisions is to walk around and see what thrives in live soil without intervention. Here, on the 21st parallel north, there is: noni, guava, passionfruit, Surinam cherry, papaya, jackfruit. Also a ton of castor bean, aka Ricinus communis, aka the source of the poison that the guy on Breaking Bad used to vanquish his enemies.
Ricin is easy to prepare and I take a certain pride in passing the trees every day, knowing that I can but choose not to euthanize myself.
I decided on Surinam cherries because they are convenient (self-fruiting) and look like Italian Renaissance hats:
Plus, how often do you get to eat a food that is “tufted”? Plus^2, the taste is unique; like eating a tart cherry upon which a sprig of tarragon has been placed. Plus^3, the trees repel flies.
I couldn’t access any local trees to get cuttings—they were all guarded by brambles or, in one case, a menacing cur—but my seed hookup came through. Now I just need a container the size of a garbage bin…
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