If you have been following our blog, you may remember that when we lived in our apartment in Escazú, we volunteered to take care of the plant of a neighbor friend, John H. John H works for a logistics company and he is responsible for all aspects of setting up a new office in Costa Rica. John H has an apartment in the same apartment complex where we lived, Escazú Village, which is how and where we met him.
When COVID began to be a concern in the spring of 2020, John and his company decided that it would be best to postpone the Costa Rica office opening until things quieted down. John H went back to the States in March 2020 and asked if we would take care of his plant while he was gone. After we agreed, we found that he had actually named the plant “Buddy” and that Buddy seemed to require a lot of care. We thought John H would return to Costa Rica shortly, so it wouldn’t be a big deal. We were wrong.
It’s been over a year since we talked about Buddy in our blog, and surprisingly, people do inquire about him, so we thought we would let everyone know what happened to Buddy.
In case you missed the Buddy posts, or want a refresher, here are the links to the previous two posts from the start of COVID restrictions in Costa Rica in March and April of 2020. The last post included updates we had provided to John H about Buddy’s antics while he was away.
With the COVID situation, it should be no surprise to learn that John H was not able to return to Costa Rica as soon has he had expected. In fact, he didn’t make it back again until February 2021, almost a year after he left. During that time, we’d made some changes in our lives. The biggest change was our move from Escazú, in the cooler Central Valley area of Costa Rica, to a rental on the Pacific side of Costa Rica.
We made the move in June of 2020. At the time we weren’t sure if we needed help moving or not, initially hoping that we could fit everything in our new Toyota Hilux pickup, even if it took a couple of trips. In the end, the large TV that we bought when we initially came to the country, wasn’t going to fit, no matter what. So, we ended up hiring a moving company for the big items. We still had a lot of smaller items that we needed to move and filled our entire truck (in the cab and truck bed) with things that we would need to set up house when we got there. And Buddy? We didn’t feel we had any choice but to bring him along. After all, we’d promised to take care of him. (Feeling a bit like Dr. Suess’s “Horton” character at this point.) I admit I had second thoughts when we were packing the truck for our move. Buddy required the entire floor space behind my seat, taking up valuable real estate in the truck that we could have used for other items. Rather reluctantly, at least on my part, we brought him along, anyway.
In Escazú, Buddy had been an inside plant. He sat on a small stool in the main living area near the sliding door to the small apartment deck. Our new rental house near Playa Flamingo has a larger main living space than our apartment did. But the house owners have also provided more and larger furniture, including a sofa, love seat, coffee table, end table, and a dining room table that seats six. We also have squeezed into this area two small tables for our computers. We soon realized that there wasn’t a good place inside the house for Buddy and his stool where he just wasn’t going to be in the way. However, our new rental house has a patio and pool. It didn’t take too much thought to determine that Buddy could and should transition to being an outside plant. We placed Buddy in a corner of the patio where he would get protection from the sun most of the time since Buddy is a corn plant and is not supposed to get direct sun.
There was definitely a change in Buddy after our move. In our apartment, Buddy had acted out quite a bit (again, see the second “catching up with Buddy” post). Maybe because he was now older, or maybe because he was outside on his own most of the time, Buddy seemed to settle down, and he even made friends with the local wildlife.
I noticed that he was growing, and probably would need to be repotted soon. But we, especially me, didn’t forget that we were just “foster” or perhaps more accurately, “forester” parents for Buddy, until John H returned to Costa Rica. By the way, I was the one making sure he was dutifully watered twice a week.
At the end of January 2021, John H informed us that his company had determined that things had settled down enough with COVID so that he could return to Costa Rica to continue opening the office in Escazú. He was eager to return and made it back to Escazú the first of February. We invited him to visit us in our new rental house the first chance he got. We finally settled on a visit the weekend of March 6th.
I was very excited that John H was coming. It meant Buddy would be able to go home and would no longer be our (my!) responsibility! I discussed it with (my) John. I suggested that maybe we should make a little suitcase for Buddy, and a little sign that said, “Escazú bound.” John was surprisingly not enthused with the idea. This from the guy who had spent hours posting Buddy on a South Dakota Jackalope and creating an entire Buddy storyboard based on “Knives Out”. He finally said that if we (meaning, I) did it, it couldn’t just be a picture of a suitcase, it would have to be more realistic. Geesh! In the end I didn’t have the time, even though I saved an old tea box that I had planned on using for the suitcase.
John H’s drive from Escazú to our house on Saturday, March 6th, was longer than he expected due to traffic. A lot of people from the city were making their way to the coast to enjoy the beach. We fed him lunch before I asked about him taking Buddy back with him.
