Until December, the pole was pretty, well, sad, since it only had two arrows on it.  There it sat.  It was, indeed, a random pole, at the front of our building, well, in the middle of a small town, with the durable wood that Cele made sure he made it out of (Chaeli – it will not rot for 20 years!).  Now, if you are in a relationship, you know that you support your partner’s ideas at crucial times, like when you go out on a limb and start a business.  Linea del Mundo!  OK – sure! But, well,  I was having my doubts. But, I’m getting more excited about it-six arrows!  For me personally, it’s showing that our business is growing-slowly but surely.

And once the arrows begin to age, Cele says it will add a bit of personality to the pole as well (yes, I believe that is an excuse not to varnish the arrows).

The only issue I see, is that, well, New Zealand is straight through hell.

Well, you’ll get excited about this – we got air conditioning installed in three of our rooms -woo hoo!   Of course, the price of electricity is about double that in the states.  I dread the electric bills.

My computer hard drive, recently failed, and a side benefit of transferring files to a new computer (because, hey, you just gotta look at the bright side when your computer starts to make gurgling sounds and awkward beeps), I got to take a look at some of the old photos from construction of our B&B over the past year. Hope you enjoy!

For those who don’t know, my husband oversaw construction. Our wedding anniversary is coming up (almost 10 years!), and looking at the time series of pics made me feel all warm, and appreciative of him.

I know I’ve mentioned the morning Cafe Tute cup of coffee.

Here’s the neat thing about Cafe Tute and it’s sister brand Coffee Santa Fe – it’s part of a locally owned and operated cooperative. No big farms here, just rural people with a couple of acres making some extra cash.  There is a small coffee factory in town where the coffee is processed, toasted, ground, and packaged.

And it’s good stuff with a story of past poverty, a statue, a priest, a disappearance and expanding business.  (Lead for next time!)

What are coffee cooperatives?

With the Santa Fe Coffee Cooperative at least, it’s a business owned by farmers.  The cooperative gives locals the coffee plants, fertilizer and training in exchange for them agreeing to grow, take care of, and harvest coffee for a certain amount of time (seven years).  Coffee beans, when harvested, are sold back to Santa Fe Cooperative’s Processing Plant.  The farmer receives a portion of the profits and so to does the cooperative.

Do you grow coffee?

Our inn was part of a historical coffee producing area, turned to ranching.  Calling it a coffee plantation sounds great, but the fact loving girl in me says that would be misleading.  Here, traditionally, coffee is not grown in unicrop plantations, but interspersed with other tree crops, like oranges and lemons -that can provide shade.This provides a diversity of plants, increasing resilience both to pests and for farmers against bad crop years.  Some say that the coffee in Santa Fe even has a citrus note to it because of this.

When we built the inn in 2012, we replanted coffee plants from the cooperative of a couple different classes.  It takes about three years for plants to start producing.  They are midgets right now, and we are fighting with the leaf cutter ants who seem to be big fans of coffee plants.

My husband, who worked his childhood on a farm, has bought a couple of orchids last weekend to place around the inn.  A lady from a nearby town searches and harvests them from the area, and he went over on the weekend to buy a couple.  Why?  Because he thinks they’ll make me happy. So, I’m loving them.

Now here’s the thing, I’ve read that there are two types of orchids – the epiphytes that grow on trees and terrestrial that grow in the ground.  I’m looking at these and suspect that they are the epiphytic ones-why, well to me they look like the Oncidium genus.  Anyone know?

So,if they’re epiphytic, how good will they do planted in the clay ground around our inn?  Hmmm…well let’s see how good this farmboy is – at getting them to grow/survive. He’s got them staked.  And if there is someone that can make something grow by determination, that’s Cele.

Update: Me of little faith

Cele says he doesn’t have them planted but on dead wood within the planting box.  Farmboy strikes again!

If it were a paint color, I would call it happy blue.  I know it’s about 80 degrees.  That if you were to walk barefoot on the grass, that it would be slightly wet from a night rain.  The sun is warm but not harsh on the mountains behind.  It is a happy blue.

In the foreground you can see evidence of what I term as my husband’s new hobby – renting heavy equipment. Now, if you know Cele, you know that he’s very neat.  We’ll go out for a day on a muddy backroad, and I’ll think – cool- we had a great time the mud on the car- wow, it’s over the rear view mirror -it’s a badge of honor.  He’ll think, great, we had a great time, now it’s time to clean the car…and worse, somehow he manages to talk you into helping out.  Sigh.

He discovered that you can rent time from owners of the road construction equipment.  In front of the hotel, there used to be a green area, but it had little indentations and hills, the free spirit in me thinking- how nice a little character.  But man, those hills didn’t stand a chance once Cele learned about the cuchillo that was in the area.  The upside, we have a nice area for parking…. got motorhome? No problem.

His friend Eliecer is an outreach technician for the coffee cooperatives in the area and helped us (er Cele again) plant 50 different coffee bushes around the inn of different classes, they’re planted around the perimeter, currently about 10 inches high.   Eliecer says that one of the kinds only takes 1-3 years to start producing coffee – how great would that be!