Category Archives: food plants

Beginning the Deck

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This last week we began the process of building a deck. This first entailed taking down the scaffolding from inside the house and using the materials to build more batter boards.

Inside of house without scaffolding
Inside the house without scaffolding

Batter boards for deck
Building the deck batterboards

Next was to mark and dig the footers and then to pour them.

Down below waldemar and jorgeHello down below! Getting ready to dig the footers for the posts

And then they worked to fill the footers and then the mini-columns that will hold the deck posts.

Deck footers
Footers/mini columns

Next up will be to put up the actual posts, headers and ledgers and then the supports.

In the meantime, the gardens are growing really good. Check out these pitangas we have been gathering!

Pitanga
Pitanga aka Surinam cherry

And these interesting ornamental ginger flowers on curving spiral stalks.

Ginger flower
Unique ginger flower

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Start of Summer in our PR Yard

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It’s that time of year again. Early May when the whole town of Rincón seems to clear out. The seasonal folks go back to the (mostly) Northeast of the US, and even people who live here permanently start planning summer vacations. That leaves us die-hards with the whole place to ourselves!  Even the most popular beaches are completely empty! The weather can start to get a little hotter, but at our place under the cool shade of the mango tree, we still have to put on a light blanket at night.

Baby mangoes
Mango flowers and fruitlets

The other transition is in all the plants. Everything comes alive in the summer. The avocados are beginning to form again and mangoes have been dropping like crazy hitting our cabana roof.

The robles (tabebuia) have bloomed a couple of times. They have these dainty trumpeted purple flowers that the hummingbirds and bees love and when they are finished they slowly spiral to the ground and form a flower petal carpet.

Purple roble flowers
Pink/purple robles

We also have lots of different food growing. We recently saw that our Surinam Cherries were fruiting. These are interesting little fruits that are in the shape of a pumpkin. Sweet but also tart with a distinct, hard-to-describe flavor. Britton and I munched on a bunch of them though.

Surnam cherries
Surinam cherry AKA pitanga

And we were super excited to see one of our pineapple plants forming a pineapple! We have had some difficulties in growing citrus as well as pineapple. The citrus has all sorts of diseases here in Puerto Rico, and it seems that pineapple often succumbs to root rot. This one, however, is doing great!

Pineapple forming
Pineapple growing

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Puerto Rico: A Tropical Fruit Paradise

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Puerto Rico has an ideal climate for growing tropical fruit. All of the tropical standards found in grocery stores can grow right here: pineapples, mangoes, bananas, avocados, and citrus. And of course there are all of the lesser known exotic fruits that are quite delicious but maybe not as suitable for long distance travel to stores all over the globe.

In our garden we have many different tropical fruits. Recently we harvested some mandarin oranges.

Tangerines 2
A handful of mandarins and the tree behind it

Puerto Rico has been hit with a variety of diseases that are harmful or deadly to citrus including citrus greening which is simply devastating to crops. When we began clearing we saw the remains of probably 5-6 other citrus trees, but these 3 mandarins were the only mature ones to survive. We have since then planted more citrus varieties (kumquats, Buddha’s hand, lemon and lime, orange, grapefruit, etc), but it will take a while until they are full-sized and producing fully. So far, it has been a little over a year in and we really haven’t lost any citrus trees, so we will continue doing what we’ve been doing.

The next thing we recently saw was a banana flower with little bitty bananas growing!

Photo bomb turkey and banana flower
Turkey photo bombing the banana flower!

These banana flowers are so huge and beautiful. We have planted a large number of banana “hijos” or sprouts of various cultivars, but these ones over by the turkey coop really took off. We think this area may have slightly better soil than some of the other areas (and more fertilizer for sure). We are super excited to eat our own bananas from the land because bananas are something we eat every day.

Banana tree
Pineapple plant, banana tree and chicken

We are also super excited to grow our own pineapples. We planted probably 20 pineapple tops, but we only have about 5 remaining. Most of them succumbed to root rot. We are trying a new technique and are hopeful that it works.

Gardening in February…never ceases to amaze and delight me.

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Govardhan Gardens

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Govardhan Gardens Entrance

Yesterday we visited Govardhan Gardens located between Mayaguez and Maricao. We were interested in this private fruit farm because the owner, Sadhu, has one of the largest exotic plant collections on the island. We have picked up quite a few exotics from a variety of nurseries around the island, but there were still some trees we had difficulty finding. We were excited to learn that Govardhan Gardens has pretty much any tropical fruit tree you can imagine!

Rambutan
Rambutan on the tree at Govardhan Gardens

We made arrangements with our friends Greg and Frances who were also interested in seeing his place. We took a tour of some of the property and visited his goats who were super cute!

Sadhu and goats
Sadhu and his goats

Bilimbe
Greg and Frances with a Bilimbe tree -the fruit grows right on the trunk!

In addition to fruit trees, Sadhu also prides himself on an extensive collection of rare and high quality bamboos. We are considering bamboo for a living fence along one edge of our property. But that will be another day.

Golden Bamboo
Rare golden bamboo

We picked up a nice assortment. I would have bought more, but they are quite a bit more expensive than some other nurseries, so we just stuck with the ones we have been interested in for quite some time.  It is amazing how fast our property can just go through plants. To really give it a tropical lush garden feel, it must be packed! Which is fine with me as learning about and finding new, ever-more-exotic/rare plants is one of my favorite pastimes now.

Fruit trees in truck
Truckload of more plants!

Here’s what we came away with on this trip to Govardhan Gardens:

Nutmeg– Used to make the spices nutmeg and mace. I am interested in getting a full spice collection including black pepper, cinnamon varieties, vanilla (we are currently growing), cloves, cardamom, ginger, galangal, etc.
African Breadfruit – Like traditional breadfruit, it can be used as a starch and even ground into a flour to make bread.
Dwarf Acai (2) – We have been looking a long time for acai. I love plants that are both beautiful and useful. Acai is a great looking palm tree and the fruit is one of the highest in antioxidants.
Jaboticaba- Strange tree whose dark purple grape-like fruit grow on the trunk of the tree. It is used extensively in Brazil.
Triangle Palm -This is an ornamental tree that we had been wanting for a while. It grows in the shape of a triangle and is quite striking.
Lipstick Palm- This is also an ornamental palm tree whose shaft is red-colored.
Black Sapote- According to Sadhu, if you pick this fruit at just the right time it will taste like chocolate pudding. If you freeze it and then shave it into a bowl, it tastes just like chocolate ice cream. I am a huge fan of ice cream, so I had to have this one! 🙂

I have no doubt that we will be back at Govadhan Gardens again in the future. Sadhu was extremely knowledgeable and helpful and I look forward to learning even more from him as well.

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