We’ve Moved On Up!!! - Part 2

Our new rental home is located in San Roque de Grecia. We have a typical Costa Rican address: “400 m. este de Restaurante La Paila, detrás del taller de aire acondicionado Serví-Frio”.

We are mostly settled in. Only a couple of bins left to sort through, put the contents away and then try to remember where I stowed what. We have found our gardener and housekeeper. They’ll both come every two weeks.

Part of the fun has been exploring the garden area and finding out what is growing. Fruit wise,  we have mora (a berry rather like a blackberry), a mango tree and an avocado tree, a couple of lime trees and what I think may be a limon mandarina - it is green on the outside and yellow on the inside. The mango tree has two almost ready to pick mangos and lots of tiny ones. No avocados as yet.

For herbs, there is a large rosemary bush and I have just planted dill and Italian parsley. Our garden is walled and slopes downward. Lots of truck tires have been situated to help prevent erosion. They are great for gardening and all of them are filled with soil so I will plant more herbs. I found several rose bushes, lots of crotons, some vanda orchids, and two Norfolk pines. There are lots of places for me to hang up my orchid collection.

Someone spent a lot of thoughtful time creating this garden. There are quite a few large lantana shrubs and they attract butterflies and hummingbirds. 

And now for the inside of our new house - 4 bedrooms, two baths, big kitchen and living room. Three, at least (end to end) car garage. Gas oven and six burners, gas dryer. Side by side refrigerator with ice maker, etc. Big round wooden table in kitchen with six chairs. The wood is beautiful - Costa Rican hardwood. Lots of counter space and cabinets. 

The appliances are top of the line.

My favourite part is the outdoor covered loggia which runs around two sides of the house.

Including indoor garage space, outdoor patio space and indoor living space … we have over 3,000 square feet for USD 850, furnished, utilities extra. The cost of utilities is much less. The stove and gas dryer rely on propane and not electricity. In our previous place, the stove and the dryer were electric, leading to a bill of about $100 USD per month. Our first bill here for electric for a month was about 25 USD - I was shocked.

Laneway to our house - garage entrance is on the right:

My outdoor painting area:

Living room: 

Lots of wall space to hang my paintings:

All the inside doors are like this - Costa Rican hardwood.

And, of course, room for my hammock:

More wall space for my art:

Kitchen - gas stove and microwave:

Kitchen table and my favourite refrigerator type:

One side of the loggia:

Click on images to enlarge.

This Week in Review!

Hah! I like to use this title - it makes my post sound so important!

Four of my orchids are blooming now.

Trigonidium egertonianum:

Encyclia cordigera, a lovely spicy scent:

 

Guarianthe skinneri (Guaria morada), the national orchid of Costa Rica:

And I cannot recall the name of this one:

 

We moved my hammock from the back of the house and put it under the carport. We had a few drops of rain recently so I got tired of moving it under the eaves at the back of the house to keep it dry.

Missing in the above photo is our car. It’s now with the main Subaru dealership in Costa Rica. They have some sophisticated diagnostic tools which our local mechanic (Carlos) who works with them from time to time does not.  More to follow.

This is not an orchid, but a vine - Pyrostegia venustra, or flame vine. The flowers and their colours are amazing. This one is cascading down the tall retaining wall between our house and the vacant lot next door.

Every Thursday we have been buying a kilo of fresh picked strawberries from our friend Minor. The berries are grown around the Poas Volcano at a higher altitude. They are delicious.

We are expecting to receive our Covid-19 vaccine shots soon. We are in the second group to receive them. The clinic we are assigned to should be phoning us with a time and date.

(Click on images to enlarge)

Iguanas, Orchids, High Winds

This week has been notable for the high winds we have been experiencing.

To read the above text, click on the image.

The gusts have been very strong. So strong, in fact, that early on Thursday morning a part of the roof on the rear of the house was torn off. It blew up and over the roof and landed on the other side of the house, where it became lodged on the roof and the articulated umbrella. Fortunately, neither of us were in the immediate vicinity to be injured but the noise was something else.

We took photos and sent them to our landlord, Rodrigo, who lives in San José. From the photos, he determined it was not a critical part of the roof but something that had been installed some years ago .... for what reason, I do not know.

