Tag Archives: robles

Spring and Easter in Rincón

In Puerto Rico because it is a tropical environment, many people think that there are not seasons. This is not exactly accurate. While it does stay between 75-85 degrees F year round there are still subtle changes. Because we work outside a lot and we live in a cabin in the middle of the jungle we notice these changes perhaps a bit more than some people. For one thing, many of the plants begin to flower in preparation for fruiting in the summer. One of my favorite flowering plants are the robles (Tabebuia rosea). For about one month these trees add a rose colored hue to everything including the ground! It is like living in a pink snow globe especially when you see them softly twirl to the ground.

The trees and I are pink!

Roll out the pink carpet!

Turkeys enjoying the changing colors of spring

The rambutan are already flowering! Let’s hope they form fruit!

Like this grosella

The papaya and bananas are constantly producing! I love the way this trunk looks like ancient carving

I think all plants are beautiful in a certain way, but not all of them are friendly! We have been working on clearing around the cabin and replanting with fruiting trees and ornamentals. In doing so we have to clear out some pretty mean and nasty stuff like the Puerto Rican poison ivy they call Carrasco that no matter how careful I am, I always somehow manage to get on me. About 2 days after this happens I swell up really bad and start itching uncontrollably. Then my skin erupts in a pus-y mess and then finally scabs over. It is not fun!

Spring for the Carrasco plant too! Here is its flower/berry

Another mean plant are the wild bromeliads. While beautiful they have the most vicious spikes on them. I have many pokes and stings from these bad boys. They are very difficult to eradicate from an area. We just threw them over the fence line. They would make a good living fence because no one would want to walk through these!

Wild bromeliad and its thorny weaponry

Side of the cabin that we cleared of bromeliads and other brush and have begun to replant

When we’re not enjoying spring in the jungle, we have been out with friends at various events including the Stand Up Paddleboard race, and Spring/Easter parties. The 2017 tourist season was a little slow, but that doesn’t mean the partying was. One thing about living in Rincón (and I think Puerto Rico in general) is that there is never a shortage of parties! It’s a good-time island. We have to consciously choose which events to go to and which not because we’ll never get anything done around the property otherwise!

Villa Cofresí and her famous piratas during the SUP contest

Fun times with friends!

On Easter weekend we went to a friend’s farm in Aguada and set up a campground. We sang songs around the campfire and toasted marshmellows and relaxed. The fireflies came out and danced alongside us. It was truly magical!

Road through the woods to the campsite

Campsite by day

And by night (thanks Daisy for this pic)

Easter we had a wonderful time with a variety of friends!

The Van Ees

So much fun! Slip-sliding away…even with chickens!

¡Felices Pascuas!

And another party at the beach!

So yes, there is a spring in Puerto Rico even if it isn’t quite as pronounced as up north. Everything is in bloom, the birds and insects start mating more, the rains begin to come more regularly, the temperature and humidity go up a little and the ocean warms up just a bit. In Rincón the northern tourists leave and the local Puerto Rican tourists start arriving. I hope we can continue playing music through this summer, but if not, come check us out at our next show this Saturday at Willie’s Bar and Grill in the marina!

Rincón Continentals Live

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Garden and Food Update: Our Outdoor Grocery Store

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We just spent about 3 days mowing, machete-ing and planting around our property. It’s hard, hot work, but in the summertime you have to do it fairly regularly or things will just grow out of hand with all the rain. I can mow about an acre that is flat(ish) and Britton does another acre that has a fairly pronounced slope.

Mowing away!

We have two of the same mower so sometimes we mow together, but we can also exchange parts as we inevitably break something. The good news is that all the growth and work also means FOOD! Lots and lots of food.

Delicious creamy red banana

In the summers I can buy about half of what I normally do at the (indoor, conventional) grocery store and only need to go shopping every 10-12 days instead of every 5-7 days and we could probably go even less if we could stand to eat mangos every snack and meal. Instead I end up having to shovel off the rotting mangoes from the roof of the cabana and the chickens and turkeys eat them. A good exchange for some eggs and meat down the line.

Rooftop mangos

A quick stroll around the finca for about 10 minutes I came up with this plate of food. Eggs, figs, Surinam cherry, mulberry, sapodilla, pomarrosa, papaya, mango, passionfruit

And while I love the delicate little berries like mulberry and pitanga, and the succulent passionfruit, nispero and figs, the real staples that make it so you don’t have to go shopping as much are in the starches like breadfruit and plantains.

Breadfruit AKA pana ready to be picked

Plantains and papaya from our finca

Both breadfruit and plantains taste and can be cooked much like potatoes. They can both be harvested and used green or a little more mature. I prefer to cook with amarillos and ripe pana, but that’s just my preference since we still have a limited kitchen and the ripe ones take less time and prep. I often cook them with our eggs. Just add a few peppers and fruit and it’s a fully rounded meal!

Britton and a friend harvesting coconut

Another great food that we are currently under-utilizing is coconut. We have two varieties that are currently producing. One is a smaller yellow coconut and the other is a large green one. They are both good. The green one tends to have a lot more coconut water though. I would like to eventually make our own coconut milk and oil. For now we are just eating the meat and drinking the water.

