This article is one of a series on life in the campo, or country living in Costa Rica, as my wife and I* experienced it on our visits and after moving to Costa Rica. Each is a sort of time capsule, the stories evolving with us as we have lived more experiences and delved deeper into the culture.

Though there are few available varieties of green vegetables and nontropical fruits, we discovered the best ways to buy them out in the lowland campo. Good: Find out what day the produce truck comes to the local grocery store (pulpería) and shop that afternoon or the next morning. Better: Hit the nearest farmer’s market, usually open one day a week. Requires a trip to a larger town, where you may also find people selling local produce from the backs of pickup trucks. Best: Climb up into the back of a produce truck straight from the hilly farm areas and choose your own stuff. Requires a stroke of luck to be on the spot when the truck shows up at the pulpería or soda (café). You pay the store owner, not the truck driver. It's also possible to arrange for a driver to make a regular stop at your casa, depending on how close you live to their route.

If you don't mind someone else picking out your produce, here's a method to try: We know one family who has the shopkeeper in town give their order to a bus driver, who stops in front of their house on his regular run just long enough to hand the package out the door. When they happen into town, they pay the tab.

Since we hunted high and low in the campo for it without success, we had our visitors bring from the States some packets of mix-it-yourself ranch dressing for our partner’s gringa wife. She decided to offer it as an alternative at a large gathering, and it turns out the ticos loved this North American favorite, only using the traditional lime-and-salt dressing for the shredded cabbage salad after the ranch dressing ran out.

Ah, meaty chicharrones (cracklings) fresh from the pig and hot from the cooking oil! A trip to Costa Rica would not be complete for me without a few of these. The best way to experience chicharrones is during hog butchering time. Then a bunch of neighbors drop by and chew the fat, so to speak. But seriously, if you get one with all fat and no meat, you just toss it to the waiting vultures (see photo).

Yucca boiled in salt is served in settings where I’m used to finding salt potatoes. Tiquizque and camote are other tasty starchy roots, each a little different. The first is less starchy than a potato with a creamy texture when cooked; the second is between a potato and a sweet potato.

We went to a soda (small road- or streetside cafés that serve typical tico fare are called sodas) near La Fortuna that has a nice public swimming pool that costs about $2.50 US to enter. It has tilapia ponds where you can catch your own, buy it freshly caught and cleaned, or get it fried whole with sides of a salad made from green bananas and sweet peppers and, of course, boiled salted yucca. We paid for our table of eight and brought home enough fish to cook for a meal for everyone and paid less than $20.00, all told.

*We are Fred and Amy Morgan, originally from the US. We bought a dairy farm in Costa Rica to plant trees in its pastures, then later caught a dream of turning all the land we can to permanently protected, sustainably maintained forest once the plantation trees have been harvested for profit. Along the way, we made it possible for our former partner to realize his dream of starting a business of his own in his native land. He is featured in many of the earlier stories.

To read more about Finca Leola S.A. and how you can also invest in trees and at the same time help with reforestation, go to Own Trees with Us.

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