- Feed them to Sydney (she doesn’t like it that much)
- Dehydrate it (still tastes funky to me)
- Make pepper from the seeds (wasn’t flavorful enough to be used in place of pepper)
- Add green papaya to our salads (this is really good! Thanks for the suggestion Katrina!)
- Feed them to the horses next door (they love it)
- Add it to smoothies (just don’t add too much so you don’t get that funky foot aftertaste)
- Make papaya jam (this is REALLY good!)

Most recently I made papaya jam and it was really, really good and really, really easy. This is what you need:

5 cups of mashed papaya
1/4 cup orange juice
2 cups of sugar
60g of pectin

Remove the papaya seeds, chop up the papaya and mash it up. Leave it chunky if you like chunks of fruit in your jam or throw it in the food processor to make it smoother. Heat the papaya, orange juice and pectin. When it begins to boil stir in the sugar. When it begins to boil again, let it boil for 1 minute (be careful to not let it boil for longer as you risk over-cooking the pectin which can cause your jam to not set correctly). Ladle the jam while it is still hot into sterilized canning jars and let the jam cool.

Wasn’t that easy?! The original recipe called for 5 cups of sugar, but even cutting it down to 2 cups left the jam very sweet (so sweet, in fact that I am going to try it with 1 cup next time). The only hard part to this papaya jam recipe is finding pectin in Puerto Rico. I ended up ordering it on eBay. You can also find it on Amazon.com, but you have to buy it in bulk.

Here is another recipe for papaya jam, that I have not tried yet, but it looks good (and you don’t need pectin):

1 cup papaya
2 cups sugar
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Mash the papaya, mix with sugar and heat to a boil. Reduce heat and continue cooking while stirring constantly. When the mixture becomes sticky, add butter and lemon juice. Stir for 1 minute. Let cool.

Anyone have other suggestions on good uses for papaya?

Composting our green waste in the kitchen removes at least half of all or the waste from the trash can (that I bring to the top of the driveway. If all the kitchen waste is composted properly, it will provide a thriving environment for our garden, plants and trees. Compost inoculates soil with beneficial microbes (bacteria, fungi, etc.) and the habitat that the microbes need to live. These microbes are able to extract nutrients from the mineral part of the soil and eventually pass the nutrients on to our plants.

Kitchen Compost Container

Composting – Step 1

The first step to our family and visiting friends composting is making it easy for everyone. We have a small tupperwear container in the kitchen next to the sink that we dump all of our ‘green’ waste in to. We put everything in our compost except meats and dairies. A typical full compost bin upstairs will have egg shells, fruit peels, vegetable peels, discarded lettuce, coffee grounds (w/filter) and paper towels.

Compost Tumbler

Composting – Step 2

The indicator for moving to step 2, is that the tupperwear container next to the sink is full (sarcasm). Usually, once a day, we bring the container downstairs and dump it into our compost tumbler. The compost tumbler we have is perfect for a small family with a small yard. It is a round bin on a stand that takes our family (with guests) about 2 months to fill up. We turn it 1-3 times a day to airate it and I check it regularly for ant infestations. When you open the door to the composter, the interior of the tumbler is hot from the decomposition going on inside it all day long. The balance between vegetable matter and dry grass/leaves is important. The correct balance will leave you with a compost that does not smell at all.

Composting – Step 3

Backyard Lasagna Compost - Making Black Gold

Now, after a few weeks of lasagna composting, we get what is referred to in the garden world as BLACK GOLD. Black gold is the finished product of composting. It is very dark, almost black, earthy and smells like soil (not rotting veggies). You should not be able to recognize any of the original ingredients. If you want to learn more about composting, check out this Wiki on composting.

Summer and I compost because it is satisfying and rewarding. The little bit of extra work has worked its way seemlessly into our routine and we reap the benefits everytime we enjoy vegetables from our garden.

Termites have eaten their way through gardening equipment handles, expensive palm trees but mostly just kill the undesirable Salsa trees. These trees grow like weeds everywhere and take all the nutrition away from other more desirable trees (shade year around, fruit etc).

When we moved into this place we had no trees in the back yard. The yard had been recently bulldozed and we started from scratch with a few sprouted coconuts we found. Over the years we have been clearing out the Salsa trees, planting more stuff and trying to create a cool landscape. We had one Salsa tree that grew big quick, so we kept it for shade in the summer time but this year, it didn’t survive the termites.

I cut it down yesterday (with a reciprocating saw ) and now our back yard is landscaped EXCLUSIVELY with plants and trees that we planted ourselves. It’s a cool feeling to have, especially now that some of them are 8ft plus tall.

