Greetings from Mykanos. As I write this, but hopefully not as you read it, we are enduring a ‘Paro Nacional’, or national strike, here in Colombia. It started as a protest against the new tax regime proposed by the Government, which was an attempt to raise money to fund the shortages caused by the pandemic. […]
Greetings from Mykanos. I am sitting here, on the veranda outside the bedroom, looking across the palms and bougainvillea, past the towering guadua undulating in the morning breeze, at the neighbour’s house, which is currently being further enhanced by another bungalow. Like us, he has been in uninterrupted residence for almost a year and seems […]
Greetings from Mykanos. I can’t really send greetings from anywhere else, as this is where I am, and have been since February. Yes, we are still self-isolating on the farm, with Adriano making as few trips as possible to oversee workers, monitor the coffee processing and to visit the Co-Op to negotiate coffee prices, masked […]
Greetings from Mykanos. Apologies for another hiatus in communication. It’s been yet another day, another week, another month in lockdown and everything seems to merge into a continuous cycle of possibilities and postponements. We were due to end in mid August, until the most recent prolongation extended it to mid September. Whither from then? Who […]
Greetings from Mykanos. It has been a while since my last Letter, and this one was to be done in May, but then May sort of flowed from April and blended into June, and well, you know how this state of suspended animation called ‘lockdown’ operates. Originally, lockdown started here on March 25 and was due […]
Greetings from Mykanos, no longer the destination of choice for sophisticated international visitors. Before the news became mono-topical, there was a story in the press about Nespresso buying coffee from farms using child labour. They took great delight in adding a photo of George Clooney and challenging his moral credentials. The Guardian International Edition wrote […]
Happy New Year from Mykanos. Well the cosecha is over for now, as is the festive season, and life is getting back to normal, or whatever passes for normal here. Adriano and the team have been concentrating on doing the groundwork for the 2020 cosecha in October, pruning, fertilizing and weeding. We had some rain, […]
Greetings from Mykanos. As the cosecha winds down, Christmas has climaxed and the year-end is almost upon us, Adriano is getting ready for everything that entails. The season proper started on December 7thth with the day of the little candles, celebrating the definition of the Immaculate Conception as dogma by Pope Pius IX in 1854. Everyone […]
Greetings from Mykanos. We are in the heart of the cosecha at the moment and it is proving a challenge for everyone. As compared to last year, when we were delivering our coffee to the Co-OP as cherries (cerises) due to the abysmal state in which our former administrator had left our beneficidero (processing plant), […]
Greetings from Bogotá. I am having a short break from the farm to give Adriano more space to lead the cosecha (harvest), which is a couple of weeks in. We had been suffering an extended drought, which was causing real problems. Not only do we need sufficient rain to mature the coffee cherries so they […]
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