City Girl in the Jungle

City Girl in the Jungle EP 17 Leaving

Posted: 10th May 2012 by Basia in City Girl in the Jungle Videoblog
Tags: cacao fruit, city girl in the jungle, house inside, jairene, leaving

The time has come to say good-bye for a couple of months. There are some things outside of the jungle that have been calling me and so I will leave.

Before leaving, however, I will show you some of the updates on the house inside. There still is a lot of work to be done. But I believe that you will find some improvements. Take a look and judge for yourself.

While I will be gone there will be a nice lady staying there and taking care of everything. Her name is Jairene. She is a very creative person who makes her own furniture, her own clothes, and all sorts of decorations for the house. She also rides a motorcycle, as you will see in the video.

The beginning of May is the time when cacao starts to mature here at the Cacao Coast, which is where I live. And so I decided to show you what cacao flowers look like, how they become small cacao fruit, and what mature cacao fruit looks like. My cacao is original cacao, and so its fruits are yellow when they mature. But there are new hybrids that are resistant to certain diseases. These can be red or purple.

You will also see how it is harvested and which parts of the cacao fruit you can eat. I really love cacao fruit. In Brazil you will also often find cacao fruit juice. The beans are then fermented, dried and often roasted. Just a few kilometers from my place there is a cacao roasting plant. And so, when the wind blows just right my jungle becomes filled with a wonderful sweet chocolate smell.

Many well wishes.

City Girl in the Jungle EP16 The House

Posted: 7th April 2012 by Basia in City Girl in the Jungle Videoblog
Tags: city girl in the jungle, fuses, papaya, the house

One upon a time there was a small, small building that housed thousands of beings. They had established a whole ecosystem and were happily living side by side. There were large termites that had build their houses out of earth. There were tree termites that had constructed round abodes by the ceiling. There were cockroaches, spiders, flies, mosquitoes, and many other unidentifiable creatures. Along came frogs, and toads, and lizards, and bats. And so they lived happily for years, until the human came.

The human, me, decided to take over the house and evict all of them. They protested, and tried to come back, but in the end they found other places to live.

In the video I show you some of the transformation the house has undertaken over the last couple of months.

Also, I show you the first papaya from my little jungle. It is more orange colored than most, and tastes wonderfully sweet and flowery.

In the end I challenge you to find something peculiar about the instructions to change fuses.

City Girl in the Jungle EP15 Improving the Soil

Posted: 19th March 2012 by Basia in City Girl in the Jungle Videoblog
Tags: city girl in the jungle, lactobacillus, soil

I was recently made aware that one can employ some of our gut flora to work in the garden, improving the soil. And so, in order to be able to grow some regular vegetables and leafy greens I have decided to try it out.

To start with, I got some lactobacillus from a health food store, and decided to see if I can grow it in coconut water.

I got some help from my friend Fabio. Very swiftly, he climbed up a coconut tree and got me some fresh, young coconuts. I then took out the coconut water and used it as the basis for my lactobacillus culture.

In the future I will report back to you, letting you know how the bacteria affect the soil and the plants.

City Girl in the Jungle EP14 Presents and More Fruit

Posted: 7th March 2012 by Basia in City Girl in the Jungle Videoblog
Tags: city girl in the jungle, custard apple, inga, mangosteen, presents

A couple of weeks ago I showed you how my friend Tyler did exercises for his eyes in order to improve his vision. This got me thinking that vision training might be the only alternative for many who have very limited incomes. A neighbor of mine, Ninha, a tiny but very cheerful lady of 65 with long black hair and a skip in her step, had very poor vision and no financial resources to go to an eye doctor or buy glasses. And so she decided to start doing the vision exercises. Within a few weeks her vision improved dramatically. She was so happy about it that she managed to save up enough money to take the bus into town and buy me a present. She was so happy that she could give it to me. I show it to you in the video.

At this time some of my favorite fruits are coming into season. One of them is mangosteen, the queen of fruits. I have planted a couple of mangosteen trees and should have some fruit within a couple of years.

Some day I hope to be able to grow the king of fruits as well, durian. But it is not popular here and so it is difficult to find seeds. Also, it takes many years before it starts bearing fruit. But I suppose that would be worth the wait.

Another fruit that is in season now is custard apple. The type I like the best is “fruta do conde”. It is very sweet when ripe.

A third fruit that is in season is “Ingá”.

City Girl in the Jungle EP13 Fruit Trees and Creatures

Posted: 24th February 2012 by Basia in City Girl in the Jungle Videoblog
Tags: city girl in the jungle, eccentric insects, fruit trees, parade

In this episode I introduce you to some of the new baby fruit trees I have planted. These include trees that give fruits like acerola, pitanga, star fruit, lychee, mangosteen, fig, avocado, and chocolate pudding fruit (brown sapote).

I even planted coca-cola trees! These are trees that give the cola nuts that one can make cola beverages from. I planted 20 of the cola trees, but the leaf cutting ants had a feast one night and left me with only two.

And so, now I am planting my trees with some plastic wrapped around the trunc, with grease on the plastic. All to discourage the leaf-cutting ants to cut down my trees. So far, one week into the expriment it seems to be working. No new trees have been attacked. We shall see how it will continue.

While working on all of this, I have run across a number of interesting and rather eccentric insects and other creatures. All of these have been carefully documented for you.