We have two main food sources from the property right now, the garden and our fruit trees. Our garden is doing really well and is starting to produce tomatoes, snow peas, cucumbers and spicy lettuce. We have some other stuff coming in too like jalapeno and habanero peppers.

Spicy Lettuce and Summer

Most of our grafted fruit trees are not really producing yet with the exception of the first Starfruit (Carambola) tree we planted. They are all too small and although some of them have flowered and started to grow fruit, nature took over and made all the fruit fall off so the tree could grow up big and strong.

The exception to our ‘non-producing’ fruit trees are our banana trees. Wow, they really exploded with growth this year! That is probably pretty apparent with all the ‘banana blog posts‘ we’ve done, but they are fast growers once they get established and 70% of our trees have produced bananas this year. Check out our most recent harvest!

Home Grown Bananas

We’ve learned lots of stuff from garden 1.0, garden 2.0, garden 2.5 and garden 3.0 and our current garden is doing AMAZING. While many plants say they do best in full sun, I don’t know of many plants that can survive and thrive in full PUERTO RICAN SUN. We moved the garden down by the mango tree where it gets a nice dose of sun and an equally nice dose of shade during the day. Currently, our garden is producing lettuce, cucumbers, bell peppers, cilantro, basil, zucchini, tomatoes and snap peas, and will soon be producing jalapanos, habenero peppers, purple bell peppers, thai chilis, lemon cucumbers and leeks.

Summer and Sydney Watering the Pineapple Plants

I left the office and hiked up to the top of the hill and found Summer and Sydney (in her sling) watering the plants with the hose. It really is cool to see our plants/trees hit the 2 – 3 year old mark. They aren’t big yet, but they are established little trees. By the time Sydney is ready to climb trees, she’ll be swinging on branches of trees Summer and I planted. It’s awesome.

Pineapple Flowers

We have two flowers coming out of one of the pineapple plants. The colors really are amazing. The plant that is producing this round is the same plant that produced the first round of pineapples we got. The first round had 1 pineapple. We weren’t in town when it ripened so we didn’t get to taste it, but because we never cut off the rotting fruit, the pineapple that grew off of the plant grew into a new pineapple plant. Sweet.

Pinapple Facts



Pineapple Nutrition

I did a little research on pineapples and found out a few cool things.
• The English name pineapple came from European explorers that re-discovered due to its resemblance of a pine cone.
• The original name for a pineapple is Tupi, which comes from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
• The Spanish word for pineapple is piña.
• A pineapple plant can grow to be as big as 5 feet tall and deadly leaves that are 3 and a half feet long. (the leaves are very sharp and spikey, not poisonous)
• Each pineapple plant can produce multiple fruit (pineapples).
• A pineapple is made up of helically arranged flowers that form the fruit. So, it is not actually one fruit, but many combined into one.
• Pineapples are mostly pollinated by hummingbirds (we have a bunch)
• Pineapples and the root are used in traditional Filipino medicine as an anti-inflammatory. It was both eaten and applied topically.
• Pineapples are chill sensitive and should not be stored in the refrigerator.

Hopefully we will take advantage of our pineapple crop this year, eat them all up and then replant them for pineapples in a few years. This is not a vicious circle.

We made another trip out to the nursery and spent a couple hundred dollars on a new batch on injertado (grafted) fruit trees and this time, we are protecting our investment! Stefan came up with a plan of using PVC pipe to create little tree jackets to protect our trees from wayward weedwackers. While this is a great plan, it’s kind of a pain in the butt to go buy PVC and cut it to fit each tree, so I made a trip down to the $1 store and bought a bunch of plastic hair curlers. They are much easier to cut then PVC, and you can just add more curlers if the tree is taller. Hopefully this will work!

Our new batch of fruit trees:

Our trees wear fashionable light blue “armor”:

Does any one know the best time to pick bananas? While they are still green or when they start to turn yellow?

In addition to bananas, we could not believe how much the papaya plants had grown in the two months we were off the island. I would say they are ten times the size from when we left and there are 20+ papayas hanging off of that tree!

In the madness of preparing for our first cross country trip with the baby we forgot to harvest and eat our first pineapple and it went bad by the time we got back…Bummer! But we do have 6 more pineapple plants in the ground so hopefully we will get another soon.

It’s so cool to finally be able to eat the fruits of our labor (literally)! So far we have produced the following food from our land: mangos, papayas, pineapples, avocados, kumquats, limon dulce, noni, tomatoes, lettuce, basil, rosemary, string beans, calabaza, snap peas, jalapenos, edamame, chives, bell peppers, peanut butter fruit, starfruit and cilantro. It’s like Farmville, but for real! Right Robin?