Living It Up Lunar Style

Biodynamics and the concept of farming according to the lunar cycle is very cool. Not only can it be applied to agriculture, but also to daily life! Gustavo, our agriculture intern from EARTH University, has a book written by Johanna Paungger and Thomas Poppe that describes how the lunar cycle can be incorporated in daily life. For example, one section of the book describes days that are best for haircuts, and days when the moon is in Leo or Virgo are best. The two times differ a bit in that Virgo is best for a long lasting haircut, while Leo is better for overall hair strength. I’m not sure how this was measured, or the validity of the claims, but I’m eager to give it a try, especially since I’m in a bit of a need for a haircut. The book has been translated in several languages and the English version is titled Moon Time: The Art of Harmony with Nature and Lunar Cycles.

I’ve been learning so much about Biodynamics since I’ve been here. I’ve also been doing a lot of reading about soil preparation and composting. I had no idea what a science composing is. Farming biodynamically and organically is not only good for our health, but for the health of the planet. The concept of planting with lunar and planetary phases is especially interesting, in part because it connects our food to something greater than just the earth; it connects it to the universe. The ways in which lunar cycles are used in agriculture are based on simple concepts, for example, a full moon will draw up sap from a tree and is therefore a good time to harvest sap, but it is an especially bad time to harvest trees for wood since there will be a high moisture content in the wood, causing it to rot easily. Days around a new moon are ideal for wood harvesting since there will be a low water content in the wood. I’ve also learned that mornings are best for picking fruit and leafy greens since the water content in the leaves and fruit are greatest in the mornings before the sun gets too hot. Evenings, on the contrary, are best for harvesting root plants, like carrots and potatoes, because the plant’s energy is concentrated in the root. Unfortunately these methods are costly to employ on a commercial level since it is inefficient to use labor at a different time each day.

People, like plants, also have certain unshakable biorhythms. Birds rely on their biorhythms to coordinate roosting and food gathering with their partner. Another example is how, inexplicably, certain chemotherapies have higher success rates in cancer patients depending upon the time they are administered. Despite research and promising results, the practice of cancer therapies according to biorhythms is not performed, sadly because it is too difficult to coordinate staffing of such health professionals round the clock. Another example is that people function most efficiently during daylight hours, regardless of change in sleeping habits. Those who work the night shift are often prone to make mistakes and some of the greatest disasters our world has seen have occurred in the hours between 1 am and 5 am, during the night shift. The Chernobyl nuclear explosion, which occurred at 1:23 am, is one such example.

People, plants, and animals all have biorhythms, and such biorhythms are accumulations of behaviors and hormones changes which are regulated by the sun and moon. I’ve learned how these biorhythms involve the sun and how they affect humans and animals, but I’m also now beginning to learn the importance of lunar cycles and how plants are equally affected. Fascinating.

Morning Yoga and a Meeting of Great Minds

Today I led a group in a yoga session for the first time! We have a group from the Rodale Institute, one of the oldest organic organizations in the States, staying with us and this morning some of them caught me coming back from doing yoga in the tower this morning and they mentioned how they wanted do some yoga themselves. After I got mats out for them one of them mentioned how excited they were to have me lead them in a yoga session. eek! I wasn’t planning on leading them! I’m more of an admirer of yoga and most of what I know is what I’ve picked up from guests who pass through. I was a bit timid at first, but I just gave my disclaimer and went ahead with it. Towards the end of the session I was getting more comfortable and walking around helping people to realign themselves and get a deeper stretch in various poses. Interesting experience for me; I really liked it. When I get back home I will look into learning more about yoga. I just love it. My flexibility has increased so much and it’s just such a great way to start the day!

Also this weekend we’re hosting a Cultivating Diversity think group where an interdisciplinary group of people came together to investigate avenues of change in agriculture systems. The great minds present included people from the NGOs, certifying agencies, universities, the ministry of agriculture, farmers, and students from EARTH, the top tropical agriculture university in the world. They were dreaming up ways of creating a future Costa Rica and how to implement changes that would increase self-sustainable and just agricultural systems. And despite the language barrier, I got to participate! Jann, the facilitator, was great. I learned so much about how to get a group of people to be creative and then organize their visions and ideas. Her method involved getting ideas down on lots of colored pieces of paper and then organizing this flurry of ideas onto corkboards. We finished the night with a dinner accompanied with Luna’s starfruit wine and ginger mead and a fermented biodynamic alcoholic drink that tasted like Kaluha. Yum!

In between the morning yoga session and the Cultivating Biodiversity meeting I made, with the help of Rocio, about 8 pounds of ginger candy. Rocio and I spent the entire late morning peeling ginger until our hands felt hot and tingly from the ginger juices. After I was done I though I would never want to eat ginger candy again, but by the evening I was just snacking away. They're quite addicting!

