Ñande Róga Paraguaya

Welcome, friends, to this first edition of Ñande Róga Paraguaya - Our Paraguayan Home. Today we´ll talk about how you, an ex-patriate with lots of time on your hands, untested enthusiasm, and the will to eat vegetables, can create your very own huerta, or garden, in Paraguay. Here with me is my special guest, Martha Stewart.

Martha (manically): Thank you, Jake. Did you know that nothing says Che Paraguay, rohayhuve cada koe like a handcrafted ao po´i top commemorating Paraguay´s participation in the 2010 World Cup? Or how about welcoming otoño and Semana Santa with artisan-quality chipa almidón in the shape of Easter Bunnies?

J: Wow, Martha, you´re a font of folksy Paraguayan know-how.

M: Thank you, Jake, although I´d prefer to go by ´´Mirta,´´ my Paraguayan name.

J: That´s fine, Mirta. You know, I have a Paraguayan name, too: Jacobo.

M (with obvious ennui): That´s...distinctive.

J: Anyway, I decided to make this episode of ÑRP about gardens since I´ve spent the last three weeks building the huerta in my new backyard. The landlords gave me a quadrant of about 80 square meters to cultivate. It didn´t look like a lot at first, but I´ve been working my butt off and over half of the plot is still more or less how I found it. My predecessor started building a fence for the garden, but didn´t make it very far. She did leave me a few well-placed fence posts, important given the scarcity of wood.

When I started, the whole plot was covered in grass, small tree seedlings, and bushes. So I cleared the whole thing with a machete, and then started hoeing. And yes, I did leave the adult trees (lemon and palm). Otherwise, what kind of an agroforester would I be? Next, I hoed about half of the surface area of the future-garden. This eliminated some of the weeds and broke up the surface of the soil. I then began the most laborious process: shoveling out raised beds.

M (interrupting eagerly): Raised beds or tablones are the gardening style of choice in Paraguay. They conserve water and drain easily, and they also make it easier to build up the soil in areas where you are gardening through addition of compost and mulch. Just be careful, viewers, to make the tablón no more than twice as wide as your reach! That way you can weed it while crouched in the walkways between beds.

J: I erected two large raised beds on the area I´d cultivated and this will be a good start. I´ve also been walking around my neighborhood with an old feed bag and a shovel collecting cow plops to deposit (or re-deposit?) on my raised beds as manure. This will have to do until the compost pile (abonera) I built starts producing.

The last step in physical construction is finishing the fence. Some neighbors donated bamboo, which we cut down and stripped of leaves and branches. I then dragged the bamboo poles to my house, where I split them and chopped them down to size with a machete. My neighbor Aldo is helping me wire them to the posts to make a fence; we´ve got one side done and one to go. It´s good he´s helping out: I remain hopeless at engineering style tasks, almost as bad as I am at arts and crafts. The parts of the fence I did myself look like they were crafted after several margaritas (they were not).

M: Any project can be carried out professionally with sufficient patience and commitment to excellence!

J: So what´s next? It´s still far too hot to plant most things directly into the garden, although I did sow some pigeon pea and sunflower seeds for abono verde seed multiplication in the spring. I am going to start some seeds early in almácigos, or portable seed beds, made from reused milk and juice containers. This way, I can extend the garden season and have my plantitas ready when it gets cooler. The garden species I´ll plant will probably include peas, cabbage, green onion, radish, small peppers, broccoli, lettuce, beet, carrot, tomato, spinach, and eggplant. Keep in mind that this is the winter garden I´m putting in.

M (sanctimoniously): Keep in mind that frost may occur in Paraguay as early as Mayo.

J: Thank you, Mirta. So I´ll probably transplant the bulk of my seedlings next month. I´m also hoping to continue cultivating other parts of the garden and to use it not only as a font of fresh produce for myself, but also as a demonstration plot for abonos verdes and as my own little tree vivero and seed-testing ground. And, as a small treat to myself, I bought a bargain blender today in San Juan in preparation for some carrot-beet juice to come.

M: Jugo de pakova kambyrehe or banana juice with milk is a classic summertime Paraguayan treat!!!

J: I´ll be sure to try that, too! And I´ll conclude this episode of ÑRP with some photos of my garden. I´m not sophisticated enough to intercalate them with the text of this post, so please try to match them up appropriately. Until our next episode of ÑRP, I´m your host, Jacobo José Grossman, AKA ´´¡Americano!´´

M: And I´m Mirta Stewart. Che guapaitereri.