Category Archives: food plants

Líneas de Agua

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We decided that walking up the hill to fill the chicken and turkey water was becoming a bit too tedious.  Granted it is good exercise, it is kind of a pain.  Since it is a pain the turkeys and chickens sometimes let us know that they are out of water by following us around.  The whole flock.  It is kind of funny, but also can be a reminder that getting them water is a chore.  The distance from the cabana to the turkey coop is about a football field (down, then UP hill).

We figured that since we put the coops along the property line, we could also drop in a new PVC water line along the border.  This serves two purposes.  Easy to water the birds, but also the plants.

It is pretty dry in Rincón during the winter.  It is nice because the humidity drops as well as the temps just a few degrees.  It really does feel perfect out, but the plants and especially the new plants have to be watered.  We have been dragging around 150ft of hose to do the task, but since we have expanded our area of planting, we think it is time to expand our infrastructure.

Truck with pipe
Truck with Pipes

We are now clearing/planting almost to the end of the property line on one side, we are putting down lots of grass seed and we spend quite a bit of time “down below”.  The mower, the chainsaw all the gardening equipment is starting to live at the turkey coop for convenience.  Having a water tap will be perfect!

A nice thing about living in the tropics VS a temperate climate is that I don’t have to bury the water lines.  It makes finding and fixing leaks easier as well as installation.  There really is no need to bury the line.  Not that it makes laying 400 feet of pipe thru the jungle easy, but if I had to bury the pipe I would probably not be doing it!

Laying Pipe
Ducking Under the Mandarin Tree

We have installed the new system and I had to fix a few leaks due to hooking up to some old PVC that was dirty.  Lesson learned, sand/clean the old pipe before cementing.  I should have known because I have worked with copper pipe quite a bit, oh well.  If you want it done right, do it thrice!

Water Faucet
New Faucet On The Coop

This project cost ~$150 more or less.  We decided to do this because it actually made our lives easier.  We had thought about installing a rain catchment system but did the calculations and decided that for the amount of water we use, it was far cheaper to use the water system already setup and maintained by the city.  Plus we have a reserve built up in the lines to our house, so there would be little to no gain and more maintenance and cost.  When we build the main house, we may setup a rain catchment off the gutters/roof.

In either case we planted lots of grass seed, planted new trees, transplanted trees and watered the birds with ease today!

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Our Biggest Find…So Far.

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The other day we bought some new trees while we were out and about.  We have been in the habit of finding free plant sources thru friends and have had multiple truck loads full, but when you dig up sprouts and hijos you are somewhat limited to what varieties are available.  For instance bananas, plantains, ginger, heliconia some spreading ground covers are fairly abundant but citrus and other fruiting trees usually are harder to find.  We came across some Buddha’s hand, kumquats, tangerines and various other harder to find stuff at one of the plant stores and of course we don’t have anywhere cleared to plant them!

The areas we have planted with trees we have actually had to go back and rearrange.  We have found that a lot of the varieties of trees we bought grow to enormous sizes so we decided we put them too close and in an area that will one day block the view unless they hare heavily pruned.  Moving forward we will take that into account, but when we first arrived we were just excited to plant the trees as soon as we had cleared enough area to do so.

We haven’t cleared/cleaned up even 1/4 of the property yet.  A lot of it is still wildly overgrown.  When the forest gets tall, all the trees start to compete to stay at the top of the canopy.  This causes trees to grow very tall and slender with a huge bush at the top.  We have cut down a lot of trees shaped like this that are nearest to the house because they just block out the entire view of the ocean and Aguadilla.

So anyway, we started to clear out another area of the forest and we came across this:

Avocado reach
Pulling Off Vines

We learned a lesson in our biggest mistake and so we didn’t saw this avocado tree down..lol.  The avocado tree we cut down in that post is, as commenters posted, growing back.  It is however going to be a long while before that tree will have avocados again.   This new find has lots of nice big fruits on it and we have started to pick them up off the ground as they fall.  It is amazing that we have walked by this area quite a few times and haven’t ever noticed the tree!  It is just a testament to how over grown the property is after 20 years.  Hopefully we continue to find mature fruit producing trees.  It is fun to have our own sources for food.

Avocados up aboveAvocados Getting Ready to Drop

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Tropical Agriculture Research Station

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TARS

This past week our new friends Missy and Ben invited us to visit the Tropical Agriculture Research Station (TARS) in Mayaguez with their family.

Four at fountain

Ben is a professor of botany at the University of Mayaguez and had told us about this great place. We were very interested in checking it out.

TARS is a research center of the USDA and not considered a botanical garden though it certainly had a garden feel to it. And while not very well advertised as open to the public, it is open to visitors. We signed in as visitors in the main old building that was built in 1909 in the mission architectural style.

Arbol Campeon

We walked around nearly the whole area and found quite a few great varieties of exotic tropicals that we are looking forward to growing ourselves. There were a few Arboles Campeones (Champion Trees) also that are the largest known specimen on the island as well as some very strange and funny trees like the sausage trees.

Sausage tree

The landscaping is beautiful and sweeping with some trees that reached heights of at least 70-80 feet.

Royal Palm with Monstera

It was really cool to see large healthy specimens of many of our small little plants and trees and what they could potentially be in the future. We are looking forward to another visit soon!

Mangosteen
Exotic and delicious mangosteens littered the ground!

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A Meal from the Yard

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While the cost of food in the grocery stores here can be pretty expensive, it balances out because of all the food you can grow or find growing around the island.

We are still learning about all the different local fruits and edibles around, but one day we were pretty low on food in the fridge, but the pantry of our yard made for a full meal.

The starch component of our meal came from our large breadfruit tree out front.

Bredfruit small

We had noticed quite a few breadfruits growing, but there are a lot less recently and so we have been eating them when they are not quite mature. We think quite a few people around this area know about our huge mango tree, the breadfruit tree and the quenepa tree. We have found people on two different occasions hacking through the vines on our property to collect quenepas!

Fruits small

Breadfruit (or pana in Spanish) is a direct substitute for potatoes. We simply cut off the green skin as well as the inner core. The spongy white part is what you use to eat and prepare just like you would potatoes. For this meal from the yard we made them into little squares and lightly fried them in coconut oil until they were crispy and golden.

For the protein part of the meal, we cooked up some of our eggs. We are now eating eggs at nearly every meal since we are currently bringing in about 6-10 eggs a day (and that will be still be increasing)! It is not hard to do because these eggs are so rich, delicious and creamy.

And finally the fruit/veggie portion of the meal: passionfruit, coconut, mango and quenepas. A full square meal straight from the yard. No grocery store required! Yum!

Breakfast small
Scrambled eggs with hash brown breadfruit with a side of raw coconut, quenepa and passionfruit as well as a cup of mango slices with parcha juice and shredded coconut -and of course a cup of Puerto Rican coffee!

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