Chocolate Making Attempt Thwarted by Mini Natural Disasters, and How to Keep Pesky Squirrels at Bay

Oh no! Just as I thought my cacao pods were coming along nicely—they almost smelled like chocolate a few days into the process—they began to mold! Everything molds during rainy season! My shoes, my backpack, my jewelry, and now my cacao! And after I remedied the mold issue they began to sprout! The embryo of the bean is supposed to shrivel and die in the fermentation process, not grow! But alas, I guess everything just grows in the rainforest. Also, the cacao beans began to be a breeding ground for little maggots. After assessing the myriad of problems, I had to toss all the beans into the forest area just outside the lodge (aka our non-food compost pile). I had two chocolate recipes to try too. One was a truffle recipe which used the whole bean, and the other was a real chocolate recipe. I have a new fermenting recipe to try for next time, and this one is full proof…I hope.

Also, I just learned how to control pests using a biodynamic method. It involves skinning the pest, such as a rat or squirrel, and charring the skin in a wood fire until it’s just ashes. Then, the ashes are spread around the plants and fields that need inoculation. Gustavo was using it to control rats in our food garden and now we’re going to use it against squirrels in our cacao fields, which are being ravished by squirrels and fungus. I was given instructions on how to char the skin just in case a dead squirrel is delivered to me this weekend when Gustavo isn’t going to be around. The only thing I didn’t get instructions on was how to skin a squirrel. It can’t be hard, right? I dissected rats in bio lab, so this shouldn’t be too far off.

Tree Identification and Cacao

Identifying trees is tougher than identifying short shrubby plants! I went out today identifying trees with Roberto. To properly id a tree, it’s necessary to inspect the leaves, but since I cannot reach them by hand (canopy trees can be up to 20 meters tall) I had to use binoculars. I am not a fan of using binoculars and even using them for stationary objects, like leaves, is dizzying for me. I had to lie down on the ground and point the binoculars upwards, all the while being wary of being bitten by ants. And it's especially difficult to id trees in the rainforest since various trees are crowded together and leafy vines are growing on everything, making it confusing to figure out which leaf belongs to which plant. After spending half an hour identifying an Inga tree in the Fabaceae family (bean family), I narrowed it down to four possible species. Now I just need to wait until it's flowering or fruiting to be able to pin down the species.

I’m also fermenting cacao pods to make chocolate! We got 25 cacao pods from our cacao field. Using his machete, Fernando helped hack open the pods and I spread out the sweet mucilaginous beans onto a straw mat placed at the bottom of a drum container cut vertically in half. I then marched out in the garden, armed with a heavy kitchen knife, and retrieved a few banana leaves to cover the beans so they can ferment in the dark.

Also, funny side note speaking of chocolate. In the morning, after seeing Fernando make himself some chocolate milk using fresh milk, I really wanted a glass for myself. Later in the day I went down to the pool kitchen, where we keep our milk, and filled a little pitcher with a bit of milk. Once back at the main kitchen I set to work mixing in some sugar and cocoa powder. It was the richest chocolate milk I had ever tasted. In the morning I found out that the milk that I used to make my chocolate milk was not cow’s milk but buffalo milk! No wonder it was so creamy! Buffalo milk has a much higher fat content than cow’s milk, which makes it ideal for thick yogurts, cheeses, and butters.

How We Get Our Chicken Dinner

Luna Nueva has really been connecting me to my food source. Because I’ve been in California for so long, where grocery stores are stocked year-round with every possible fruit and vegetable, I’ve lost sight of how our food is grown and where it actually comes from. Even after having been on the farm for two and a half months and knowing that the delicious pork and chicken that I dine on comes from the animals I see every day and adore so much, I have never really seen that middle step between clucking chicken and stove-top.

When Sara Newmark came for a visit with the Whole Foods’ Whole Planet Foundation (who are all such warm and incredible people! I wish they could have stayed a longer) she decided to stay an extra week at Luna, and little did I know that on her agenda was an item that would fill in that missing step in my understanding of food--she wanted to kill, clean, and eat a chicken. Her reasoning was that since she ate a lot of chicken, she should be able to kill one as a symbolic way of validating and completing the cycle of her consumption. Oddly, though I cannot kill a spider, I have no qualms about killing anything that I will eat, especially if it is done in a humane way, so the chicken sacrifice was not too an emotional experience for me, but taking life is serious and I felt heaviness in the air. The whole process was very gentle. Fernando and Yeudy, our animal guys on the farm, brought out the chicken and calmed it a bit by gently stroking it. Sara then said her thanks to the chicken and with the guidance of Yeudy, swiftly made the sacrifice. Tom Newmark, CEO of New Chapter, the vitamin company that owns Luna Nueva, also participated. He said it best when he described the act as feeling as though he just did something that people have been doing for hundreds of years. The chickens were next dipped in boiling water, plucked, cleaned, and quartered. The event ended with a heartfelt dinner. After observing this process I have a deeper appreciation for my food and am more grateful for my meals. If everyone was this in touch with their food than I doubt that there would ever be any waste!