“Oh no,” John H stated matter-of-factly, “he’s yours. I already got another plant.”
I tried not to look disappointed, but I am sure I didn’t look very pleased.
“That reminds me,” he continued, “I have something for you guys.” He went into the guest bedroom and returned with a decorated gift bag that he handed to us. “I made this for you. It’s like a scrapbook for Buddy!” he said, delightedly.
John and I looked inside. There we found a book that John H had printed based on some of the Buddy posts John had sent to him. What a nice gesture, for someone who was not going to take back that plant! (It wasn’t lost on us that John H still had Buddy’s “original” last name in the scrapbook title.)
We spent a pleasant weekend with John H, and true to his word, he didn’t take Buddy with him when drove back to Escazú.
Now Buddy was totally our responsibility, and he really did need to be repotted.
During Santa Semana (Holy Week, the week before Easter) we went to Liberia, the closest town with a Walmart. We thought everyone would be at the beach, as most offices close during that week and people take vacation. What a mistake! Everyone was at Walmart! We could barely find a parking space, and the store was more crowded than we had ever seen it. Even with COVID mask mandates, we were feeling a bit exposed, and John kept referring to the store as one giant petri dish. He was anxious to leave, but I insisted that we get a new pot for Buddy. When we came to the aisle with the gardening items, we found two sizes of pots. One size was about the size that Buddy was currently in, and the other was larger. We bought the larger pot, one package of potting soil, some other unrelated items that we needed from Walmart, and hurriedly left.
Admittedly the pot and soil sat in the guest bedroom for a while before we got around to repotting Buddy. It seemed like it would be such a chore! But one hot Sunday afternoon, I decided that we’d put it off long enough.
When we lived in West Des Moines, we had a large flower garden in our front yard. We enjoyed selecting and planting flowers each Spring. Of course, we had all of the necessary gardening paraphernalia, like gloves, trowels, etc. These were things that we realized we had none of now. For gardening gloves, I donned purple Sysco nitrile gloves that we bought for COVID protection. We took Buddy to the gravel area in our yard and pried him out of his old pot. It would have been easier with a trowel, which again, we didn’t have. We then placed him in his new pot, opened the bag of potting soil, and poured it in.
Until we actually put Buddy in the new pot, we didn’t realize how comically large it was for him. His old soil and his new potting soil weren’t enough to support him in his new pot. There was no going back now, so we had to find more dirt.
It’s said that in Costa Rica, the soil is so good, you can stick anything in it, and it will grow. A house was being constructed nearby and the workers had deposited a couple of mounds of red soil across the road from it, probably dug up from the construction. Being as it was Sunday, there shouldn’t be anyone around to witness us taking some of that soil. So, John and I walked down the road to the first mound. I brought the old pot that Buddy was in, thinking that we could use it both as a shovel and bucket for the dirt, since we didn’t have anything else. I looked across the road to the house under construction. Shoot! There were some workers there, maybe even gardeners! What were they doing there on a Sunday? I decided to just go ahead with the dirt “removal” and hope that they didn’t come over and question us, especially since it would be in Spanish and that conversation would go nowhere. I didn’t have my phone to be able to translate “I’m not really stealing dirt” from Spanish to English.
I bent over and tried to scoop the dirt into the pot. It was hard as a rock. I couldn’t get any dirt into the pot. That was a fail! I moved over to the other dirt mound, where I had better luck. The pot broke through the crusted dirt, and I could get some in. It wasn’t as easy as just scooping it with the pot, though. I ended up using my hands to get clumps of dirt into the pot. John’s job in this whole process, evidently, was just to watch me struggle. When I had as much dirt in the pot as I could get digging it with my hands, we walked back to the yard where we’d left Buddy. I transferred the dirt clods into his new pot, doing my best to break them up as I went. John did turn on the hose so we could give Buddy some water when I was finished.
Buddy’s new pot is too big for the stool he was sitting on, so he has to sit on the floor now. We did try to put Buddy inside for a while, thinking that maybe he was getting too much sun in the afternoons.
However, with his new pot, he was not less in the way than he was before, so we ended up putting him back outside on the patio.
Now Buddy is contentedly sitting outside on the patio of our rental house in his new “big boy” pot near the pool, where he continues to make new friends.
Unfortunately, the COVID numbers in Costa Rica are on the rise again. John H’s company determined that the new office needed to be put on hold once more, and he has returned to the US. We have Buddy safely here, but we have no idea what happened to his “other plant” (Buddy 2?), and we don’t want to ask.
Remember, it's an adventure. 
Except for the succulents, I try not to name my pot plants. Last week a possum ate the leaves of my potted parsley plant. It was too upsetting. 🤭
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