Tag Archives: turkeys

Pineapple, Papaya, Avocado and September Fun

Our tropical food and other adventures continue daily.

Papaya
Fresh, delicious papaya

This month we harvested our first papayas as well as our very first pineapple. I have never been a big fan of papayas because to me they smell a little like vomit. But this variety was actually pretty good and didn’t have the smell.

Pineapples are probably up there as one of my very favorite fruit, and we’ve had such issues with root rot here that I got so excited I just had to wear our first little harvest on my head along with some home-grown bananas! Haha, poor Britton always has to put up with my silly shenanigans.

Cassie chiquita - Copy
Just call me Chiquita

In addition, it’s avocado season in full steam. Nearly every meal and snack now includes fresh avocados. Each evening and sometimes morning we go scour beneath the avocado trees. We have found four large mature avocado trees and we have planted another 8 or so, that are off-season varieties so (hopefully) soon we will be so overrun with avocados we won’t know what to do! Most days we’ve collected about 5-10 large avos. It’s amazing how much you can extend a meal when you have avocados. We have them with our eggs in the morning, with salads at lunch and with pretty much anything for dinner (nachos, rice and beans, etc).

Scambled eggs
A typical daily breakfast is almost all home grown -avos, mangos, starfruit, and scrambled eggs. We look forward to growing our own peppers soon too

Iguana hammock
Large orange iguana hanging out eating our fruit too- on the parcha vine!

The animals are all doing well. The baby turkeys are now living in the coop in a smaller cage and we take them out for walks daily until they are hawk-proof (about 3 months old). And of the two chicken chicks that survived from the original 6, one was a hen and the other a rooster. The hen is a gorgeous black chicken mix of auracana and Jersey giant and lays really cool  green olive-colored eggs. The rooster is beautiful and huge, working for his place in the pecking order.

Chickens
The birds crowding around Britton at dinner time

There are still four large male turkeys toms, and we need to decrease numbers because they fight a lot. But we want to wait until we have a stove and fridge to properly handle them. In the mean-time they are looking more beautiful than ever.

Pretty turkey
Turkey looking good 

We are in the midst of a large project that I will write about once it is completed, but we have had quite a few days off as well. We have been going to the beach, hanging out, and playing music with friends.

Steps Beach beauty
Afternoon rain clouds form at Steps Beach after we went snorkeling and the water turned an amazing color

September is a quiet month in Rincón. The local Puerto Rican tourists have left and the North American tourists haven’t arrived yet. There are afternoon rains nearly daily, threats of hurricanes, and the heat can be super intense to work outside. (We take LOTS of showers and have all the fans on after sweating outside!) But I still wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Cassie legs
When we’re not working we spend a lot of time just chillin’ in the Big Sky park of our yard with its ever changing painting

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A (Silly) Video Tour of the Finca

We often have people visit who are curious about what we’ve been up to, so we thought it would be fun to do a little silly video tour for those of you who can’t visit in real life. We had fun making it, and we hope you like it. We should probably do a video like this every year to see all the progress we make. We’ll see about that.

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Snapshots of Life Now

Not many words are needed. Here are a few snapshots of our day yesterday.

Cassie and the turkeysJust hanging out with some particularly friendly turkeys

Swinging BK
Britton literally hanging out

Heliconia and palm
Surrounded by beauty

Pretty Kitty
A pretty Kitty

Tina Turner Singing
And a funny Tina Turner chicken named Grandma singing “What’s Looove got to do with it?”

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Start of a Turkey Coop and End of a Deck

We had wavered a little on whether or not to build a turkey coop. After all, we have a pretty kickass chicken coop that is about 70 square feet. A few turkeys should be able to fit pretty well, right?

Turkey face
Hey, where’s my coop?

Well, we have learned a lot more about raising birds and we have found that they are rather territorial and since these birds weren’t raised together, it could be quite the task to try and cohabitate them. Plus, there are some diseases that chickens can transmit to turkeys, so we decided to go ahead and build them a coop.

Another factor in our wavering was the cost. To build a coop similar to the chickens’ from new wood would probably cost a good thousand dollars. We didn’t have another deck bathroom to remove so what should we do? We talked about bamboo, a hoop house, just a covered run until they were bigger and could sleep in the trees…None of these choices sounded like the right one.

House before

Then one day as we were discussing it, I looked up at the wood house and said, “Well, aren’t we planning on removing the deck and building a new one anyway? If we are going to spend $1000+ on wood shouldn’t it be on OUR structure instead of the turkeys?” And so that is when the turkey coop decision was finally made.

Britton started by removing the bars from the window on the part of the deck that he would be dismantling. From the inside it is pretty hard to get at because it is right over the stairwell. There is a little hatch that folds over to stand on over the stairs in order to reach the window. Sometimes we feel like the house is more a big boat than a house!

Window board over stair

Next, he started to take apart the deck itself. This process took a bit of time, but wasn’t too complicated.

BK on Deck
Removing the deck on a gorgeous day

Once the wood was on the ground we were able to sort out which pieces would work and which were too far gone. Some of them are aesthetically worn down, but will still function in a coop. It is pretty amazing, actually how well this deck has stood up to the time and weather. It is probably about 25 years old and hasn’t had any maintenance done on it in at least 15! And yet, here it still stood! At least until we got our hands on it!

Britton and pile o wood
Cleaning and powerwashing the boards

The next phase was choosing a site and starting the base once more. The turkey coop will be similar in style and construction to the chicken coop, but just down the hill a ways more.

Cassie at the coop site 1At the coop site!

Another end brings yet another beginning. We are looking forward to saying, “So long, deck and hello, turkey coop!”

House without a deck
The house with half its deck removed

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