Our Journal

Katie Rose Molina Browning and Scott Gallant As we look to find niches and stack functions in our tropical permaculture homesteads, one often overlooked group of plants include the edible flowers. With a focus on Costa Rica, this blog, authored primarily by Katie Browning, a certified herbalist, explores the many common and uncommon edible flowers […]

By Thomas Newmark, Finca Luna Nueva Lodge Make chocolate in the rainforest? Of course! You’ll take a thousand-year journey through the history of growing cacao and making chocolate, even using an ancient cacao grinding stone recovered from the Caribbean slope of the great Atlantic rainforest in Costa Rica. Plus, you get to drink and eat the tour, […]

Our daughter Sara and her beautiful family (husband Drew and our grandkids Elias and Eloise) visited us a few weeks ago, and they brought with them a gang of friends and other family members. It was spring break meets family reunion at Finca Luna Nueva, and the group exchanged photos to share their memories. The […]

October 9th, 2021 was a “Big Day,” where birders around the world went out canvassing their ecosystems, finding birds, and compiling bird species counts. We at Finca Luna Nueva always participate in these global counts, but this year offered up a twist. Not only did we have humans go out to find birds on our […]

by Tom Newmark, Chairman of The Carbon Underground, and member of the CRARS Leadership Council Artwork by Sam Hepburn. Guilty! Many of us in the regenerative agriculture movement describe the world’s soils as a “sink” into which excess atmospheric carbon can be stored, and we’ve been wrong. That mistake has diminished the appeal of our […]

The ecologist Carl Safina writes that “macaws are born to be wild. But becoming wild requires an education.” He wonders what happens when habitat loss or other pressures force them to relocate. What happens when caring humans rescue macaws and move them into a new region? Do those glorious creatures somehow ask “How can we […]