Tag Archives: chickens

Pineapple, Papaya, Avocado and September Fun

Our tropical food and other adventures continue daily.

Papaya
Fresh, delicious papaya

This month we harvested our first papayas as well as our very first pineapple. I have never been a big fan of papayas because to me they smell a little like vomit. But this variety was actually pretty good and didn’t have the smell.

Pineapples are probably up there as one of my very favorite fruit, and we’ve had such issues with root rot here that I got so excited I just had to wear our first little harvest on my head along with some home-grown bananas! Haha, poor Britton always has to put up with my silly shenanigans.

Cassie chiquita - Copy
Just call me Chiquita

In addition, it’s avocado season in full steam. Nearly every meal and snack now includes fresh avocados. Each evening and sometimes morning we go scour beneath the avocado trees. We have found four large mature avocado trees and we have planted another 8 or so, that are off-season varieties so (hopefully) soon we will be so overrun with avocados we won’t know what to do! Most days we’ve collected about 5-10 large avos. It’s amazing how much you can extend a meal when you have avocados. We have them with our eggs in the morning, with salads at lunch and with pretty much anything for dinner (nachos, rice and beans, etc).

Scambled eggs
A typical daily breakfast is almost all home grown -avos, mangos, starfruit, and scrambled eggs. We look forward to growing our own peppers soon too

Iguana hammock
Large orange iguana hanging out eating our fruit too- on the parcha vine!

The animals are all doing well. The baby turkeys are now living in the coop in a smaller cage and we take them out for walks daily until they are hawk-proof (about 3 months old). And of the two chicken chicks that survived from the original 6, one was a hen and the other a rooster. The hen is a gorgeous black chicken mix of auracana and Jersey giant and lays really cool  green olive-colored eggs. The rooster is beautiful and huge, working for his place in the pecking order.

Chickens
The birds crowding around Britton at dinner time

There are still four large male turkeys toms, and we need to decrease numbers because they fight a lot. But we want to wait until we have a stove and fridge to properly handle them. In the mean-time they are looking more beautiful than ever.

Pretty turkey
Turkey looking good 

We are in the midst of a large project that I will write about once it is completed, but we have had quite a few days off as well. We have been going to the beach, hanging out, and playing music with friends.

Steps Beach beauty
Afternoon rain clouds form at Steps Beach after we went snorkeling and the water turned an amazing color

September is a quiet month in Rincón. The local Puerto Rican tourists have left and the North American tourists haven’t arrived yet. There are afternoon rains nearly daily, threats of hurricanes, and the heat can be super intense to work outside. (We take LOTS of showers and have all the fans on after sweating outside!) But I still wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Cassie legs
When we’re not working we spend a lot of time just chillin’ in the Big Sky park of our yard with its ever changing painting

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A (Silly) Video Tour of the Finca

We often have people visit who are curious about what we’ve been up to, so we thought it would be fun to do a little silly video tour for those of you who can’t visit in real life. We had fun making it, and we hope you like it. We should probably do a video like this every year to see all the progress we make. We’ll see about that.

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The Iguana Hunt and a New Camera

So…this happened.

Camera

Yep our trusty old camera bit the dust. It had already lost its lens cover, couldn’t zoom any more, couldn’t take very good night shots, had sand in it and the screen would fog up with humidity when it rained.

Here’s how it finally gave up the ghost.

We were out in the yard and I saw that the chickens were acting really weird. They were all together and seemed disturbed by something. We immediately thought hawk, but we looked to the skies and we saw the little pitirre in the nest was not disturbed at all. Finally we saw what it was: an iguana. We  had been talking about bagging one for a while (as they are very destructive especially to plant and bird life and an invasive species). And this was our opportunity. Britton grabbed the pellet gun and the camera. Then he handed me the camera, and he took the gun. The iguana stood still on the low-lying tree branch and Britton had a clear shot. The iguana jumped and fell backwards on the branch. Britton went to get his gloves to grab it but it somehow came back to life and fell into the brush, completely camouflaged.

So I watered the trees while Britton went on a hunt under all the branches and trees for the wounded iguana. While watering the trees, I also accidentally watered the camera that was hanging from my wrist as well! Oops. I didn’t think too much of it because it has survived so many mishaps, but when Britton came back carrying an iguana upside down by the tail, I tried to take a picture and it would not work.

We didn’t want to let this moment go without a photo, but we could not fix the camera and we ended up just having to take a crappy picture with the laptop.

iguanaFirst iguana!

We cut up the iguana and were going to try and eat it but the skin/scales were like super hard leather and we ended up just hacking at it so much that we gave it to the chickens who devoured it! Now we know a little more about how these creatures are made, so that when we are ready to actually eat it we will be able to properly butcher and skin it and then cook and eat it.

Unfortunately our camera was toast and so we made the difficult decision to buy a new one. I have a really hard time letting go of stuff because I know all the quirks and how they work and it seems like new stuff always has too many weird functions that I will never use and they get rid of features that I like! But we finally picked another Canon and it seems to work pretty well, though we are still trying to figure it out. It does take pictures with filters which is kind of fun to play with and so we took a few test photos of the animals in the yard.

Turkeys filter
Turkeys!

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Chickens

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Kitty

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Even the pitirre bird!

 The filters are fun, but it seems to take pretty decent regular shots as well though we are experimenting with the color a little.

Poof turkeyThe turkeys are getting big but still look funny when they do their little turkey poof

So it seems that while we shot the iguana, the iguana sort of got the best of our old camera and it will never take another shot.

However, while all things come to an end, new iguanas and new images are sure to come.

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****NEWS FLASH Raccoon Attacks Chickens!! ****

This morning at 5am the suspected Chicken Killer was spotted returning to the scene of the crime to possibly commit yet another crime.  We heard screaming from the chicken house, and were able to capture a photo of the assailant.

Racoon
Bandit Fleeing the Scene of the Crime

This enhanced photo is the only evidence of the perp.  As you can see he wears a black mask and has creepy human hands (good for opening rudimentary locks on coops).  Fortunately the hens sounded the alarm in time and he was not able to breach the lock on the door.

This is the first racoon we have seen, previously a skunk and possibly a feral cat (unconfirmed) have been spotted in the past.

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