Tierra Sol Services

Hi Raquel, I’ve tried to combine and summarize a lot of our thinking here to help guide you….let us know if questions come up.

Bambu Atitlan: As Christopher has probably mentioned, we love the landscaping at Bambu house in Santiago Atitlan, both the entrance walk in and the lush gardens between and around the patio and the lake that include texture, structure, height variation, colors, flowers. We don’t know if they ever work on separating plants for sale, but it would be worth a trip over there to for a walk around.  I believe I recall it’s the owner who is the garden expert there.
https://bambuatitlan.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Tarifario-2024.pdf

Compost: We think there should be one compost area in the top section of the property near or around where all the bamboo has been processed. 

Mulch: We would like to use mulch in our planting areas where possible to help with soil fertility and water retention. The mulch/compost area to the lower left can be moved up for pathways, plant mulch or moved up to the back compost pile.

Kitchen Garden/Zone 1: Things we like include rosemary, basil, chipilin, mint. There used to be more lavender and rosemary on the property and perhaps with our new watering system we can now support them.

Seeds: The seeds we have on site are, milkweed, calico flower (the vine with giant flowers over the greenhouse), and nispero. Is it possible to grow nispero as a pruned orchard tree? I think I have only seen them in a spreading natural form.

Walking Pathway: We’re thinking that a mulched walking path might wind around from the hammock area (new porch) to along the top of the terrace (above existing mulch pile on lower left) and join path to lower house and kitchen. The middle area we can perhaps maintain as a grassy area. The walking pathway may need to be built up a bit as we don’t want it to become a compacted puddle during rainy season, we’re prefer the rain stay and move toward the plants.

Flowers: The area where the lower left compost currently is, can be all planted with flowers and grasses.

Ground cover: There is a ground cover with a little yellow flower — it’s a legume — that we really like. It’s still growing in the upper area and a bit behind the bedroom. We’d like to get that more established again behind the bedroom and next to the upper side of the bathroom. It used to be lush.

Upper area: We’re thinking this will ultimately be a sort of agro forestry area or agro orchard since that’s what we have. Eventually we can plant tree tomato, tomatoes or other greens and veggies in and around the fruit trees.

Eating: We love the idea of eating from the landscape, whether it’s for human consumption or supporting caterpillars, butterflies, hummingbirds and birds. So any plants that support these goals are welcome.

Fertilizer on site: The Home Biogas unit can producer fertilizer. If you feed the unit kitchen compost (only one citrus per day and no big seeds), it makes cooking gas and “burps” liquid. If you put a bucket under the liquid end (lake side) you can catch this. But we usually don’t have it there due to mosquitoes.
https://landing.homebiogas.com/bio-fertilizer/
I think the manual has a section on using and diluting the fertilizer: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Lfpl81CvsKxIBDQm0YeXiVQIpknu_eUv/view?usp=sharing 

Mound behind bedroom: Eventually this mounded swale-like area should become a bit more like the little terrace  between it and the wall. If we have any leftover stone (laja), maybe we can create a similar looking terrace effect? This soil came out of where we buried the compost toilet material (to the left of the bathroom), so we may need to replace some of the soil to that spot as it subsides over time.

View to Lake: As we mentioned, keeping the view to the lake open is an important feature of the property. 

I’ll make a quick sketch of a few plants to look out for and upload shortly...

I added a very poor sketch, but it shows where I planted the pacaya palms, the two naranjia, rue, flowering tobacco, lantana, and the butterfly ginger. The palms are very small and on the side are under some existing plants, so may be hard to see. These things don't have to stay where they are, I was mainly trying to save some things and/or get them out of the way of construction work. The pacaya palm that is planted between the raspberries and the fence is in that location specifically so that as it grows it becomes a natural visual privacy barrier between the upper and lower houses. 

Volunteer exchange:

1. Draw roadmap plans based on the blog posting
2. Find plants look in IMAP and Pana?
3. Add seed starters to greenhouse and teach Marina to care for them (plant 3 seeds and start fig starters)
4. Plan intensive work week for Sep 29th 
5. Test watering system

Random other tasks:

We should put skinny bamboo sticks next to all plants so nobody cuts them down
Water at night or early morning