This article shows how we harvest sugarcane or sugar cane from our garden and make sugar cane juice on a manual hand press or trapiche, as it is known here in Costa Rica. This is the sugarcane we have planted in our garden. It grows to a height of 8-10 feet. We only use the
DIY concrete planters are a fun project that takes very little time or effort. Save money by making your own. Along the roadside here in Limon, Costa Rica people like to sell you their wares and crafts. In just a 20 minute trip from town we pass balsa wood carvings of eagles and toucans, granite
Why are we Building with Wood? Part 2 Building Costa Rica. We chose to build our home with both wood and concrete. Wood will be our supports, buried directly in the ground, and serve as the material for the entire second level. Wood provides a cooler environment inside the house and reduces the likelihood of mold growth.
How to make your own Food Dehydrator using Solar Energy (the power of the sun) Why build a Solar Food Dehydrator? We built this solar food dryer because all of our harvests seem to come at the same time and we needed a way to perserve our food and seeds for later use. We must dry out seeds from
DIY Soft Box for Pocket Strobe I use my DIY Soft Box all the time with my pocket strobe. It softens the hard directional strobe light to subtly enhance the subject, so it doesn’t look like it is being interrogated. It adds details to the normal shadows often created when using one light source. You
How to make a Grid Spot for a pocket flash & why you need it. A Grid Spot is a light modifyer used to funnel or concentrate light. When you don’t want your entire subject lit by the strobe use a grid spot to get light only where you want it. The concept is that the
How to Photograph a Greater White Lined Bat Using DIY Bat Box We see a lot of bats on our farm here in Costa Rica, mostly when taking down ripe bunches of bananas. They live within the banana leaves and eat the spiders that the bananas attract. Every time I saw a bat fly out of a
DIY Beehive for Stingless Bees We have been wanting to practice bee keeping for a long time. In the U.S. we read books, watched videos and even had the opportunity to visit a beekeeper in Kentucky who gave us a full ticket tour of his farm and hives. We learned a lot and were excited
How to build your own DIY Outdoor Wood Stove,Oven, Cooker, Grill and Smoker. Materials list and step by step photos. We find ourselves needing to heat up some odd stuff around here from time to time so we wanted to make an outdoor cooker that could do all of them. We heat up banana type
Buy it or Make it? Do we have to buy everything or can we just make it ourselves? Barry and his Dad made an oven, Barry is making just about everything under the sun and I made curtains! On a recent trip to San Jose I found some lovely Guatemalan fabric in a store downtown.
Our first days living on a Costa Rica farm. We were staying on a friends farm and learning everything including Spanish. You can’t expect to come to Costa Rica and just take the country by storm. Even if you have a building plan, money and big dreams, nobody cares. There are permissions, stamps and rules that need
How to make and use an Infrared Camera Trap How-to’s and uses of using a DIY Phototrap to capture photographs of animals and birds. A Phototrap is a device that uses an Infrared beam (much like in a garage door or a home alarm) to send a signal to your camera every time the invisible