Category Archives: food plants

Signs of Spring

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Well, there is still about a week left of March, so I hope I’m not jumping the gun or jinxing anything, but the weather has been spectacular these last few days! 80 degrees and sunny. Mild evenings. Everyone is outside in the parks or on their porches enjoying it. It really feels like Puerto Rico! But we have to be careful because March in Colorado is one of the most fickle months. Often one of the snowiest and windiest. But so far this year, March has been so beautiful. And if feels like spring has truly sprung.


Crocus in our yard -first flowers of spring

We’ve filed (and paid!) our taxes. Britton has moved the chicken coop out of the greenhouse and into the yard again (their summer home). We’ve planted a few early seeds like lettuce, spinach, cabbage and the like in the greenhouse and in the garden area. And we’re already seeing lettuce seedling volunteers from last year come in! And of course the tulips. One of my favorite flowers that I will miss in Puerto Rico because they need a cold season to be perennials.


Tulips coming up and volunteer lettuce (upper right)

All of our fruit trees are looking healthy and have little leaf buds ready to burst open (or have!).


These are apricot flowers from our fruit cocktail tree -looks like we might have quite a few apricots!!

It’s amazing how much better we feel in the spring/summer. 80 degree sunny weather is just about perfect. I can see why we have chosen a place in Rincon that stays this temperature year round! When it is like this here in Colorado it erases all those miserable windy, icy, snowbound and dark days. Everything is waking up and is re-energized with life. We are out walking and biking, and we are spending more time with friends and family. It is great!

Another sign of spring: We even were able to balance and stand a few of our chicken eggs upright on the spring solstice! They say you can only do it on the spring solstice, but I have no idea if that’s true or not. In any case, we managed to get a few of our eggs to stay up. Pretty cool.


Balancing and egg to stand upright on the spring solstice -first day of spring

 

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Avocado Seedlings in Colorado

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After the avocado party back in November, we saved all the avocado seeds and brought most of them with us to Puerto Rico where we planted them in a trench to see if they would sprout. We also saved a couple here in Colorado to see if we could get them to sprout and grow. One of the avocado pits was already splitting apart and sending up a shoot, so we figured that one would be fairly easy to grow. We planted it and it shot straight up.


Mexicola on the left and Zutano on right

We also put two of our little Mexicola avocado seeds in water to see if it would throw down any roots. Only one has so far, but it is already catching up with the big Zutano one.


How to get an avocado pit to sprout

It’s fun to see these grow so quickly. We’re not sure what we will do with them when they get too big for the house, but we think that’s a ways away. Hopefully we will be able to pack up some of our tropical house plants and bring them with us on an airplane trip back to Puerto Rico where we can plant them in their native environment.

Anyone know the regulations on plant transport? From Colorado to Puerto Rico there is no USDA check, but from Puerto Rico back there is…so I think transporting plants in this direction should work out. They didn’t say anything about our little bag of avocado pits! But for now our little avocado seedling plants join our tropical Colorado house along with orchids, a banana tree, a coffee plant, pomegranates, citrus trees and more. If we can’t be in Puerto Rico full time quite yet, we’ve done our best to recreate it here in Colorado.

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Our New Jack LaLanne Juicer

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Britton and I recently watched the movie Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead, a documentary about an Australian man who was about 80-90 pounds overweight and decided to go on a juice fast for 60 days in America. The fast would help as he called it “reboot” his system and encourage or inspire Americans to try juicing during his road trip. Along the way he met a few people who were up to the challenge and decided to try the juice fast as well.


The juicer hidden amongst the various fruits and vegetables

We thought it sounded interesting and had positive results. A sort of opposite Super-Size Me. Since we already like fresh-squeezed juice -usually just citrus, we thought we’d try juicing other things. We researched a few brands and some of our friends recommended the Jack LaLanne brand. It’s a mid-range price model. At about $100 it’s a little spendy, but it meets some of our criteria: 1) It’s health-promoting 2) it’s for food (we have to eat something anyway) and 3) it’s something we can both enjoy together. We are planning to do a week long juice fast this week, but so far we’ve just been enjoying trying out various recipes.

We usually shop at King Soopers for our general shopping but went over to Sprouts to pick up a bunch of fruit and vegetables because Sprouts has the best prices on fresh fruit and vegetables. For instance, we got cucumbers, red and green peppers all for 33 cents each! Plus they have a lot of organic options as well.