Rodrigo is an excellent landlord. He always responds quickly to any of our concerns and, sure enough, he arrived later that same day with a helper and they removed the fallen metal. They folded it up like an envelope (aluminum I guess?) and put it away for some later disposal.

Strong winds and gusts continued today (Friday) and I opted not to spend my daily hammock time under the palm tree in the backyard. Who knows when a branch may fall.

Recently, I went around our house and took photographs of various plants that are flowering right now.

I have two orchids in bloom right now and two others that have sent out inflorescences but the flowers are not yet open.

This is my Miltoniopsis. I bought this at an orchid show in Grecia a couple of years ago. This is the first time it has flowered for me.

And this one is Trigonidium egertonianum. Pretty little orchid flowers.

Moving on from orchids to lizards and iguanas ... the word seems to have got out that we will feed small pieces of bananas to our resident critters. The iguanas here appear to move around from house to house and water drains to water drains. We are now able to recognize quite a few of them. Here is a video I made of Lance feeding bananas to a couple of these critters.

(Click on images to enlarge)

Christmas in Costa Rica - 2020

This is our ninth Christmas spent in Costa Rica and our second Christmas at our house in Grecia. We our now experiencing the dry season with nice strong trade winds, mostly blue skies and nice warm temperatures in the afternoons. Nighttimes are cool (61F!) so easy sleeping.

Because of Covid-19, most public seasonal activities have been cancelled. The Grecia park has been reopened and decorated for the holidays, so people can enjoy that - following protocols of course. The park and the cathedral are the heart of Grecia and this is true of all Costa Rican towns.

The municipality has created a Santa convoy and they have been driving around the different neighbourhoods all week, throwing candy out to the kids. Today we ended up at the tail end of one of them while out and about.

We don’t put up a Christmas tree or decorations but every year we have our driftwood tree with lights (made by our friend Pete) and a little lighted polar bear (came with our house) outside. Some of our neighbours put on elaborate displays. 

It seems to be orchid flowering season, as least for some of my orchids. My epidendrum stamfordianum produced an amazing display this year.

And a couple of other different species have put out inflorescences (flower stalks) so I look forward to enjoying their flowers.

Mature coffee beans (aka red cherries) are presently being harvested through to about March. And the sugar cane is flowering now. The flowers are a beautiful pale pink mauve shade and the undulating, waving fields of sugar cane are beautiful.

Flor Maria, our housekeeper once every two weeks, created this gorgeous flower display for us this week. She used flowers that grow all around our house. She has a florist’s eye and this was a lovely surprise for us. 

To all my friends/readers of my blog - we wish you the very best for this holiday season. 2020 has been a tough year for so many. Please - wear your masks and wash your hands. Keep your distance. I believe that 2021 will be much better.

Here’s a little painting I did of a Christmas Brahman calf. Thanks to Beeche Brahmans, Costa Rica, for letting me use their photo as a reference.

(Click on photos to enlarge).

Orchids and Spiders - Costa Rica

When we still lived in Cloverdale, British Columbia, Canada - I had a small orchid collection. When we decided to move to Costa Rica, the collection went to a new home.

It was very easy to start a new collection here because Costa Rica is home to about 1,400 orchid species, 20% of which are endemic (they live nowhere else on this planet). In fact, the national flower of Costa Rica is the orchid guaria morada (Cattleya skinneri). I have several of these.

Some of my orchids were purchased at orchid shows, others I confiscated from friends who were having trouble looking after them. They never saw them again of course. So now my collection numbers twenty-six orchids. They are not all different species and some I have not been able to identify. I have three vandas with different coloured blooms.

Our current house came with some orchids and I’ve been able to take some divisions for my own collection. It’s so easy keeping these gorgeous plants in a tropical climate - they live outdoors all year around.

Most of my orchids are hanging from the atrium outside our bedroom. Some I keep closer - the ones that need a bit of TLC - so I can keep an eye on them. I walked around the other day and took photos of my colección de orquídeas. Nothing is blooming at the moment.

Click on the photos to enlarge.

The other day, Lance spied a spider that we have never seen before. I took a photo and my friend Claudia, who is (amongst many other things) a protozoologist and she identified it for me. Behold, here is the spiny-backed orb weaver, or Gasteracantha cancriformis, Araneidae:

Although you cannot see it here, it also has an iridescent sheen to it.