The holidays are in full swing here in Puerto Rico this year. The festivities are on fire and it seems that every other day we have one party or another to attend. It has been so much fun! Thanksgiving with our neighbors, birthday parties, cookie exchanges, encendidos, parrandas, school parties and more. It has been non-stop. It is so true that Puerto Rico knows how to party and the winter Christmas season is the best for that!
When we haven’t been out having fun, we’ve been trying to take advantage of the extra time we have with Aeden in daycare and the fact that it has been so much cooler in order to expand the gardens. We recently planted over 35 new cultivars of heliconias and are so excited to see them grow! The cabana has been steadily booked with guests and so that keeps us busy with maintenance, tours and turnover. It’s been a very fufiling time in our lives. I’ve been trying to make more videos in order to capture the essence of life these days, sort of “vlog” style if you’d like to watch some other things that we’ve been up to. Here’s our channel: LIFETRANSPLANET YOUTUBE
Christmas Fun
Primer Cumpleanos for friend Nico’s Birthday Party
Holiday fun. At the beach, with a Norfolk pine (a tropical Christmas tree!) and surfer statue has been Santa-fied
Winter is the best time for a swim!
Or just visit the beach
There was a fun party at the lighthouse
We went out to the encendido in the Rincon Plaza – the best orchestra in Puerto Rico (Orquesta Sinfónica)!
Cows and geckos- normal sights
Had a fun stop at Tres Sirenas Inn
And an awesome farm called “Finca Brutal”
Thanksgiving with our neighbors was a lot of fun!
The beauty of this place still astounds me
More fun out and about
Some new additions to the garden and harvests
Preparing for a flower delivery and working outside in December!
Check out this GIANT heliconia called “Beefsteak” or Mariae. With our new friend Carlos
It’s been an active period of growth, literally, while we enjoy the holidays as well. We hope yours are going well also! Felicidades.
We continue working on our flower business. We have more demand than supply so that’s always a great recipe for expanding and planting more and more. Something we love to do anyway!
Our flowers at a wedding!
Our flowers on display!
More and more flowers on their way!
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Animals are doing well
We’ve taken some time for beach days
Freshest coconut water from the crew down the road!
We continue to host our cabana for rent and have had some really fun guests such as ethnobotanist and author Maria Benedetti and competitive surfer Dominque Miller stay with us!
Dominique and her mother at the Rincon Farmer’s Market
We’ve been out hunting more waterfalls and found a nice close one in Anasco that is also an abandoned park!
At Salto La Encantada
Aeden keeps getting bigger and bigger and has even started walking a little! We also have put him in daycare a few days a week which has opened up our time quite a bit in order to manage our businesses (and just get a breather). He seems to enjoy the socialization time that he doesn’t get being with us 24/7.
Approximately one year apart! My how he has changed!
Aeden enjoying some play time at school
Dress code at home: No shirt, no shoes, no problem!
Sugarcane in bloom
Well, that about covers everything new in our world. Hope all’s well in yours!
The end of September was a hot and humid one. It took everything we had to keep up with the work on the farm. Thankfully we don’t have to be out there when we don’t want to, but when it is that sticky, it is rare to want to get more sweaty than we already are. So we have taken to waterfall hunting (which I’ll write about a little more in later posts) and gathering and planting new finds from nurseries and things that grow wild. Even that can take a lot of effort and exertion just to plant something, but it is not nearly as much as clearing out brush and maintaining/mowing thick areas. Despite the difficulties, the gardens are looking fantastic! When we take pictures and roam slowly throughout, I remember why we do put so much effort into our botanical gardens.
A few of the wonders of the gardens. Pride of Barbados, Vanilla, Weed flower, ornamental banana, bird garden art, rainy day market with flowers
Tried dragonfruit for the first time. We have it growing, and it flowers but hasn’t fruited yet
Cockscomb and yellow beehive ginger
We visited the old Coloso sugarcane factory that they are going to renovate and reopen and turn into a distillery. Sounds like a cool project
Randomly saw some peacocks walking around. How I want these on our farm!
Flowers (ground orchids and fragrant hedychiums)
Just a few things around the yard (avocados, bananas, turmeric, ginger). We are always eating straight from the trees/ground.
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We checked out a new restaurant/boutique inn in Aguada called Fusiones. It was like a fusion between a food truck and a fancy hotel.
At Fusiones
Still find lots of wild hermit crabs on the property!
These Vanda orchids love this huge almond tree!
Tried out another cute vegetarian food truck called Cafe Yoruba in Rincon at the old Carta Buena
Baby Spiders hatched! yay! Go after those mosquitoes!
An amazing lily bloomed after about 5 years since we planted it!
The gardens of Aeden (and Daddy)
Taking the long windy drives up the high hills of the Rincon peninsula!
We have passed our 2 year anniversary since Maria (and 6 years since moving here full time). So much has changed!
