We often have people visit who are curious about what we’ve been up to, so we thought it would be fun to do a little silly video tour for those of you who can’t visit in real life. We had fun making it, and we hope you like it. We should probably do a video like this every year to see all the progress we make. We’ll see about that.
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.
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.
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.
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 growing
Tamarind from a tree out back
One of our new favorite snacks is tamarind or tamarindo in Spanish!
We really had never seen or eaten tamarind before, but wow, what a treat! It’s like candy growing right off the tree. It tastes a bit like a chewy sweet tart candy. You just pull the fruit off the tree, crack it open and suck the jelly off the seeds. You can also make juices, candies or sauces with the pulp. I prefer to just eat it straight from the tree.
It is currently in season here in Puerto Rico and we have two or three big trees right here on the property. We are always amazed by the wide variety of tropical fruit here, but even more so we are amazed that these great fruits aren’t more common in the stores in Puerto Rico! So many things can be grown here (and are!) but they just don’t make it through the “normal” distribution chains. You’ll see things like this tamarind from Thailand sometimes before you’ll see the local Puerto Rican variety! It’s crazy!
Tamarind all the way from Thailand in a Puerto Rican Wal-Mart!
That’s why we get a lot of our Puerto Rican produce at the little fruit stands or just grow it ourselves. We made a short little video that shows how to identify both the tree and the fruit and how to tell if it is ripe or not. Enjoy!
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.
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!
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.
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.