Here are some of the recipes we have tried out:
Power Up:
4 celery stalks
1/2 cup spinach
1 medium apple
1/2 cucumber
1/2 green bell pepper
This Power Up recipe is similar to the Mean Green recipe in the movie except they used kale instead of spinach

Power Up Recipe (Doubled)

The green juices are even better for you than the fruit juices because there is a lot less sugar (from fruit).


Glasses of Green Juice

It’s kind of strange to drink green juice, but it actually tastes really pretty good. Like a green garden in summer with a little sweetness from the apple. It’s cool how the fresh juice is all frothy too.

We also tried the Carrot/Apple/Ginger Juice:
2 medium carrots
1 apple
1 inch of ginger root


Ingredients for carrot juice


Carrot going down the shute


Carrot/Apple/Ginger Juice
Carrot is surprisingly sweet when it is juiced. It’s really good, even without the apple. We made some with just carrot and celery and it was really refreshing.

We are looking forward to summer when we will have our garden to help provide us with juicer fodder. We were also thinking about Puerto Rico. It will definitely be useful when we have all the mangoes from that huge tree falling all over the property.


Pulp headed for the chickens

Besides juice, it also has the pulp which is most of the fiber. This is good to use as well. Carrot, zucchini and apple pulps can all be put in breads and cakes. The vegetable pulps can be used in savory meals like meat loaf or omelettes. We’ve even made a sorbet with some of the tropical fruit pulp like pineapple, mango and orange. The pulp we don’t use goes to the chickens which makes their eggs even healthier! Works out great. Nothing goes to waste.

I’ll keep you up to date on the juice fast that is coming up. Hopefully it will work out well. We don’t have 80 lbs to lose, but we could use a boost in energy and antioxidants and we could all use a little help getting those 5-9 daily recommended fruits and vegetables!

 

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Rincon Trip Goal Outcome

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Don’t worry, we did spend some time at the beach too! 🙂

Well we had a list of things we wanted to do on this trip; some for fun, some for utility. Of course, we often put off the fun and do the work first, but I think we did pretty good overall.

Here were our goals: what we didn’t get to are in red, and what we accomplished are in green.

* Plant banana trees (BK)
* Visit with ARC ENG -the architecture/engineering business in Rincon (CK)
* Visit the Rincon Treehouse place to talk about specifics (BK)
* Visit Mangosteen person in Mayaguez if we have enough time (CK)
* CRIM? We haven’t done this yet and probably should (neither really want to)
* Fix up kitchenette to have running water (BK)
* Get estimate for cost of our property ideas by local contractor
* Get hot running water rigged if possible (CK)
* Buy a heavy duty weed-wacker at Home Depot, as the property is probably very overgrown by now (BK)
*Take a surf lesson – if we have time (CK)
* Have a small little fire at night on the property (BK) (A reminder to be careful what you wish for!!)
*Walk to the beach from property (CK)
* Get rest of bees removed from walls if possible (BK)
* Find closest hospital (just in case-ha) -CK
*Find thrift or 2nd hand stores in the area (CK)

So as you can see, we got quite a lot of the major items taken care of in the time we were there. In addition to these things we also:

*Found our trees that we had planted last time and cleared away the vines and growth from around them
*Weed-wacked the whole fenced area and a little beyond the fence line
*Met with a variety of friends in Rincon/Moca for dinners and poker
*Tried new restaurants
*Planted more sprouted coconut palms
*Planted our avocado pits from the Avocado Party (we’ll see what happens!)
*Found a nearby hardware store in Rincon with prices better than Home Depot and a discount day (10% off on Saturdays) for women!

We still haven’t quite made a decision one way or the other about the wood house. We go back and forth and forth and back, sometimes in the same conversation. There are so many pros and cons to either decision. Getting the bees out of the house really helped us feel more comfortable in it and around it. We could see more potential, and less of a desire to “just get rid of it”. Still not sure though. We would have a long way to go to make it feel like home. Next up for it will be bat removal!! Yikes.

I think we have a pretty decent plan to get the cabana very livable and then we can make our big decision on the wood house. It is definitely cool to have a wood house, as it makes it seem more like Hawaii-style housing: warm and inviting and less like concrete storm bunkers, but as we have seen with all the animals in the house it may be a little TOO inviting.  As you can tell we’re still in limbo on that one.


The wood house from the roof of the cabana

In addition to the bats and the bees, we also had some unexpected canine visitors on our last day there, but they were friendly:

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