Latest Spring Harvest at the Costa Palmas Secret Garden

A Giving Land

The arid, neutral landscape created a blank canvas allowing the vibrant and bountiful harvest at the Costa Palmas Community Garden to pop with color. Baja-grown vegetables and edible flowers overflowed as a result of the autumn/winter seed-sowing last September. And today, we embrace the fruits of our community’s labor and give back to the community that has given us so much.

The desert playground surrounding Costa Palmas is home to the vast sea and rugged mountains, yet also to hidden ponds of freshwater. These aquifers far below the surface provide nourishment to thriving farms, both quaint and expansive, resulting in an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables, thus sustenance and nourishment for our community.

Just recently, Fabiola Ceseña, the Costa Palmas Agricultural & Community Affairs manager, joined her team to harvest. Together, they collected juicy heirloom tomatoes, red Russian kale, carrots in an array of colors, Swiss and rainbow chard, black and purple radishes, golden and Chioggia beets, and a multi-hued collection of cherry tomatoes.

Contributing to the striking collection of bold natural colors was the Community Garden’s portion of edible flowers. There are more than 70 varieties of edible flowers in the world, and 50 of them are grown in Mexico. The delicate harvest included the bright golden calendula, alongside borage, zinnias, the innately joyful sunflower and snapdragon. Also harvested were the delicate coriander flower, the resolute broccoli flower, nasturtium and the common and beloved, marigold.

Content with what was harvested today, we look forward to the coming years when our Community Garden fruit trees swell with sweetness in the form of citrus fruits (orange, pomegranate, tangerine), along with the prickly green fruit with a creamy texture (soursop) and the sweet mango, refreshing guava and rich fig. Nature always provides us something to look forward to.

The Community Garden is also tended by local La Ribera elementary school children involved in the Costa Palmas Learn, Grow, Eat and Go program, along with middle schools in the horticulture program.

As Costa Palmas has adjusted to the present global situation, fresh fruit and veggies that would have been shared with volunteers and used in dishes at Costa Palmas Beach Club have now been offered to Costa Palmas employees along with the La Ribera Food Bank to provide directly for the community.

And so the tradition of sowing, reaping, sharing, and planting continues for another year at the Costa Palmas Community Garden. During your next visit to Costa Palmas, we invite you to tour our secret garden and take in the beauty that mother nature provides.

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Sunday, May 10, 2020