The tropics in my back yard

I sometimes joke that our garden might be known as ���Little El Salvador��� because I have dumped so many coffee grounds [or so much coffee grounds?] there — I love the Caf�� Salvador from Equal Exchange.

(We compost, but coffee grounds go straight into the garden or onto our tomato vines. Is this wise? Our tomatoes, at least, were formidable this year.)

I was tossing cinnamon sticks into the compost a few days ago, and I thought of the coffee, and it struck me: archaeologists examining historical sites consider it noteworthy if they find even a fraction of the foreign goods that all of us have around the house (or in our yards). Imagine what future archaeologists would think of my yard.

(Example of archaeological frenzy: I visited Parkin, Arkansas, this year, where the big archaeological news some decades ago was that diggers had found a few Spanish trinkets in what was once a large Native American village.�� This is a big deal because it indicates that Parkin, as had been suspected, was one of the villages visited by Hernando de Soto in the Sixteenth Century; it is considered one of the very few known sites of that Spanish expedition.)

(Another: This link shows archaeologists gushing over a site in Louisiana which shows trade coming from as far away as present-day Canada:

http://www.crt.state.la.us/dataprojects/archaeology/virtualbooks/POVERPOI/trade.htm

Regard my yard:

The cinnamon sticks I mentioned above most likely come from Indonesia, the world���s largest producer. I���ve also composted vanilla beans, which came from Madagascar. (These were a very nice gift from a family we know who hail from there.) I bought a whole coconut awhile back which came from the Caribbean.�� Think of the amount of banana peels we have composted ��� from Honduras and elsewhere.

We dream of vacationing in the tropics, and occasionally do, but in a way the tropics have come to us and lie in our back yard.

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