We planted a Titan Arum -a corpse flower! These are amazing! Now our gardens are even more like true botanical gardens!
Bromeliad in bloom
The Jungle Boys!
Besides our waterfall adventures I think that just about catches us up lately. We’ve also been dealing with some car issues (got a new-to-us transmission in the Mustang), we work the cabana rental and continue selling flowers and plants at the market and at the farm. Aeden’s getting big and nearly walking and is always with us on our adventures. He’s really starting to fit in with us and we love him so! That’s our life recently in a nutshell!
Thanks to Jessika Providence for this beautiful picture!
No, I am not talking about the stock market or the GDP, but rather the original meaning of those words. Literally growing things (including a baby) and going to markets. We have a bit of a schedule and routine now, moreso than ever with a baby. We used to go out a lot more at night with the band and just to hang out at chinchorros or downtown at the ArtWalk, but we now appreciate our quiet evenings with the kiddo sound asleep. So that means our days must be a little fuller. Fridays and Sundays mean market. Fridays we go to the San Sebastian Pulguero (Flea Market) where we do some bartering and buying. Mostly we are in the market for strange exotic plants. Actually we are ALWAYS in the market for those it seems. No matter how much plant life we throw at the property, it just eats it up.
With a new flower find at the San Sebastian Market
It’s pretty fun at the San Sebastian market because we are nearly always the only “gringos” there and so we sort of stick out like sore thumbs. But people are starting to get to know us, greet us and show us what all they have available before we even have to ask. It REALLY helps to know Spanish in these sorts of environments!
Aeden is a favorite with many people at the market including this sweet woman who even sang “Que Linda Manita” to him
Aeden and the birds back at the farm
Saturdays are usually spent back at the farm unless we have something fun planned. On Saturday afternoon we harvest the fruit and flowers for the Sunday Rincon Farmer’s Market.
Look who needs to start wearing shoes soon!
Aeden is now 11 months old! Check out his latest update video
New bromeliads in bloom at the farm
Our avocado that we accidentally cut down YEARS ago, has come back and is fruiting! I am so happy! Yay for guacamole! What’s strange about it, is only one trunk has fruit. So I think it must have been grafted long ago and we’ll probably have two types on one tree. We’ll see!
At the Farmer’s Market in Rincon. Dragonfruit! We have had our dragonfruit plant flower, but it never holds onto the fruit
The Farmer’s Market on Sunday mornings is fun. We don’t make much money, but it is worth it and it’s fairly stable for being summertime. We have made a lot of great friends there. And we use the money to go out and have brunch and drive around a bit afterward. If we make any more than that we put it into buying more plants from the nurseries or flea markets around.
Taking Aeden to Yogufruti after the Farmer’s Market one Sunday
I never knew what fashion tasted like before, but it’s pretty good! haha
During the week we mostly work on the farm: mowing, planting, improving trails. We also clean and do “turnovers” if we have guests staying in the cabana. We also like to pick a day or two to go shopping or an excursion of some sort. Sometimes we go hunting for plants on the side of the road or check out a beach. Lately it has been so hot, that we have been doing everything we can to stay cool. Since we don’t have A/C that means sitting in the baby pool, finding anywhere that has air conditioning and just milling around, eating watermelon and lots of fluids and trying to avoid the heat of the middle of the day (siesta anyone?). The beach is actually too hot for me on those sizzling days since the water and sand multiply the sun’s effect.
Staying cool in our baby pool in the shade like the hillbillies we are haha!
Fun shopping day out with friend Pauline
Stop in at an authentic chinchorro for una bien friiiia
Checking out a beach in Aguada (Tablerock) -great beach for bamboo driftwood hunters!
Fun on the farm! Dad and boy
Man and his horse swimming in Anasco
Not sure, but I believe this is a cupey flower blooming at our house
Britton had a red RX7 when he was a teenager so this made him gasp when we were driving along in Aguada one day! His 17 year-old self has multiplied! haha
He probably wasn’t listening to this type of song back then though (this is a top hit currently on the radio that we turn up when it comes on, and it’s great for Spanish vocabulary!)
Buying plants at Jardines Eneida! One of our favorite nurseries!
At Jardines Eneida. Check out the video:
I call Puerto Rico “Toon Town” and it’s not without reason…Check out this vibrant little house
And this one…who is very concerned with the modesty of its columns haha
Or this awesomely strange creation seemingly out of a sci-fi movie
Driving up the hills of Mayaguez we had a majestically different view of Rincon and Desecheo in the distance
That’s it for the update. Time flies. I can’t believe that a year ago I was hugely pregnant and just waiting for our little guy to arrive and now he’s almost walking. It’s crazy. Nothing like a kid to make time really feel warped.
Here’s a quick little video of some vignettes of our daily life in Puerto Rico. Hope you enjoy. Oh, and I am trying to do a little more with Instagram if you’d like to follow along.
