Rainy season – overflowing rivers

The rainy season has arrived – but these downpouring rains cause us some problems.

Downpouring rain

Due to the incredible powerful rains, our little river swelled to a ripping torrent.
Many trees along the river were uprooted. Those trees which remained standing, lost most of the supportive earth and now their roots are stretched into the air.

River at Jiwa Damai

To prevent other tree losses, the sand bags were placed directly around the roots to prevent possible future torrents from uprooting more trees.

Roots covered with sand bags

Balinese tooth filing ceremony

The Tooth Filing Ceremony (Metatah ceremony) is one of the biggest Hindu rituals on Bali. This ceremony is executed by smoothing down the incisor and eye-tooth. The ceremony is performed on young adults.

In the Hindu culture when a person turns 18 he or she is to be considered well on the way to adulthood. To help make this smooth transition from adolecent into the first phase of growing up, the young will have to take part in a teeth filing ceremony

Sugik, one of our appreciated team memebers at Jiwa Damai, had his tooth filing ceremony recently.

Metatah ceremony is aimed to kill six enemies (Sad Ripu) in people who are often considered the enemy within ourselves.
Sad Ripu include:

• Kama (lust)
• Loba (greed)
• Krodha (anger )
• Mada (intoxication)
• Moha (confusion)
• Matsarya (jealousy / envy)

This ceremony is performed on a certain day based on the Balinese calendar.

Sugik after his tooth filing ceremony

Bee hives at Jiwa Damai

Some of our readers might already know about the Balinese bee hives that we set up some time ago in the organic garden.

Bee hive up in the tree

We started out with only few bees living in these traditional Balinese bee hives located in different locations all over the garden.

After a few months we were able to harvest the first honey. It was quite difficult to extract the honey from these traditional bee hives and the men doing it had to operate with a lot of care.

(complete post: First honey harvest in Jiwa Damai)

Since then, the bee population has increased, thus more honey is being produced. To give more space to the bees and to facilitate our honey production, we decided to move the bee family from the traditional Balinese bee house  into a new house. In this classical, western bee stock it will be much easier to extract the honey.

The relocation of the bee family was not an easy task.

But now they are living in the new bee stocks and we are excited to see how much honey can be produced.  We will keep you updated !

Rainy season on Bali

Lately it has been raining a lot here on Bali.

Downpouring rain

The rains come all of a sudden and disappear the same way. The raindrops are warm but sometimes so hard that they destroy our young plants in the gardens.

The waters of the ponds become alive withe the rain drops dancing on it.

Raindrops in the pond

Saraswati our goddess of arts, culture and education remains majestically still, no raindrops can disturb her.

Saraswati in the rain

Sacred temple snakes

Last week we discovered two large beautiful snakes on the ceiling above the dining area.

Sacred temple snake

After checking with the local priest, we were told that these are sacred temple snakes which usually only live in temples. He meant that obviously the energy at Jiwa Damai seemed attractive to them.

Actually they are nocturnal animals. Being concerned about our guests fears, the priest suggested to use burning incense to move them from the spot on the roof where one had gone to sleep. Low and behold, they moved away into the roof of the building.

Snake

Tomato blessing

Our fertile lands at Jiwa Damai produce delicious tomatoes.

Fresh tomatoes

Since we can not eat all these tomatoes at once, we regularly process them into other products.

We use our fresh tomatoes to make Balinese Sambal.
We already shared our recipe for original Balinese Sambal in one of our older posts. Click here to read the post.

The sambal is cooked and then filled into plastic bags, sealed and frozen.

Balinese sambal

Another option is to dry the tomatoes (with our raw food oven). This is an excellent method to conserve fruit and vegetables.

Dried tomatoes

Butterflies in our garden

These are just a few of the many beautiful butterflies that live in our gardens at Jiwa Damai.

Butterflies from the Jiwa Damai gardens

Homemade basil pesto

In the permaculture garden we also grow basil – Balinese lemon basil as well as western basil.
The land at Jiwa Damai is blessed with fertile grounds – and the basil bushes are growing really well !

Western basil growing at Jiwa Damai

We use the basil to make basil pesto – Today we want to share with you the recipe for our old fashioned basil pesto.

Balinese lemon basil from the permaculture garden

For our flavourful pesto we use the Balinese lemon basil from the garden, combined with stronger flavored Italian basil.
At first all the leaves have to be cut in tiny pieces.

Cutting the basil

Once the basil is cut, we add garlic, olive oil and shredded parsley.
Et voila – the pesto is ready to be eaten.

Basil pesto

Enjoy with fresh pasta !

Selamat makan!

Dried organic fruit and vegetables

Our latest project here at Jiwa Damai is to produce dried fruit and vegetables. We only use the organic produce from our permaculture garden, grown without fertilizers and chemicals.

For this purpose we invested in a food dryer / raw oven used in the raw food kitchen.

This is the first batch of bananas ! They are air-dried at very low temperature to retain the flavour. What an incredible sweetness !

Dried bananas

We also dried tomatoes and hot red peppers.

Dried tomatoes

Dried peppers

We pack the fruit and veggies in FDR recommended plastic bags to retain the flavour.

These products can be bought at Jiwa Damai.

Come by and taste for yourself!

Organic potatoes from Bali

In August we wrote a post about the potato tower that we built in the permaculture garden.

Since it proved impossible to grow potatoes in the wet soil here at Jiwa Damai, we decided to create a tower that is filled with stones, sand and earth, so the water is able to flow through it and that the potatoes are kept dry.

Digging a hole in the garden for the tower

Now, that some months have passed, we can finally see the results !

The potato plants are growing really well.

Potatoes growing in the tower

We can’t wait for the harvest & to taste our homegrown organic potatoes