garden on calle 56, april 2007

We love to garden, so it's been tough to accept that everything we knew about gardening from our experience and classes and tutoring in Illinois was no longer useful. Gardening here in Merida is amazingly simple. You buy it, stick it in the ground, give it some water (but not too much because here things grow with water but bloom when dry), and presto a garden emerges before your eyes and before you know it.
The advice we heard most often, and have repeated now that we know it's true, is don't overplant. We thought our little garden was going to be so meager when we first put it in last June, but now not even a year later, we are pruning and chopping and finding uses for that machete. And still it is lush with all manner of flowers and colors.
We have daily visits from hummingbirds, see a huge variety of butterflies in and around the space, and most recently, have taken to prayer to keep the swarms of locusts away -- literally, Biblical swarms of black locusts that cover the sky. We don't know where they are landing but thankfully, it's not in our yard to munch away at things.
And all of this on a shelf of limestone that seems to suck the dirt down some place unless you buy the local tierra (sold off of horse-drawn carts) which is reddish and hard as cement when it dries so it cannot be absorbed (we didn't buy this stuff but brought in dirt created with the help of pig shit so it is black not red). Tropical things seem to grow without dirt and certainly without mulch (does not exist down here, cannot be purchased, and there is no translation to Spanish) and despite hot temperatures, sun beating down, and cloudbursts when they occur.
So here, are some current pictures of flowers that we have in our back yard, the new and improved look of the front of the house, and some amazing things that have happened, like cactus blooming. We are enthralled every day. http://picasaweb.google.com/necshs1/Flowers

If you want to go back to see what the garden looked like before, click here-- http://picasaweb.google.com/necshs1/HouseBefore