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Published Friday, March 20, 2020
What to do with all this time..... By Victoria Torley Well, here we are, stuck in our homes and quite possibly bored out of our skulls. What will keep us from going absolutely batty? Our gardens of course! Fresh air and sunshine! Ungloved fingers in the dirt (dirt is therapeutic – I read it on the net so it must be true), healthy microbes, fresh veggies and flowers to brighten up the quarantine room. What to plant? Well, if you have some veggie seeds around somewhere, now is the time to see if they are still ‘live.’ I have a bunch in the refrigerator from last year (yes, I always overbuy) so I am going to start with those. Today we went to the feria (elbow bumps and lots of distance) and I got a nice zucchini so I may try planting zucchini seeds. It didn’t work last time but gardeners always have hope. We live on hope – we hope it will rain but not flood, we hope it will be sunny but not enough to burn the tender new leaves. We have hope enough to go around. Tomatoes don’t need hope. Tomatoes are the opposite of zucchini for sprouting. Leave one unpicked tomato and you will have dozens of new plants. Tomatoes justify hope. No seeds in the fridge? Nothing interesting at the feria or the local vivero? Call some friends who garden and see what they can share or visit the local nursery (elbow bumps and lots of distance - again) for some seedlings and get planting. Now is also the time for planning in the yard and long solitary contemplative walks down forest paths, preferably with your “Plants of Costa Rica” guidebook. After all, you may as well learn something while we self-isolate, right? Tens of thousands of different plants here in Costa Rica and I bet you can’t really identify more than a handful and most of those came with tags from the vivero. No fair saying, “Look a fern,” or “That’s a palm.” Not now. Now you need to say that it’s a bracken fern (I’ll let the Latin slide for now) or a palmito dulce palm. Take your camera with you on that walk and snap a picture of the unidentified plant. Put it out on the web if you can’t find it in a book. Don’t send me the picture though. I have enough plants that still haven’t been identified. In the last few weeks, most of the pictures featured in this column have been unidentified. Plant
for the Week
 I walked down to one of my lower gardens yesterday and found this growing so I ate one. Since I am typing, it wasn’t (immediately) toxic but I probably shouldn’t make a habit of eating unidentified berries (okay, I confess I have seen them eaten before). It’s a boring little berry, neither sweet nor tart, certainly not something I would plant on purpose but, like many things in Costa Rica, this berry just showed up. Nope, not a raspberry although it does seem to be a species in the genus Rubus which includes raspberries, salmonberries and thimbleberries. ------------------------- More information on this article or about gardening, Ms. Victoria Torley, gardener columnist, can be reached at victoriatorley1@gmail.com |
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