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Published on Friday,
March 24,
2023
By
Victoria Torley Well,
here we are. 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 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
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. 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
of 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). ---------------
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