Author: Yerba Buena Farm Jamaica

Committed to practising and promoting sustainable agriculture, we enjoy organic farming, growing mushrooms, soap making, natural building, top bar beekeeping and more. We offer internship opportunities and welcome guests interested in getting to know the real Jamaica through ecotourism or community tourism.

So many essential oil distillations!!

Thanks to the efforts of our summer interns, we have managed to do 39 distillations in 35 days.  It has been really interesting, as we learn something new with each distillation.  We are drawing distillation curves for each new plant (to help future distillers know how long each distillation will take and how much oil…

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Around Jamaica

“Around Jamaica”  has a Flickr page with some stunning pictures taken while traveling …around Jamaica.  Here’s the link.

Face Painting!

Claudia Marclay, a guest from Switzerland, is an extremely talented face painter.  She made Jamaican kids happy at a couple of stops around the island, including here at our farm.  Here’s a link to her blog where she describes painting the faces of literally all of our town’s kids.  Claudia stopped at a children’s home…

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Intern Abby Cali is more than serious…

Intern Abby Cali from Oberlin College not only went home from Jamaica to lead a sustainable beekeeping class and create a college top bar hive apiary, she also used her beeswax to create a line of products that was sold in the local farmer’s market.  For anyone in Ohio who needs some nice, all-natural beeswax…

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Jamaica Essential Oil Project on Farmer-to-Farmer Blog

The Partners of the Americas/Farmer-to-Farmer blog Cultivating Change put up a beautiful post about our volunteer trainer Clare Licher’s time here with us in Jamaica.  Please click here to read the post on this website.

Summer 2014 Trainer Tom Hebert

In the summer of 2014, Farmer-to-Farmer volunteer Tom Hebert came to teach Jamaican beekeepers how to build their own foundation mold.  This frees them from having to pay or trade for commercial foundation.  Tom is an amazing volunteer, as you can see from this list of the results of his time here:   10 different…

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Honey Soap!

Yay!  We are making honey soap now.  Why not our normal hemp soap?  Because we are beekeepers, that’s why!  And we just consider the soap to be a value-added product of our beekeeping operation.  And we are happy, and the soap is SOOO nice.  Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure.