The baby chicks have been delayed about a week, so we have a little more time to clear out some more trees and get started on the chicken coop. We have also started our first small garden test bed to see how growing vegetables in the tropics will compare with growing them in the more northerly climate of Colorado.

During the “dry” (relative) season we have to do some watering of the plants

In Colorado you really can’t comfortably start gardening until after Memorial Day, the end of May. The main factor that delays it? Fear of frost killing off the plants. Here in tropical Puerto Rico, that is not a factor at all.

So what else could be a factor in growing vegetables here? Well, some plants such as tulips require a cooling period in order to stir them to grow, so you wouldn’t want to attempt to grow those. Other plants like head lettuces just prefer cooler weather or they will bolt too quickly or just not grow at all. And still others, like large tomatoes will split open if they have too much water. Some plants need longer light cycles than the nearly even photoperiods here. And some plants don’t like much humidity.

We know from the fruit stands and agricultural stores that some garden vegetables must grow pretty well here like: okra, peppers, eggplant, cherry tomatoes, pigeon peas, cucumbers, watermelon, yard long beans.

Britton digging to put in a small raised garden

But even with these common vegetables we know very little about when to plant them, and most local seed packets offer little advice. Do we plant in the slightly longer but much wetter days of summer or the dry slightly shorter days of winter? Do we need to have a cover or cloth over the bed to keep off the torrential downpours and the intense midday sun? How long is a growing season for these annuals?

And then there are all the other plants that may do well in Puerto Rico, especially if they are bred for tropical environments.

All of these are big questions for us. In Colorado we were self-proclaimed Lazy Gardeners meaning that we liked to grow things that were fairly easy to grow. If they needed a lot of attention, they often didn’t receive it and died. Working full-time jobs, we just didn’t have the time to spend babying them. But we found through a lot of trial and error that in our area of Colorado, lettuce, strawberries, cherry tomatoes, squash, asparagus and fruit trees quite literally just grew themselves and all we had to do was pick them.

Very tiny garden (lower portion) in comparison to the rest of the property

So here we are in the trial and error phase gardening in Puerto Rico (and in other aspects of life as well). We want to grow things that we 1) would like to eat and 2) that grow easily and without much fuss. If it is something we really love to eat then we might put a little more time and energy into it, but overall, our gardening will have to be pretty hands off. The orchard of fruit trees may prove to fit that bill more clearly, but we want to at least give some veggies a shot too.

This is not only a consideration for plants, but other areas of our life too. For instance, one of the reasons we love bees and chickens is for this very characteristic. They are relatively maintenance free and provide many benefits to the overall holistic picture of self-sustaining food production.

So in our first efforts we dug up a small 8’x’4′ space, mixed in some local compost, and threw in some seeds. If this garden test bed works out well, we plan on having more scattered throughout the property.