Viva Mexico

Mexico Blog

Once I got a job at the farm school, I wanted to take advantage of the free time to go visit my parents in Mexico. They live in Queretaro, about 2 ½ hours northwest of Mexico City, and since the last time I was there they’d bought a new house. My dad came and picked me up at the airport and we took a bus back home. My mom had me come to heer English conversation group the next morning, and they recommended the seminar that day, so we went to hear all about how viruses affected human evolution.

Then we went to meet Guillaume, a recent grad from the American School (in Queretaro, not from Mexico city where I went), who has started his own business as a local distributor of produce. He took me to a couple of the greenhouses he buys from – a tomato greenhouse near Bernal, and a hydroponic lettuce greenhouse close to Leon.

The tomato greenhouse was fascinating. Although it was hydroponic, the tomatoes are rooted in tezontle, a volcanic gravel (kind of like red pumice), and then the nutrients and pumped through in water in a drip irrigation system. It was fascinating how careful you have to be in such a big monoculture – we put on white suits and walked through a bleach shower before going into the greenhouse. They have to buy in hives of bees to pollinate. The company was started byu Dutch folks, who are well known for their experience with greenhouses. But many of the tenets of greenhouse growing in Holland don’t hold true in mexico. In Holland, you want glass greenhouses, because they all the most light to pass through. More light = more productivity. Not so in Mexico. In mexico, water, not sunlight is the limiting factor. So they shifted to more translucent plastic greenhouses. They use white landscape fabric on the floor instead of black, to cool it down more. They string up their tomatoes like Eliot Coleman (using indeterminate vines, only the last 8 feet continues to produce tomatoes, so you clip the top of the vine to almost a “clothesline” that runs across the greenhouse at 8 feet high. As the plants grow, you just slide the clotheline along a pulley. So the root end of the tomato stays put and the productive 8 feet is shifted over, and the older part of the plant is horizontal along the floor. ) In Maine, this makes the tomato plants look like “J”s. but in mexico, where they keep the same plants growing for 9 months, the old vines strung along the floor become dents ropes of many plants.

I got to play some piano, spend some time reading on our back porch, cook with my mom, walk around downtown Queretaro while the jacarandas are blooming. Sunday we went to Freixenet, a vineyard near Bernal and then to a beautiful restaurant with a view of the Pena of Bernal. Totally beautiful! With that and fresh orange juice and mangos de manila…my trip was complete.