The other day we bought some new trees while we were out and about.  We have been in the habit of finding free plant sources thru friends and have had multiple truck loads full, but when you dig up sprouts and hijos you are somewhat limited to what varieties are available.  For instance bananas, plantains, ginger, heliconia some spreading ground covers are fairly abundant but citrus and other fruiting trees usually are harder to find.  We came across some Buddha’s hand, kumquats, tangerines and various other harder to find stuff at one of the plant stores and of course we don’t have anywhere cleared to plant them!

The areas we have planted with trees we have actually had to go back and rearrange.  We have found that a lot of the varieties of trees we bought grow to enormous sizes so we decided we put them too close and in an area that will one day block the view unless they hare heavily pruned.  Moving forward we will take that into account, but when we first arrived we were just excited to plant the trees as soon as we had cleared enough area to do so.

We haven’t cleared/cleaned up even 1/4 of the property yet.  A lot of it is still wildly overgrown.  When the forest gets tall, all the trees start to compete to stay at the top of the canopy.  This causes trees to grow very tall and slender with a huge bush at the top.  We have cut down a lot of trees shaped like this that are nearest to the house because they just block out the entire view of the ocean and Aguadilla.

So anyway, we started to clear out another area of the forest and we came across this:

Pulling Off Vines

We learned a lesson in our biggest mistake and so we didn’t saw this avocado tree down..lol.  The avocado tree we cut down in that post is, as commenters posted, growing back.  It is however going to be a long while before that tree will have avocados again.   This new find has lots of nice big fruits on it and we have started to pick them up off the ground as they fall.  It is amazing that we have walked by this area quite a few times and haven’t ever noticed the tree!  It is just a testament to how over grown the property is after 20 years.  Hopefully we continue to find mature fruit producing trees.  It is fun to have our own sources for food.

Avocados Getting Ready to Drop