The garden sans volunteers

Garden Maintenance

The garden has been a lot of work lately, and Carlton and I have been keeping it up while there haven't been any volunteers. Phase I is looking really good but the fruit garden is a mess. Corallita sprang up overnight and now there's actually a jungle of it in the fruit garden. We're hoping to clear it enough to put grass seed down and then hopefully do some planting of fruit trees. Over the break, Julia and I (the other intern) built these beautiful arches in the garden, and I must say the finished product looks great. The arches are going to be at the 3 entrances of the garden, and they will all have climbing plants growing up them. Most of these plants Carlton and I have started from seed, so it will be very nice to see them growing up the arches. Unfortunately, there's a shipping crisis at the moment and the fruit trees that we've ordered are lost somewhere possibly in Puerto Rico or maybe Saaba, no one knows for sure. In addition to that, no one wants to pay for the lost items. So, unfortunately, some of the major planting might happen after I leave.

The new volunteers have just arrived two days ago and they're settling in nicely. Everyone seems very friendly. There are only 4 of them this time, but they seem very enthusiastic about working in the garden, and for that, I'm very glad. One woman has been working in a nursery for the last two years, and she is very excited about the veggie patch.
Unfortunately, one of the volunteers has a scorpion problem near his tent and he's actually found 3 or 4 of them inside the tent although the tent has stayed closed. Although they won't kill you, they'll give you a really nasty bite and make your appendages swell up wherever bitten.

After completing 10 dives with the dive shop, I was able to dive with STENAPA. So far, I've done about 3 line cleans. The last line clean that I did was quite spectacular because there were lots of really cool fish. We saw jawfish, which looked like little eels coming out of the sand and whole schools of barracuda. The barracuda are apparently a delicious fish, but around here, they harbor ciguatera which makes you get a kind of fish poisoning. (It's actually a benthic dinoflagellate that accumulates up the food chain- that's for you bio nerds!) I'm hoping to do some more line cleans next week, because although it makes your arms very tired from scrubbing the line with a wire brush, you get to see everything at that dive site.

This picture on the left is of the Quill which is the dormant volcano on the island. This is the view from the other side of the island.