Visit to Nicaragua

We had the good fortune to get down to Nicaragua since last I posted. The next few posts will give you something of a travel log of Nicaragua.

We arrived on the 11:45am flight from Miami. Alex was, of course, there to meet us with a driver ("chofer"), since he does not like driving in Managua.

We decided, since it was basically lunch time, and we had been traveling since very early (2am in my case), to get lunch at the airport. Augusto Sandino International Airport has quite a few dining options in their food court. Both large national chicken chains (kind of like KFC) have counters there. Also, you can find a Subway, but we opted for Hilda's Comida Tipico (typical Nicaraguan cuisine).

Typical Nicaraguan cuisine: chicken breast in sauce with peppers and onions, gallo pinto (the rice/bean concoction in the middle of the plate), queso frito (fried slice of cheese in the foreground), and pico de gallo

Hilda's food was good. Priced like real Nicaraguan food and truly delicious. I can't imagine anyone wants to arrive in Nicaragua and eat grilled (or fried) chicken sandwiches with french fries, if they can have the plate above!

Also before we left the airport, I wanted to get my birthday present (early): a crocodile purse. When we were there last, I was on the fence about getting one, but then we had to catch a plane, and that was that. So, I didn't want that to happen again. There is exactly one booth at the airport that sells "bolsas de cocodrilo" (note the R is in a different syllable). They had a tremendous selection compared to our last visit, including lots of different colors. They also had quite a few purses and clutches of boa. Very tempting.

Alex had put new tires on the truck earlier in the week, because he didn't want any mishaps with the old tires while he was driving around with us. After we admired the tires, we all piled in. A song from The Matrix was playing on the radio.

The airport is on the north side of Managua, so we got out of town with relatively little trouble. On the side of the road, about half way to Matagalpa, Alex wanted to stop to see about getting his girls a parrot. Locals catch the parrots and sell them from the side of the road, or even in cages at the intersections in Managua.

I snapped this one out the windshield of the car at an intersection in Managua, later in our trip. This man has one of the same birds in his cage.

Because the entire side-of-the-road-bird-purchase event transpired so quickly, I didn't get a photo. The short of it is that Alex's girls are not getting a bird because the man selling them that day wanted $15 for them, which Alex thought was too high. Alex tells me the birds are called chocoyos or pericos.

Beautiful yellow-naped parrot, native to Nicaragua

About 8 miles from Matagalpa, the car started making an unhappy sound. We pulled over so Alex could add water (from a 2-liter bottle in the trunk) to the radiator. Catastrophe averted.

Arriving in Matagalpa, it was drizzling a bit. Matagalpa is definitely the greenest place we went on this trip. This was our first trip during "the dry season," but in Matagalpa, which is in the mountains, the dry season is not all that dry. We got a little rain every day.

My husband and I were both anxious to get to our hotel to get cleaned up.

We have yellow coffee cherries!

Right in the middle of our debate about whether to plant the beans (which are actually seeds, not beans) from the mature coffee plants on the farm, our business manager in Nicaragua, Alex, sent us some photos of the other types of mature coffee on the farm: the plants that produce yellow coffee cherries! I had never seen yellow coffee cherries before.

Yellow (yes, these are RIPE) coffee cherries on one of our plants!

Alex said he was not sure of the variety, but a short Google search found me this:

The closest thing I could find to our yellow coffee cherries (from http://www.coffeeresearch.org/agriculture/varietals.htm).

The beans in the bottom photo are called Amarello, and they are a mutation on the Brazillian Bourbon bean. I was able to find quite a few sites selling "sweet yellow bourbon beans." So ... that might be what we have. We will probably have to send a sample somewhere to have it tested.

This, of course, complicates our decision about what seeds to start next. We will have about 1000lbs of coffee from the yellow cherries, so we could plant this year's crop of plants from the yellow beans. We just need to figure out which plant give us the highest quality coffee on our soil at our elevation.

Malanga: A Tale of A Tuber

I first fell in love with malanga, a root vegetable, in the summer of 2010. Malanga is not a vegetable I had ever tasted before my first trip to Nicaragua in 2010. It is not a particularly glamorous vegetable.

Malanga: Not a very sophisticated looking tuber.

Malanga likes very wet soil. That makes it a perfect partner crop to coffee. We grow malanga in the valleys between the various peaks on the farm. The coffee grows on the sides of the peaks, but at the bottom, where the water sits, we grow malanga. We also grow malanga next to the rivers that run through the farm. Finally, we grow malanga near the natural springs on the farm. 

The large leaves of malanga are common among plants that live in or near water. Also, malanga likes the sun.

Coffee will not survive in any of these places because coffee needs well-drained soil or coffee fungus will take over.  The soil on the farm is truly ideal for coffee, but malanga is happy to grow where coffee cannot.

A field of malanga. You can see the native old-growth forest behind the sun-drenched field of malanga. Coffee is growing under the canopy of shade.

We returned to Nicaragua in June of 2011, and I was looking forward to finding a woman with a basket on her head to purchase more of those wonderful, crispy malanga chips. Imagine my dismay when all the ladies I stopped (and I stopped more than one of them) had only limp, fragile potato chips for sale! Of course, to be polite, I purchased a little baggie of potato chips from each, but I wasn't interested in homemade potato chips.

Bagging up the malanga in 2010.

Malanga chips were almost impossible to find in the summer of 2011. The photo above is from the malanga harvest in early 2010. Unfortunately, the malanga harvest on our farm in early 2011 was almost zero. It was a dry year, and the malanga didn't make it. If there in not enough rain, the malanga rots. I thought that might have been unique to our farm, but apparently the malanga harvest everywhere failed. Considering how many farmers were relying on malanga crops, it was a horrible year for many.

Quequisque also suffered from the lack of rain. Like malanga, quequisque grows in wet areas. It is also a tuber but it has a more delicate flavor than malanga.

I have looked for malanga chips in the U.S. It seems like something they would sell at Trader Joe's, but I have yet to find them.  There are some other varieties of the same type of plant.  One is called "quequisque", and looks almost the same as malanga on the top, but is more of a delicacy because it has a smaller, more delicately flavored root. 

The entire malanga situation is very sad. If you type "malanga Nicaragua" into Google, you will see a long list of "success stories" of co-ops and international aid organizations touting how they have helped local farmers to increase their sales by growing malanga, rather than lower value crops. I wonder if those aid organizations and co-ops taught the value of a diverse crop. Poverty is a very difficult disease to cure.

Cafe Oro

Now that we have about 4,000-5,000 lbs. of "cafe oro," from our mature coffee plants this year, I realize I had better get hopping on finding retail outlets for our delicious Nicaraguan coffee. "Cafe oro" means golden coffee, which is the color of the coffee after the husks have been soaked off.This photo shows the unroasted beans, after husks and skin have been removed. This is what is called "cafe oro." Different countries grow different types of coffees, and each type of coffee is processed differently. Many coffees are dry processed. In Nicaragua, water is used to remove the papery skin, so cafe de oro requires that the coffee be dried in the sun. We are pretty small-scale at this point, so we are able to dry our coffee on these screens, propped up on saw horses and boards.

Large, commercial "beneficios" (coffee processing centers) use large outdoor concrete slabs (they kind of look like areas the size of multiple shuffle board courts) to dry the beans in the sun. On any sunny day, you can see the workers out in the drying areas with long-handled flat rakes moving the coffee around so it will all dry out. Thanks to Marvin del Cid for this photo.