Bonafide!

In what is perhaps my last set of photos, I offer you Finca Bonafide. Just go to this farm.

Amidst the hard work, borrowed camping pads, and flat sleeping surface, I slept very well those three days.

Proyecto Bonafide is complex, involving community support initiatives, cultivation of new seed varieties, educational internships, and permaculture design courses, and a whole lot more.

Like some nice gardens.

Another gratuitous shot of big mama Concepcion.

I was lucky enough to receive an overview of the project's many facets from Chris, one of the developers of Bonafide. Here is the design they are marketing for thin-walled water tanks. The tanks are round and structurally reinforced all around, so they need much less cement which is hard to come by on the island.

More garden greens being grown behind Chris's house. He is one of those brilliant innovators who also happens to be strong enough to build his own house. He was excited to share with me his enthusiasm for snakefruit plants, a prized delicacy in SE Asia, of which he has one of only two groves growing in Central America.

I enjoyed meeting him the first day, when he put out the call offering cold beer in exchange for mulching help. It was very cold and delicious. That was a very good day.

Here are some of the staff, shelling cacao beans that have been roasted 20 mintues or so. It was one of three chocolate making parties I was around, at three different farms over the course of five days.

Other materials get prepared to mix with the chocolate.

Volunteers break up and grind the beans into chocolate paste.

On my last day there, I would help Ed, on the right, begin creating a series of compost bins, organizing the large amount of compost generated at the farm.

I take a turn.

Mitch has recently joined the management team at Bonafide. Here he begins heating up the natural sweetener to be used in the chocolate.

Everyone is getting pretty excited as the dark chocolates are being rolled out.

Then some of the paste is combined over heat with milk for a lighter chocolate. Could've used more--it was still very dark!

You do catch a definite buzz off of this kind of chocolate. It is probably the main stimulant used at the Inanitah community I would subsequently last two days at. Here at Bonafide, we were making it to sell to kids coming through for an educational visit that night. (We would all pig out the next day.)

Take 50 pizza crusts...

a bunch of fixins...

a ridiculously large oven...

mix 'em all together...

and BOOM!

It's pizza night!

Tom just joined the staff from Seed Savers in Iowa, and brought a whole bunch of heirloom seeds. Here, staff sort through plans for medicinal herb gardens.

All non-receyclable trash is stuffed into plastic bottles and used as construction material. I was told a small plastic water bottle holds a 5-gallon bucket load of trash.

Looking out from the kitchen, there are spokes of garden beds and shrubbery in every direction.

Here is a site we were cleaning up to be developed into a canopied social garden space.

Work on the farm is well organized, and the operation runs with good energy. Volunteers are on the clock from 7 to noon, with a breakfast break at 8, but often participate in other projects throughout the day. In three dyas, I bucketed water to plants, mulched, stuffed garbage, made chocolate, made bamboo root starts (from among the 9 varieties grown on the farm) and transplanted them (a.k.a. hard work!), started rock-walled compost bins, sifted ash to be used as a soap substitute, and...well, you get the idea.

One of the natural buildings on the farm, many of which are open-walled. Bugs are definitely present amidst the lushness of the growth here, but can be managed, particularly by covering up at dawn and dusk hours.

This was the groovy shot of a young volunteer having some fun with the manual lopper, upon which my camera lens gave it up.

Bonafide is a great farm to learn all that you ever want to know about serious permaculture. They have developed Jackfruit, for example, a tree fruit native to Ometepe which has dozens of uses, as a marketable commodity. Marketing occurs naturally, as they have many locals working for and with them, so when word gets out that something works, it is quickly adopted to enhance farm variability and food security on the island.

Fun stuff, eh?