Growing Community
Talking to your neighbors is easier than you think, and it is absolutely necessary if we’re going to get through whatever comes next.
The above video starts with a two year old piña (pineapple) plant and developing fruit. The video continues down the line of newly planted pineapple coronas (crowns). Which, over the next two years, will develop fruit of their own.
Why are we planting them this way, in a long line along the road? We wrote previously about our green fencing, and about the wild pigs that live in the forest surrounding the farm, how they tear up the agriculture land (destroying more than a quarter acre in a single evening).
Our neighbors have resorted to trapping the pigs—keeping them in pens, raising them to produce more pigs—or inviting community members to hunt them. This makes our neighbors a little bit of extra money, and saves some of their crops, but has not completely solved the problem for them.
We decided to try deterrents before traps and guns. It has worked beautifully.
Deterrents as relationship
There’s a new neighbor in Puerto Rico’s forests. For the last 7 years, as a result of the destruction that Maria wrought, our mountains ha…
The green fencing does a couple things simultaneously. It deters the pigs and feeds us. The video shows a very long line of newly planted pineapples, but the reality of going out, buying (and eating) that many would just not be feasible for us.
So how did we do it?
Growing Community
Community isn’t as easy people wish. Life in a rural area comes with rural politics, which are often conservative, hyper local, and skew patriarchal, homophobic and white supremacist.
In a romanticized version of community, everyone helps each other in a zero sum game of trading favors. You do your thing, we do ours, and we’ll get together sometimes to help each other, making less work for everyone.
Alejos builds our fence without even knowing
Most of our citrus trees still have some years before they fruit and so once a week we stop by Alejos’ fruit stand on the highway for limes, oranges, and the occasional pineapple. We have a tendency of chatting up strangers, and have made more than a few friends because of it. When Alejos learned we have livestock, he offered us the fruit and veggie scraps to feed the animals. For him we are doing a service, saving him a stop at the dumpster on his way home. For us, alongside our citrus purchase, we are taking home boxes of bananas, plantains, avocados, oranges, root veggies, and many many pineapples. Some of it is still good to eat, just too ugly to sell, which Alejos makes sure we notice.
Just from chatting, making new friends, now we receive not only free lunch, but animal food, soil nutrients, and natural fencing. Whatever the chickens don’t eat adds to the compost heap. And every pineapple crown makes a new plant that we add to our fencing. In just a few weeks we’ve planted 100 pineapple crowns, which would have been hundreds of dollars had we purchased them. By the end of the year we may be able to line the entire farm, for free. Once-trash turned to so much abundance that we have extra crowns for the neighbors to plant, which they are very excited about.