The End of a Dynamic Year for the Sunflowers Community Garden (Huerta Girasoles)

A quick rundown via photos from this year: February:

The mandala garden in Sunflowers Garden in February

Using our chipper to process banana leaves and fallen branches

Teo, from Cedros community, watering the garden in March. The umbrella is for the hot sun!

Our celebration in March, officially opening up the new year: two participants, Julio and Marlon, taking part in the icebreaker

Guillermo, right in blue t-shirt, demonstrating to participants an efficient way to create compost in a small space as part of the opening ceremony.

Jonathan, right, a student from the UCR (Costa Rican University), explaining to participants in the opening ceremony our system of regenerative agriculture.

Our colleague Mía, explaining our philosophy of "wildness" represented in the 800 square yards of trees and understory that we are leaving as undisturbed as possible.

Learning about cacao ecology during a field trip that the Green UBL team took in April this year.

Also in April, international volunteers, students from the UCR and members of the Sunflowers Community garden were invited to share with another community garden project about ten miles away. The host group made a series of delicious dishes from the produce of their garden to share with us, and then gifted us with special clay chia pots.

Ana Lorena is a key leader of the "Parque de Piedras" Park and one of the original inspirations for the Sunflowers Garden.

Amanda, from the Sunflowers Garden, with her Chía Pot

Also in April we had our first Soap Workshop. Jenny and I worked with two UCR students, Jonathan and Raquel to first learn the tecnniques to then share them.

In April and May, Noemi, our student from an agricultural university in Switzerland doing her professional internship with the Sunflowers Garden through Mission Twenty-One, began her agricultural investigation, looking at the effectiveness of several biological amendments that we use on lettuce.

May and June were probably our most productive months in the garden. We saw good production of not just sunflowers, but also....

cucumbers (full disclosure, these cucumbers were from heriloom seeds that my brother-in-law, Dan Dobbelaer, reluctantly gifted me)

...four varitieties of lettuce,

...sweet peppers...

...and tomatoes, among other crops.

In May we also had our workshop on making Sourdough Bread. Noemi and Linda, a short term mission worker from the United Methodist Church, helped our main facilitator, Andrés, carry out the complex series of steps to make the delicious crusty bread. Andrés, Noemi and Linda put the limit of participants at around sixteen, but more than twenty showed up! Andrés taught himself to make the bread over Christmas Break in 2023, then taught Noemi and Linda when they came to the UBL to live and work.

Since 2023, the Green UBL team and the Sunflowers Garden members have cultivated a relationship with a Catholic school, the Teresiana Primary and Secondary Institute. In June of this year, they asked us to work with a dynamic of student volunteers to organize the establishment of their school garden. The UBL Green Team helped train the students and then we participated as they showed their fellow students how to carefully plant and mulch the vegetable starts in the various garden beds.

Also in June we had a cleanup day, our third or fourth in the last three years. The land where the Sunflowers Garden lives was often used as a dumping ground and we have removed easily half a ton of trash from the space, or more. Every time we establish a new space for planting, we dig up half a wheelbarrow or more.

Loading up the trash in the back of our Honda CRV to take down the hill to the curve in front of the Latin American University.

Melissa, one of our community work students hauling mulch in July.

We tried out a Costa Rican-produced variety of pole beans in June and July and August which was tremendously successful. We harvested more than fifteen pounds of beans from a 20-foot bed.

Flowers and insect life in the garden

Kale (dark green) and a Costa Rican-produced mustard ("Tokyo")

"Apio de Oro", Golden Celery. We produced this crop from seed.

Harvesting three beds of sweet potatoes in August. The potatoes were not the beautiful ones you buy in the supermarket, but they were very popular in the community of both Cedros and the UBL.

Noemi, with help from students and community members, finished her lettuce study successfully. Noemi also participated in every phase of the garden work. She was an incredible worker and agricultural thinker.

It was in August when we started harvesting the pole beans

In September we had two workshops. At the beginning of the month we held our second Soap workshop, this time focusing on saponification, that is, making soap from water, fat and lye, as well as continuing with the "melt and pour" soap making where we enrich already made glycerine soap with products from the garden.

At the end of September we had our Kombucha Workshop, led by Maripaz, the daughter of Estrella, a founding member of Sunflowers Garden.

Amanda and Guiselle practicing their kombucha techniques

Participants teamed up to practcice. Flor, in the red shirt, participated in almost all of the workshops this year, and supported the garden team in their final activity, the Craft Fair.

In October Jenny and I, with the help of Sara Solís, a garden member who also volunteers in the UBL, held a mini-workshop for a group of older adults that meet at the municipal public library down the street from the UBL. Here Jenny is helping a team of two discover facts about some of the species in the garden.

Among other pieces of the workshop, Sara led the icebreaker, "Two Truths and a Lie" which was a great way to get to know each other.

At the end of October we held our final workshop for the year, "The Circular Economy of a Garden." Jenny and I developed the program and a new team of UCR community service students helped us implement it. Participants went from station to station learning something about every step of the gardening process--producing seedlings, planting and caring for them with homemade amendments, producing normal compost as well as worm compost and we were even able to include some examples of how you can process some garden products to make value-added goods.

At the end of November we celebrated together all of our work this year. Estrella, Karen, Mía and I organized the program. Karen and Mía put together a dynamic technique for looking at the year. They selected and printed out photos from throughout the year and pasted them up on a whiteboard, then invited the 25 or so participants to examine the photos and lable them according what they seemed to represent: a challenge that we had to meet this year, an opportunity for learning or an accoplishment to be celebrated. In addition, those present gave ideas for what they hope to see in 2025. It was a very useful way for us to share our impresssions, ideas and dreams.

The coordinating team for the garden also came together to offer a certificate and a small, hand-made bar of soap to all of the students present at the celbration, which included two young men who completed their highschool community service with us. One of these, Jeremy, noted during a time for testimonies, that when he started his work, it was just to fulfill something that he had to do, but as he came to know the garden and the people in it, he started coming to the garden because he really liked it and because the people in the garden welcomed him.

Our final official event for the year was our participation in a local Craft Fair December 8th. Andrés baked sourdough break, Maripaz provided jars of kombucha, and a team of people created handmade soaps of all types which we took to the fair, sharing our yearlong accomplishments.

These last two weeks, several students from the UCR wanted to finish, or advance their community service hours, so we were able to begin the new year early, prepping the mandala for re-planting and putting in beds of cabbage, broccoli, sweet peppers, lettuce, kale, green onions and tomatoes. Circular Economy in deed!