During Covid, Jamaica got shut down with curfews and a ban on funerals and everything else that makes life a little fun. The kids were out of school for 2 years. It was very bad! This is a country where people hold on to financial equilibrium in a slender sort of way and it put a whole lot of them into a world of distress. A lot of people lost their jobs and little businesses. Tourism was dead. But there is always farming! Many people went back to farming.

A typical farm around here is a couple of acres where they grow yams and other “food” root veggies, lots of bok choy which seems to do awfully well, plantains, bananas and some small amounts of the more tender vegetables that may be easy to defend. We live on “Farm Road” and early in the morning the farmers trudge up to the bush in their gum boots with their machetes. I theorize that the reason every single person in Jamaica carries one of these tools around it that nature is so strong and ferocious that you must constantly be slashing it back. It’s like that George Price cartoon in the New Yorker of the guy trimming a vine and his wife yelling, “Watch out Fred, here it comes again!” You can google that if you want. The picture is copyrighted.

Bobo loves to garden and has started a “farm” up across the road up on the side of a hill. The landowners often just plant timber and coconut palms and are happy to have someone grow yams and veggies to keep nature from crowding in and doing her thing. I used to go up there to help but I am magnet for the ferocious Jamaican min-ticks. As a child in Constant Springs, I used to play outside in the bush all day with the other little kids, but I don’t remember them irritating my skin the way they do now. There’s no Lyme disease in Jamaica and anyway those kinds of ticks look completely different, but a Jamaican tick bite is terrible and can itch for a whole week. And it is a delayed reaction. You go up into the bush on Tuesday and the itching doesn’t really start until Thursday. I think the ticks do this to confuse you. Dimple and Bobo say they come because of the cows that are pastured across the lane.

One of the farmers up the lane is a Rastaman called “Kultcha.” He lives on some “captured land” on a small beach in Drapers but comes by our gate every day going up to his farm. Sometimes he will have his chain saw balanced on his head. He has a very dignified bearing, and has extremely long, fine and beautifully maintained locks which he protects with various turban-like arrangements. He has blue eyes. Very unusual to see in a Jamaican.

I had been wanting to visit Kultcha's farm for some time and finally got a chance to go. He assured me that there were no ticks on his place because there are no cows and because he controls mother nature by doing a lot of burning. Turns out he was not correct about this because I wound up with a whole bunch of very itchy spots in various places on my person. The perpetrators have dropped off and left. I hope they got eaten by a lizard.

Farming is “nah joke work,” he tells me. Bobo agrees. Kultcha has about three acres and he cleared all of it with a machete. No Roundup for him. When you consider the size of the job you can understand why Roundup is quite popular in a country like this.

The land is on the side of a hill, and he has cleared out many trees to let the light in and planted plantains and other "ground food" and vegetables. He sells to people he knows and doesn’t bother with wholesale or going to the market. He makes charcoal out of the scrub trees he cuts down and sells that to barbecue pan people.

He explained that the land belongs to his sister. She gets and income for it from the cell phone tower that sits at the top of the hill, so she hasn’t bothered to cultivate anything herself. She lives in New York City, too. Kultcha says he has a whole lot of family, and they all live in the States except for him.

He was “Born in 1963 in September,” he tells me, in the town of Drapers which is between Sherwood and Port Antonio. His father was a tradesman and invested all his money in land as back then it was cheap. He used to grow bananas and sell them to “the banana boat.” Kultcha’s family has all kinds of land in Sherwood and over in Nonsuch, too.

He started loving farming in the seventies, he tells me. Before that, he dove and shot fish, but had to give that up because of a problem with his ear. As an almost aside, he reveals that he has travelled all over the world as a Reggae singer and lyricist under the name of DJ Yellowculture. His lyrics, he tells me, are inspired by farming and nature. He visited France, Germany, China…a whole slew of places, I couldn’t write them all down. “Farming and music,” he tells me, “Brings so much love.” He still performs here and there in Jamaica.

It takes a contemplative frame of mind to do all the hard, hard work of a farm of this nature. He loves it, he says. “me hear di bird dem singing.” And yes, there were many birds about as we sat on a log and talked about the spacing of plantain trees and I got secretly bitten by ticks. We saw a logga head, and there was woodpecker who Kultcha described as a “seven day worker” and we spent some time looking at what this bird had accomplished on his various trees. He is black and red I was told but moved too fast for me to take a close look. We also saw a kind of wood cock which looked like a rooster and bopped around. They call him a “hop and peck.” I remarked that he is lucky there are no wild chickens coming on his place. Around our yard there are tons of them. They are pretty to look at and have a very intense and interesting social life, but they will destroy a garden pretty quick. “No,” he said. He doesn’t get those, and adds, “If any goat or dog come on dis land dey dead!” Bet that goes for chickens, too.