Category Archives: food plants

Moving to Puerto Rico Checklist

Lately Puerto Rico has really been in our mind. We are MORE THAN READY to move mentally/emotionally. So we have been thinking about getting ready to move physically. We wrote up all the things we will need to do in the next few months so that we can just up and move there. A lot of this is a general checklist for moving pretty much anywhere, but some of it is specific to moving to Rincon Puerto Rico.  After living somewhere for so long (Greeley) there are things we just don’t think about much.  We have lived here in our first home for 10 years.  Things like car titles, using up old stuff, medical and school transcripts/records , making sure we have Social Security cards, etc.  Also we don’t really have an “address” to ship stuff to, so that will be something to figure out.

For those of you who have already made the move to Puerto Rico (or elsewhere), are there any other things we should think about/take care of before we ship out?

  • Banks (change over address and ensure future bank cards are delivered to us)
  • Open new Bank Account inPuerto Rico
  • Cars (get titles together, sell)
  • Buy new car inPuerto Rico
  • Go thru all Stuff/Junk (to friends/family, charity, sell or toss). *Question: How much should we take with or replace?
  • Find new homes for the chickens
  • Get Kitty’s vet records and learn what it will take to bring him with us on the airplane
  • Get house cleaned professionally (carpet, bathrooms, kitchen, etc)
  • Put remaining properties under managment(2)
  • Host a going away party!
  • Put together all personal / professional records
  • Call insurance agents to cancel car insurance and change home policies to rental and update address
  • Sell assets we can’t manage from afar
  • Use up old stuff and don’t buy new stuff (Frozen food, cleaners, canned food, bathroom supplies, etc)
  • Look for boxes and pack up / label and have family ship to us when we get there
  • Buy airline tickets and line up rental car for appx 1 month while we look for a new car
  • Find new homes for our plants (coffee, banana, orchids)
  • Get tax documents together for 2012 filing
  • Update address with property tax assessor, 401k, IRA, etc
  • Setup things we need down there (we already have water and electric.  Mayyyybe internet?  Cell phone? )
  • Find new server / hosting for website and promote

We have been thinking about this a lot more lately as it appears we will be moving our date up.  We don’t have an exact new deadline but we figure we can take care of a lot of these things now in preparation.  Stay tuned for posts on many of the items in the above list!

What do you think of this post?
  • WOW (1)
  • Awesome (2)
  • Interesting (0)
  • Useful (1)
  • Bummer (1)
  • Whoa (1)

Gleaning and Cleaning

The weather dipped below freezing last night and so our beautiful greenhouse jungle turned into a limp mess of blackened smushy tomato, squash and cucumber plants. So today, now that the weather has improved, we decided to clean out the greenhouse and glean all the veggies from the dead vines.


Here Britton and the eager chickens get to work


Britton in the process with a watchful Kitty


Some of our find: cucumbers, carrots, lots of tomatoes, peppers, and squash


Spaghetti Squash from our garden. Funny story…the whole time it was growing we thought it was a freaky watermelon! 😉


Pretty chickens in the yard


Kitty in the littered yard. One of our chickens, Henrietta, is molting along with the trees


Schnoodle, Kitty, Britton and chickens -in the greenhouse- after cleaning it out

In addition to cleaning out the greenhouse, we also started the multi-phase task of cleaning out our closets. I started with my clothes since I have way more than Britton.


Pile of clothes that I sorted in the basement on a cold day


Pile of clothes ready for Goodwill

Even though this pile of clothes looks impressive, it barely scratched the surface on the amount of clothes I will have to sort through before we move.

 

 

What do you think of this post?
  • WOW (0)
  • Awesome (2)
  • Interesting (1)
  • Useful (0)
  • Bummer (0)
  • Whoa (0)

Surprises from the Greenhouse

It’s getting to be that time once again where we need to move all the happy tropical plants from the humid, wet and hot greenhouse back inside for the winter. Tropical plants can’t live below about 40 degrees F, and so we have to bring them in to the climate-controlled fake tropical space we create around here in our house for the winter.

When Britton started taking the citrus, pomegranates and pineapple plants in he also brought in the coffee tree. To our surprise, the little red berries had lost their skin and fruit pulp and so the bean seed started sprouting! (We saw the rolly-pollies at work on the red fruit pulp earlier.) So cool!


Coffee bean sprout


The coffee bean sprouts are awesome!


We went to the store and found the perfect pot for the coffee sprouts!

After moving out the potted plants, he was also able to get a little deeper into the greenhouse and found all these cucumbers! Surprise! Guess what we will be eating for snack for the next week!


A sink full of huge cucumbers

If the greenhouse is any indication of what we’ll get in Puerto Rico (which I think it is because of it’s consistent humidity and water) then we will be in for some fantastic gardening!

 

What do you think of this post?
  • WOW (1)
  • Awesome (0)
  • Interesting (3)
  • Useful (0)
  • Bummer (0)
  • Whoa (0)