Pura vida

A weekend afternoon....... Just cause I can.

Summer flowers in the Garden

An adrenal rush to keep things active on a hot day.

"town"

New Butterflies

We have some new guests in the Garden:

The Caligo, or owl butterfly, is an enormous beauty, but considered a pest by banana farmers, because of their immense appetite:

They are rather quick on the wing, so here is one under glass:

And, we just recieved another zippy little Dryadula, who loves to hang out under our lemon tree

Work Stays

This is our Lab, where we raise the morphos, mural courtesy of Nasa.
This is our work stay room, with it's own bathroom and shower, and quite the deal for 250 a month, with breakfast and lunch for 20 hours of work a week. As a shameless plug, those who are interested can email josh@montezumagardens.com

The butterflies

This is our mascot, the blue morpho, who was kind enough to spread his wings and let us have a close up shot on one of our plantanos.







Keep yours eyes peeled because you never know what you will find in the garden:


The final instar of the Morpho

The Morpho Pupa

The Parides mating (male on the bottom)

Our Heliconiinae

Life out in the Garden

This is the entrance to the garden as of January of 2007, while we still have a long way to go, we sure have come a long way, baby. Mainly we go out on a day of discovery every day, reaping what we have sown, and getting to know the friends in the area who also enjoy our little slice of butterfly filled bosque

Daniel with his Motmot friend

Daniel has been with us for the longest, now, and due to his love, our garden has grown immeasurably

Life at the house

Summer y Mami relaxing at the house.

During all the work, we had a recent addition to the family, Summer Jasmine Bickle-Sandoval, who gets a little work in too (getting papi to chill out)

But all the hard work came together, and we have a little house, and our first office in Montezuma, costa rica:

• 
  Our new treeside living room
• 
  
• Market Day
• Welcome to Montezuma Gardens!!
  

Raising the barn

It's taken a lot of sweat and many people to get us from an unfinished house and open netting to where we are today, although these don't really do everyone justice, here's a sampling of those who helped us along the way:


The Shannontree















Barnraisin the office










Linda Nasa!
And mom, pointing the way:

Montezuma

This is the house in costa rica, at it's most funkiest angle. Oblique, I think.

It's from the summer of 2006, right before we started working on completing the butterfly garden.

It doesn't take long for things to change completely around here. You can't see the house from this angle anymore, but mainly because our back yard has really grown since we started:

This is the Papaya tree that grew right behind the rear balcony in six months.

We've eaten almost all of the fruit by now

Here is the butterfly garden in Febuary of 2006, when we started, and in Aug of 2006.

You can tell some love has gone into it since then.