On a lighter note, I want to mention how comical I find it when people ask me to act as a translator for them--if only they knew how rudimentary my Spanish really is! But despite speaking a really crude Spanish, I have developed a means of communicating most anything I need to with everyone on the farm, though I sometimes doubt what I interpret. The day of the chicken sacrifice Fernando and Yeudy asked me if Sara and I wanted to kill a turkey instead of a chicken. They said they needed to know ahead of time because they had to feed the turkey guaro (a Costa Rican hard liquor) beforehand. I looked at him incredulously and thought, “Did I hear him right? He needs to get the turkey drunk prior to its sacrifice?” After a "Como?" he repeated the same thing and I walked away a bit uncertain until Iti confirmed that the turkey sacrificing process does indeed include Costa Rican hard liquor.

In short, Luna Nueva is fostering an appreciation of food that makes each bite that much more delicious.

Many New Projects

Great day! I woke at 4:30 am to do a little yoga in the observation tower at 5 am with Gustavo, our agriculture intern who I’ve recently turned onto yoga. At 5:30 am we descended from the tower and made ourselves a breakfast of farm fresh scrambled eggs and toast with a hot cup of coffee. At six, which is when everyone starts work on the farm, I went out to collect sap from the Sangre de Drago (dragon’s blood) tree. After hearing how dragon’s blood sap is a great way to treat botfly wounds, and after discovering that many of our livestock suffer from such wounds, I decided to try a little experiment and help out the animals. Dragon’s blood sap is a deep crimson color, and as I hacked a V shape into the tree with a knife, it looked like the tree was bleeding. After collecting a bit of the sap, I donned a pair of rubber boots and hiked out to the dairy where the water buffalo are being milked. Since Julie, our mother water buffalo, is a new mother and being milked, I decided to treat her first. I couldn’t find a documented procedure for using the sap to treat the wounds, so I am just trying an undiluted application directly onto the wounds.

On my way back to the lodge, I ran into Steven who was on his way to check out the ginger plants. I accompanied him out into the field and we talked about trying to make ginger candy. Young ginger roots, around 4-5 months old, are best for making candy because they are less fibrous and spicy than mature ginger. After the short hike, I rushed back to the lodge to research ginger candy recipes and to answer a few reservation inquiries.

During lunch I began researching cow milking videos on YouTube for another project I am starting to pursue—videotaping buffalo milking and other happenings on the farm. Rocio, curious about what I was doing, asked how I was able to find so many different videos. She had never heard of YouTube and after a short introduction became an immediate fan. In no time she discovered music videos and even a few karaoke music videos, and by the end of lunch she had me and all the girls singing along to ranchero karaoke.

After lunch I pursued ginger candy making. I had about 3 different recipes to try and Rocio and Ana each had one. To practice my videotaping skills, I filmed Ana and Rocio making their candy recipes. Ana’s ginger taffy recipe didn’t work out because we were using the wrong sugar and the fresh ginger we used added too much water. Rocio’s first attempt ended up burning, but her second attempt was great. After dinner I tried some of my recipes out. One was a really spicy one that I used with just a tiny amount of sugar, the other didn’t turn out like I thought it would, but it was gooey, pink (colored with rosa de Jamaica tea), and just delicious! I then experimented by dipping the various pieces in molten dark chocolate. Tomorrow Ana is going to try a second attempt at ginger taffy and I’m going to up early again to film buffalo milking.

Learning to Make Beer

I learned how to make beer today! We at Luna Nueva are constantly seeking new recipes to introduce healthy foods on our farm. Fermented foods are wonderful for health, and since beer is fermented, and can be considered a food if it is unfiltered, we started to make our own beer! After tasting the first batch of beer I’ve been eager to learn how it was done. Just before I arrived at Luna our first batch of ginger mead, jackass bitter beer, and starfruit wine was made. The beers were made to be medicinal brews—something strong and good for your health since fermented foods, ginger, honey, and jackass bitters all have medicinal properties—but they were a bit too strong! The ginger was a bit overpowering, so the recipe had to be altered a bit, but the starfruit wine was just lovely! It was tart and sweet and a lot of fun to drink.

When Harold, our farm manager, was making a second batch of the ginger mead, I and the other interns, Gustavo and Riza, came to help and watch how it was done. We all donned hair nets and started heating the water and juicing the ginger and limes. The ingredients are so simple! All we needed was honey (it’s was makes it a mead), limes, ginger, and some yeast. I had no idea that making beer was so easy. The only tricky part was maintaining steady temperatures.

First, we heated the honey and then added it to a large vat of hot water. Next we added the ginger and lime juice and let the whole mixture heat for 30 minutes at 68° C. Then we poured the concoction into a sealable bucket and added cold water to make 19 L. After letting the solution cool to 26° C, we pitched in some yeast, while stirring it vigorously, and sealed the bucket. Now it just sits for a week and is later bottled where it will ferment some more for six weeks. Simple!

I can’t wait to try the new batch! I am definitely going to try brewing beer when I get home.