Our newest baby chicks: 10 Ameraucanas and 6 Silver Laced Wyandottes:

The crate gets pretty gross really quick with 10 (I sold six) rapidly growing chicks pooping, scratching, spilling their food and splashing around in their water, so I started looking up better solutions for keeping chicks. Initially I was going to add a brooder onto our chicken palace, but I came across a better idea while researching DIY brooder ideas: the chicken tractor! The chicken tractor is portable, so we can keep the chicks closer to the house and move them around the yard, so that they can forage and fertilize the land, all while staying safe from predators and the older grumpy hens.

I wanted to use our left over building scraps to build the chicken tractor, so I walked around the property and grabbed a random piece of T1-11 that was annoying me by rotting in the yard, and I happened upon the old temporary screen doors that we finally recently replaced with permanent doors. They ended up working perfectly!

I had Stefan cut a couple of 45 degree angles so that the two screen doors fit together a-frame style. I used the T1-11 to brace and cap off the ends and I made a little box at the end where the chickens can get a little shade or nest. I found a couple of old hinges and made a little trap door on the end for easy loading/unloading of chickens, food and water. I then stapled some left over chicken wire over the screens. Originally I was going to rip out the screens, but since we found out that our cat likes to reach though chicken wire, pull the chicks heads through and gnaw them off, I decided that keeping the screens in would probably not be a bad idea…

Our new chicken tractor:

The chicken tractor isn’t exactly pretty, but I plan on painting it camouflage with the left over spray paint that we used to paint our trashcans recently. And the price was right! The total cost to build our chicken tractor was $0.00, and I got a bunch of scrap out of the yard while creating a useful addition to our finca. Chicken tractors can be used for chicks, or to quarantine/separate a sick chicken, contain chickens to a certain part of the yard, etc.

More pictures of our new DIY chicken tractor:

In other chicken-related news, we are getting tons of fresh eggs from the 5 older chickens and our Ameraucanas finally started laying green and blue eggs. Check em out!

Delicious fresh eggs:

Since we live in the tropics, we planted tons of exotic trees that produce fruit that we’ve never even heard of, let alone tasted. One of those trees is the Pachira Glabra or “French Peanut” tree and it just recently bloomed and gave us our very first French peanuts!

After we returned from our recent adventures in California, I noticed that the french peanut tree had produced a single blossom. I thought that a single blossom on an 18 foot tree was pretty funny, but didn’t think much of it, until Stefan pointed out two odd looking “fruits” on the tree a few weeks later. Not knowing when to pick the French peanuts, I just let them be. To my dismay, the other day I noticed that one of the fruits had dropped, busted open and was empty! Someone ate my french peanuts!! Luckly, upon closer inspection, the french peanuts had just been scattered and I was able to collect them from the grass.

The Pachira Glabra tree produces a fruit that has a very hard outer shell, similar to a coconut. The inside is soft and furry and contains about a dozen of the edible french peanuts. The nuts have a hard shell that you peel off and then you can eat the nut. AND…they are actually pretty darn delicious! I think they taste like a cross between peanuts and macadamia nuts. Can’t wait for more!

Root Borer Beetles!

This is what is left of the beetle that Stefan pulled out of the hole:

And here is a picture of a live Root Borer Beetle:

And here is how those little bastards get into the tree’s roots for a feast that will end up killing the tree:

I read up on Root Borer Beetles on the internet and they said that there is not a whole lot you can do about it, because once you start to notice that the tree is dieing, the damage has already been done and the tree will most likely die. Stefan tried to flood them out of their holes by sticking the hose down there and filling the hole with water then backfilling them with dirt, but the next day, the holes reappeared. Obviously the Root Borers thought that Stefan’s water treatment was refreshing, so I decided to get down and dirty! I sprayed inside the hole with roach killer and then filled it in with dirt. It seems to have worked because that hole did not get re-dug.

So if you are noticing palm trees around your property suddenly dieing, check around the base. If you see some large holes, about 1 – 2 inches in diameter, you’ve got root borer beetles eating your palms roots. So far, they have only been eating the palms, but we’ve lost at least 6 already.

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?

All that changed on round two in the same plot. Summer rotated her plants around and replanted. We watered it daily and maintained well keeping all the weeds out. As of right now, we are producing string beans but everything else is miniature. It’s not dieing, but it’s not growing either.

Summer and I decided it was time to move the garden somewhere with more fertile soil and less ALL DAY DIRECT SUNLIGHT. I have been working on the property a lot lately knocking down Salsa tree’s, weedwacking and weeding and we have an area in the back of the house with nice dirt, 70% sunlight and it’s right next to our compost! I spent a couple hours this week preparing our new garden plot so Summer and I can get planting! It’s really exciting that everything we plant now will be ready around the time our daughter will be born.

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!

Stefan was clearing out weeds down by the quebrada when he noticed the remains of a large avocado. After we looked around, we found a dozen of so rotted avocados on the ground. After looking around some more, we found a avocado tree that has HUGE avocados hanging off of it. The only problem is that the avocados are all on the top branches that are 40 – 50 feet up, so we have to wait until they fall and hope that we find them before the ants or animals do.