Coconut water filled into a bottle and ready for some tragos!

Papaya AKA Lechosa

Another favorite of mine is the wild papaya we have growing. These just grow as volunteers. I think the birds drop their seeds. I never was much of a fan of papaya because I think it smells a bit like vomit and it is recommended to squirt lemon or lime juice on papaya to cut that smell. But this rounder variety doesn’t have that smell. So it is like having a cantaloupe tree! And I LOVE cantaloupe. This stuff is so good! They call it lechosa here I think because when you cut it open a milky sap sort of forms as you can see in the lower left of the above picture.

Grow little lychee grow! (Red flagged plant beneath the royal palm)

We are starting to see the fruits of our labor in some of the trees we first planted like the pomarrosa. And we are still planting more trees. Like this little lichi/lychee above as well as a governor’s plum and longan.

Both Britton and the chickens congregate around this little pomarrosa tree to eat straight off it

Pomarrosa is so good! One of the few truly crisp tropical fruits. It has a rosey smell and a crunchy almost jicama texture. It looks waxy and the redder they are, the sweeter. This variety is seedless and you can basically eat the whole thing in 2-3 bites. I love to add them to fruit salads for a pink burst and a nice crunch.

Chickens and turkeys scavenging and fertilizing around the pomarrosa tree

We all love “shopping” at our outdoor grocery store. It’s the most beautiful supermarket I know!

The aisles of our grocery store… littered with fallen flowers. The store may be a little warm but way better than unnatural air conditioning!

An the floral selection is way better too 😉

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Start of Summer in our PR Yard

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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

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Finding Palms and Difficult Trees

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New plants ready to go once we get more cleared (plus the boss cat)

We have cleared and planted, cleared and planted and then done it some more. I think we are at the point where we can finally start to make some sort of landscaping plan on a broader scale because we have an idea of what the property looks like.

Opening up the view, one tree at a time

It would seem that the previous owner had cleared quite a bit and then those areas left unattended filled in over the years with what we are calling trash trees. There are salsa trees that are very soft wood and attract termites, but grow extremely quick. There are lots of what are locally called robles or ‘oak trees’ but are more specifically the tabebuia. These trees all have to come down and be chopped up.

As we cut back we occasionally come across a tree we don’t want to cut (it’s amazing). So far it has basically come down to a lot of mango and palm trees that we are saving. We are still finding trees that we didn’t know existed and we are still visiting areas of the property that we haven’t been to.

For example, below is another royal palm that we didn’t know was growing until we started to carve a new path thru the forest. It has to be around 30-35 feet tall. Of course it didn’t look like the picture when we found it, we could actually barely see it. We had to saw down everything around it (about 15 trees of varying size and type).

Royal palm to greet us on our new path

I have counted 15 of these on the property and this one is one of the smaller trees!

As we cut and cut we learn more. More about the plants, animals and I am getting pretty good at sawing down trees. There are still challenges that come up and require more thinking and planning. For example there were two trees near the house and cabana that we have been wanting to cut down, but for reasons of new challenges, weren’t easy.

Below is a picture of a dead mango tree that is next to the wood house. It is a real eye sore and view blocker we call ‘the monster’. It has a back lean, is half rotted, has no top branches, lives right next to the fence and septic pipe and also has bees living in the base. For these reasons, it hasn’t been a straight forward removal.

Opening up the view
Dead Mango Tree Removal Process

We covered the septic pipe with some old pallets so that what was left of the branches wouldn’t crush the pipe when they fell. This worked out well. The tree was so close to the fence that access to the base was difficult. Also because there were no branches on the top of the tree, it made it not want to fall (no leverage or weight) once the base was cut thru.

I had sawed thru 80% of the base, but it was still standing so we tied a rope around the top and tried to pull it over, but this didn’t work. We just didn’t have the leverage to pull it. So I grabbed a few ratcheting straps from the truck and tied it to the tree and a fence post. The ability to ratchet made all the difference.

High Tension

This worked out and the tree came crashing down! The bees that live in the base of the trunk will be taken care of at a later day, or maybe not. They might be able to live there, but we will see. They didn’t swarm out and attack so that was good. I had my bee veil ready to go just in case.

Dead Mango Tree Down (coop in the background)

There was another tree behind the house that blocked the view and dropped foot long bean pods everywhere. It was half dead and full of termites. For these reasons we wanted to remove it but we were concerned it would crush the fence when it fell. Well….. We decided that we are going to remove the fence so crushing it would be ok. And maybe kind of fun. So it came down too.

Tree from Deck Blocking View

Tree Down!

Fence After Taking the Tree Off It

The dry season will be coming to an end and we want to cut down as much as we can and be ready to plant like crazy! I have killed more trees than I would like to admit, and there isn’t an end in sight yet. The property is opening up more and we can see a nice view of the valley with the ocean and the Aguadilla airport in the distance. It is getting us excited to get going on the wood house.

We are enjoying the process of discovery and progress. It has been an absolute blast and at the end of the day we let the chickens out and sit on the porch of the coop watching them forage around for bugs.

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Tag Archives: robles

Spring and Easter in Rincón

Garden and Food Update: Our Outdoor Grocery Store

Start of Summer in our PR Yard

Finding Palms and Difficult Trees