Category Archives: Tropical Plants and Food

Just Peachy!

Leave a reply

We have sooo many peaches right now. It’s really cool. Our tree has just been churning them out. They are oh so good and sweet and soft. Some of the early ones were a little tart and hard, but even they softened and sweetened up. This week Britton went to pick some and we came away with over 30 pounds of them! And there is at least that many left on the tree still!


Each bag is about 6-7 lbs!


Briton in the tree harvesting the peaches (he is camouflaged with the sky)

I have brought one basket full to work, and we also made gift baskets for our family.


All the produce and flowers come from our gardens!

And still we have too much! So we have been eating lots of peaches for breakfast and for snacks/dessert. You will have to stay tuned to The Rad Dish and see my lovely peach cobbler. But here is a sneak peek:


Peach cobbler in the saucepan

What’s more is we are also planning our mini-trip to Meeker and Palisades next week for the Peach Festival. Talk about getting peached out! Oh, well, can’t complain too much about beauty and abundance! This is what we imagine our lives will be in Puerto Rico all year long, except instead of peaches it will be mangoes…and pineapples…and starfruit….and lemons….and bananas…and coconuts…and avocados…and….. I think I can get the  hang of this fruit farming thing! It’s just peachy! 🙂

What do you think of this post?
  • WOW (0)
  • Awesome (4)
  • Interesting (0)
  • Useful (0)
  • Bummer (0)
  • Whoa (0)

Selling our Garden Bounty

1 Reply

One thing we love to do in Colorado and that we are excited to try in Puerto Rico, is growing things and selling them. I sell our chicken eggs to a friend year round and I have some other people who like to buy them from time to time in the summer months when we get 5-6 eggs a day (or almost 3 dozen a week!). But when all of our plants start coming in, we also like to sell those, or the fruits from them.


At the Greeley Farmer’s Market a few years back (Selling tropical plants, but of course!)

We used to sell some of our plants at the Greeley Farmer’s Market, but now they require all sorts of expensive insurance and crap, so small backyard growers like us have been pushed out. But there is one great marketplace still around: Craigslist! We love Craigslist and use it to buy things we may need and we list our rentals as well as things around our house and from our garden and greenhouse.


One of our comfrey plants


Tomatoes and lots of other plants in the greenhouse this year


We are finishing up with the strawberry season at our house, but had a bumper crop this year!

Just tonight we sold some tomato plants that were overtaking our greenhouse floor. We also have some people interested in buying some of our comfrey plant crowns. We love doing it. I like writing up the descriptions and waiting for people to contact me. Britton is good at digging up plants and making them look good. Selling our garden bounty feels more like fun than work! We would be working in the garden anyway and so when we get paid to do it and we see how happy people are with our plants, it makes us all the more pleased.

For instance, the woman who bought our plants tonight had had all of hers torn apart when we had that hail storm a few days ago, so she was super excited to be able to start her tomato garden up again -and for way less than it would be to replace them with plants from Home Depot or a nursery.

Britton says lately he has been having dreams of planting an acre or so of our land in Rincon with rows of pepper plants. I am not sure how well peppers grow there, but I would imagine fairly good. And in Rincon, we would still be able to sell them -and eggs, palm trees, coconuts, mangoes, etc, etc- at the Farmer’s Market! There’s so much opportunity everywhere you look. We are really excited and summers in Colorado make us all the more ready to live a summer-lifestyle year-round.


At the Rincon Farmer’s Market

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

You’re Living in the Wrong Place!

Leave a reply

It’s one thing to say something to yourself, and it’s another to hear it from a complete stranger. We currently have two medical students staying with us in our spare bedrooms. I was welcoming them, showing them around and introducing them to the animals and showing them all of our tropical plants in our living room. “…This is the coffee tree with coffee berries that are turning red!”

And this is the banana tree, and the avocado trees, and the citrus collection, and pomegranate, and the Dracaena palm and the aloe vera, and the orchids and this here is our latest collection: a pineapple plant with a mini-pineapple growing on it:


Our pineapple plant we got at Home Depot in Greeley

After I finished with our little botanical tour in our tropical hotel lobby of a living room, one of them exclaimed, “It looks like you’re living in the wrong place! You should be living somewhere tropical.” How right she was. It is funny to hear a stranger point out the most obvious thing you’ve been working for. I suppose our house and lifestyle here really do point to our desire to live in the tropics with lots of warm-loving plants, chickens roaming about and people hosted at our home in the style of a guesthouse. We do it as best we can in Colorado, so I am sure when we move to Puerto Rico we’ll be ready to do the real thing in the right place. In the mean time, we’re starting to amass quite the collection of all things tropical right here in the wrong place! 🙂

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

Photo Concepts of Wooden Tropical Houses

5 Replies

It’s kind of fun to start thinking about how the wood house could transform from a sort of scary (no help from bats, bees and a dead lady), dark and stale place to a light, airy, fun and inviting home. But sometimes I need a little help “seeing” the end result. It is for that reason that Britton and I make sketches and I also look for comparables. I found these photos of other wooden houses in the tropics and thought they were really cool. I could totally imagine aspects of these in our house in Rincón.


I like the deck and staircase in this one. Sort of a Swiss-Family Robinson look


I like the nice floors and the white contrast against the wood. I also like the open and light feeling and the ceiling fan would be a must in the current high ceilings of both the living room and the upstairs bedroom/loft


I like the way this looks underneath. Not sure where this would incorporate in with our wooden house though


I like the contrast of the tropical vegetation against the wood. Britton says he would like to paint the house a blue color, but I kind of like the stained wood look found in these pictures.

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