City Girl in the Jungle EP12 Bananas and a Big Ooops

Posted: 7th February 2012 by Basia in City Girl in the Jungle Videoblog
Tags: bananas, city girl in the jungle, cutting a bunch of bananas, drying the computer, ooops

Banana trees are not really trees. They are more like grasses. Each shoot grows rather quickly and gives one bunch of bananas. After that it starts to slowly deteriorate and die. As it dies new shoots come up, and each of these produces a bunch of bananas. How many bananas you get will depend on how rich in nutrients your soil is, and how good the climate agrees with the banana plants. The richer the soil, the more bananas on each bunch.

What I do is to cut down the shoot after I cut down the ripening bunch of bananas it has created. I then cut the shoot into pieces, that I leave for the new shoots, as fertilizer.

In this episode of City Girl in the Jungle I have two of my friends show you how to cut down a bunch of banans. The bunches are usually rather heavy, and often quite high up. But my friends will show you how to easily get a bunch down. For my friend from overseas it is actually the first time to cut down a bunch of bananas. My other, younger friend, has done this before, as you might see.

I am very happy to be able to share this with you, especially because of a recent incident that almost prevented me from being able to create further episodes of City Girl in the Jungle… I happened to leave my computer in a place where it rained in on it. When tilting the computer, water was gushing out. And so, I thought that this might have been the last of my computer. Luckily, very, very luckily, I managed to dry the computer and it seems to be doing ok. In the episode you will see my drying procedure in full detail.

City Girl in the Jungle EP11 Resting

Posted: 3rd February 2012 by Basia in City Girl in the Jungle Videoblog
Tags: banana bunches, city girl in the jungle, leaf cutting ants, resting, watermelon plants

It is time to take a vacation. I decided to start resting a little and discovered that it can be quite marvelous. In the video I show you my first two bunches of bananas. I picked them in the morning and decided to hang them in a cacau tree. I liked it so much that I decided to hang out there myself. And so, I find myself relaxing in a sitting hammock while munching on bananas and reading a book.

Meanwhile…there are others that are busy. It appears that nocturnal leaf cutter ants very much enjoy young watermelon plants. They seem to leave everything else alone and focus in on the baby plants. Their enjoyment knows no limit, as they very quickly cut through the plants. Out of the initial 90 plants, I now only have 12.

City Girl in the Jungle EP10 The Best of Fruit

Posted: 22nd January 2012 by Basia in City Girl in the Jungle Videoblog
Tags: best of fruit, city girl in the jungle, mango, mangoes, pineapple, planting pineapple, snake, snakes

Eating ripe pineapple, straight off the plant, still warm from the sun is an amazing experience! It turns out that the pineapple I have growing on the farm is the best pineapple I have ever had. When ripe it turns orange and is perfectly sweet. There is not acidity and no feeling of burning in the mouth, even after having had an entire pineapple.

The mangoes I have also happen to be some of the best mangoes I have ever had. Compared to the fruit one buys in the stores it is as though my fruit is much more intense. The store versions seem as if “watered down”. And when I think about it, perhaps there is a reason for it.

You see, when one adds extra salt to a living being the being tends to swell. You can see that with people. If you eat salt, you will become thirsty and your body will use the water to try to dilute the salt. I get a feeling that something similar happens with plants. In order to get large fruit one can add artificial fertilizer (N K P). I get a feeling that this will make the plants grow more, the fruits become larger and more watered out. It will also make the plants more prone to disease. The same happens with people and animals. If you, for instance, give people or animals more nitrogen, in the form of protein, they will grow larger, but become more susceptible to disease (further reading “The China Study” by T. Colin Campbell).

In this episode of City Girl in the Jungle I show you my pineapple plantation, what pineapple looks like in different stages and how you plant new pineapple.

I also show you who visited me the other day, and how my neighbor warned me about them…

City Girl in the Jungle EP9 Tyler’s Vision

Posted: 15th January 2012 by Basia in City Girl in the Jungle Videoblog
Tags: city girl in the jungle, tyler, tyler davis, tyler's vision, vision training

My friend, Tyler Davis, who has been hanging out at the jungle farm and helping out for the last week has decided to do something very interesting. He is near-sighted, has a -4 vision. He has had poor vision since third grade and has been wearing glasses or contacts ever since. Lately, however, things arranged so that he lost his contact lenses and broke his glasses. We went into town to see if it would be possible to get new lenses, but they did not have any, and they were also quite expensive. And so, Tyler decided to do vision training and train and relax his eyes back into perfect vision.

He is following Leo Angart’s vision training exercises. You can learn more about all of the exercises from this vision training video.

Take a look and see how he does with one week of training. Go Tyler!

City Girl in the Jungle EP8 Planting Watermelons

Posted: 8th January 2012 by Basia in City Girl in the Jungle Videoblog
Tags: city girl in the jungle, mangoes, planting watermelons

I have never planted watermelons, or even really seen them grow. But I hear that they love sun, water, space and nutrients. And so, based on this I came up with a plan for my watermelons. I found an open space with lots of sun. I opened it up with a machete and dug smiley face ditches with corresponding mounds. In the ditches I plan to put organic matter and as it rains water will tend to drop down there. The watermelons will be planted below the smiley face ditches, on the mounds. This way they will not be drenched in water, but will in time have access to it and to nutrients as well.

We will see how this strategy works out. If all goes well I will have about 90 watermelon plants, with four different types of watermelons.

Also, the beautiful mango trees are starting to give delicious fruit.

City Girl in the Jungle

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