California 2 Puerto Rico » Plants

Eating Food We Grew

Stefan — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:48:07 +0000

Yeah, that’s right. We grow our own food!

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

What’s on the Menu?

Summer — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:40:53 +0000

What’s on the menu tonight? Well, spicy lettuce, green bell peppers and a cucumber may not sound that exciting to you, but these are all things that we are eating tonight that we grew in our garden! It’s so cool to finally be producing our own food since when we bought this property it was pretty barren (except for the salsa trees and pica pica).

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.

Our Pineapples de Puerto Rico

Stefan — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:11:17 +0000

I finished up work today around 5:00. We start Sydney’s dinner/bed routine at 6:00pm, so I was looking for the girls so we could get a solid evening hour of daddy time in before bed. We had a couple solid days of rain last week, but before that storm, we were without rain for about 7 weeks. Everything was turning yellow.

Summer and Sydney Watering the Pineapple Plants

Despite the rain, we still need to water daily. The yard and plants have grown enough that it just takes too long to water everything in one shot. It takes us about 2 hours to water the entire property and neither of us has time to do that every day. To make it easy, we split up the property into 4 watering zones. So, throughout the day (we both work from home) we water different zones.

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 didn’t just plant trees. Every time Summer and I eat a pineapple, we cut the top off, put it in water and plant it once the roots start to grow. We have a nice little pineapple garden now with about 7 plants. But, we don’t plan on stopping at 7. We are going to just keep on planting and planting. I am of the opinion that there is no such thing as too much fresh pineapple.

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

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’re Going Bananas!

Stefan — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:21:18 +0000

It has been really dry in Rincon for the past month. Up until the past two or three days (windy/drizzle), we haven’t had a drop of rain in over 3 weeks. These pictures are all at least two weeks old, so there is still some ‘green’ in the background, but as of yesterday, we’re talking yellow grass days of winter. Most of our plants are going into drought mode, loosing leaves and turning yellow but we have a few plants that just love this time of year.

Our banana trees have been producing a lot of banana’s for us this year. Once the first few bananas turn yellow, we chop off the entire bunch and hang it on the front porch for easy picking. Sydney eats at least one banana a day and it feels good to know that WE grew her breakfast (part of it).

Our papaya tree’s are also enjoying the dry weather. We had about 15 papayas growing out of each tree. I sure wish everything we planted grew as fast as the papayas. It took less than a year for these little non-grafted papayas to grow up and give us fruit. Amazing.

Hola from Rincon

Stefan — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:29:28 +0000

We’ve been really tied up with the baby, work and the usual life stuff…but Sydney wanted to say HOLA!

Does anyone know what kind of plant this is that Sydney and Summer and standing next to? It is really cool looking, almost prehistoric. Is this the plant that killed off the dinosaurs?

Our Trees are Ready for Battle!

Summer — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:49:34 +0000

We’ve planted several dozen (50ish) citrus, exotic fruit and avocado trees on our property, and while many of them are flourishing and doing well, unfortunately we keep losing trees to careless weedwackers. Recently we’ve lost a canepa, tangerine, kumquat and avocado in the battle that is maintaining our property. No bueno!!

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”:

Our Garden is REALY Fertile

Stefan — Wed, 27 May 2009 02:50:46 +0000

Seriously, our garden is the bomb. Of course, I say this regardless of the fact that we don’t have any plants in it yet. We have a bunch of tomatoes popping through the beautiful soil, some lettuce and sugar snap peas. We are still waiting on our other little seeds to show their little sprouts. The real reason our garden is awesome, is because it grew a pregnant Summer. Ever seen one? Have a look:

OMG! A Pineapple!!!

Summer — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:23:51 +0000

I was taking a little stroll around the property and happen to walk by the pineapple plants we planted, and…well, LOOK!!

Hay un pina!! Yay! I’m so excited about this! Every time we eat a pineapple, we have been planting the tops around the property in hopes of growing our own pineapples. I used to obsessively check the pineapple plants everyday, but then I read that it takes around 2 years for a pineapple plant to produce fruit, so I decided to ignore them for a while . It worked, it worked!

Growing your own pineapples is actually very easy. Just cut off the top of a pineapple, stick it in water and it will sprout roots. Plant it in the ground and in a year or two you should get a pineapple! Pineapple plants arn’t very pretty (in my opinion) and they are spiky as hell (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shed blood on that damn pineapple plant, trying to plant it, weed around it, etc.), so I prefer planting them somewhere out of the way.

Pineapple top + water

Roots look good! Ready to plant!

Accidental Papaya is Producing

Stefan — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:35:28 +0000

When we first moved into the house, there wasn’t any type of vegetation in our front yard. Check out this post from August of 2007, it shows our Rincon PR property completely baron. No plants in the front yard, just dirt and rocks.

In the past 6 months we have been slowly getting fruit from the trees we planted. Nothing that will feed the neighborhood (aside from the big ‘ole mango con fibre trees in the back yard) but we have scored some starfruit, peanut butter fruit, a couple small citrus fruit and a bunch of vegetables. So far, our biggest score, as far as mature fruit goes, has been a papaya tree that we didn’t even plant. It grew from seeds we threw off the back porch. We weren’t watering it or trimming it, the only thing we did was not cut it down by accident on one of my monthly (during the rainy season) 30 hour property clearing sessions.

Our papaya tree produced a great papaya last month (just one) and another one about two weeks ago…but the rats/birds go to that one before us. Yesterday, I cruised down to check out the tree with my morning coffee and there was a big beautiful papaya waiting for me to pluck it from the tree…so I did. I am going to give it another day or two to yellow out some more, and then we are going to eat it!

Rincon Horses Like Banana’s and Palm Trees

Stefan — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:06:14 +0000

I don’t know if you remember how much work it was for us to maintain our property when we first moved to Rincon, but it was some major work. It is quite possibly just as hard now, but maybe we are just used to working in the yard and have gotten better at it. Also, we hired a couple local girls to work the property 24 hours a day. Actually, it is a mom and her daughter and they take care of about one full acre of land…the downfall is that they are indiscriminate with what they eat. Did I mention the girls were horses?

The horses we have won’t eat apples, they won’t eat carrots but they will eat the heck out of some bananas, palm trees and grass. I think it’s a Puerto Rico thing. We surrounded the pasture with new barbed wire fence before the girls moved in and placed the fence about 2 feet back from our row of plants we strategically planted to block the view of the water plant in the summer. Once the horses either trampled or ate all of the grass we had in their pasture they started reaching through the fence and eating grass as far as they could reach (makes weed eating around the fence unnecessary). While they were over there, they found about 4 palm trees and a bread fruit tree and decided to eat them as well.

The horses are only going to be temporary so I didn’t think much of it, I figured I would replant once they moved out and put up a fence that they can’t reach through. Well, all that went out the window two weeks ago when they reached through the fence again and reached another palm, a McArthor palm and the corner of yet another Eureka palm. Conner and I decided to put up some fencing right away to avoid loosing those three plants like the other 5 we have already lost to the horses.

Hopefully this will do the trick, although the little girl (we call her Jackson) is biting at the fence trying to pull it away. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that the posts hold up. If they get out of the pasture they would reek havoc on our palm and fruit tree filled front yard.