Nuevos Amigos? o Muy Mal

A couple times a day I take the garden tour looking for things to harvest and any other new developments. Looking at my Plumeria I noticed what I thought was new growth, but on closer examination were eating machines!

After hand picking them off I put them on this banana leaf just to see them all together.

They have some little hairs on their rear end that waggle around looking like a fake head. They also have cool little suctioning feet. I really had to pull hard to get them off my plant.

 I put my new little friends in a bucket with leaves so they can cocoon and hatch out into what I hope are mariposas? I'm just curious to see what they become.

Here's my favorite view of one of these guys. I watched them for an hour or more. In the bucket you can actually hear them chewing which is really creepy. We went out for the afternoon and the bucket filled with water and they still lived on. What will they turn into? A giant moth? A butterfly? Maybe they are always worms (but how did they get there). Where did they come from? Another Puerto Rico mystery...

Yesterday's Spearfishing

Yesterday I went spearfishing with a new friend Pucho (thanks Pucho). I am still learning the ropes so I didn't get too many fish. We spent about 4 hours in the water, swimming and swimming. I am not usually the one to get tired but yesterday I got tired. It was a lot of fun but not easy to get fish. At this rate I burned more calories than were in the small fish I got. These fish are fast! I took probably 20 shots and only hit the one. In Washington St spearfishing was much easier. Its much harder here but its more fun. We bought about 10 pounds of fish from Sam's Club today. Hopefully it will be the last time we have to buy fish. Today the weed trimmer broke and we took it back to Sears. Its going to be around 3 weeks to be fixed. Maybe I'll use that time to go spearfishing but now I have to find a good trimmer. Sears and Home depot don't have ones that are good enough. I don't know were to find one.

3 Things a Day from the Yard and Cat Circus

Since we have been here we have tried to eat 3 things a day from the yard. This isn't difficult. Today however we have outdone ourselves! The day started with cereal and guineos, mango, and coconut on top. Jeff went spearfishing (too bad spearing fish isn't legal on scuba) and after 4 long hours came home with dinner! Dinner consisted of fresh fish, packaged yucky noodles, bread and goodies from the yard - tomato, mint, lemon, aquacate, and mango chutney. The ginger ale was tinted with grenadine which we have growing as a nice shrub now but no pomegranates yet! So today's food total came out to 7 yard things. Yummy and colorful.

So here are some more things from the yard - giant parcha, a tomato and an egg. As I was wandering the property I came across a nest (no chicken in sight) with 6 eggs in it. The next day it had 8 eggs in it. Then it had 11 eggs in it. Not coming from a farming background and not knowing what is safe and what is salmonella I asked the expert Amparo (neighbor lady) who cracked one open on the spot and declared them to be good. We split the bounty (she wouldn't take them all) and I made some cookies and didn't kill us! The eggs were from at least two different hens (different colored eggs) and weren't fertile (nothing would gross me out more) which is why the hen wasn't there. Usually they sit on them for a month.

We had a few parcha from a neighbor when we first got here and were hooked. Unfortunately though it took 5 parcha to make a single glass of juice even diluted. We still wanted some so we went and got 3 1 foot starts from Jardin Eileen just south of Home Depot in Mayaguez. We have fruit already and they are HUGE! One parcha gives us enough juice to make a nice afternoon snack. I take the pulp and press it through a sieve, add the same amount in water and a teaspoon of sugar and it is wonderful. I read that you can throw the pulp in the blender then strain out the seeds and may try that next - I might get even more juice. Anyway, I am surprised by what comes out of that little weird, lightweight orb. It is a beautiful color and is very aromatic. Here I have half the yield of one fruit in my pretty glass. (Any one know where to get women's size 6 work boots locally? Tennis shoes suck.)

In front of the house and at the turnaround part of the driveway there were stumps. The stumps had pots on them with nice shrubs but they were still stumps. Jeff got a chainsaw on sale and we decided to take them out. In front of the house there used to be a large pine and boy was that wood hard! (Now we know why the stump was left there.) Besides being hard it smelled just like hamster bedding when Jeff cut it out. Here is the stump with a plant in it.

We now have to decide what to do with the space. It has a circle of bricks that demand that something be done. We already have a fountain. Do we want a big pot with neat flowers in it? Seems like that isn't much better than the stump-pot-holder. While we wait and hope to come up with ideas we filled it with cement leaving a level spot for some unknown future use. But for now it has become a cat stage! They either all sit around the edge waiting for story time (there once was a cat who was very very good and got to come in the Big House...) or they take turns performing in the center ring.

Sometimes they have to be coaxed by the bathing-suit -tie- on -a -stick toy and sometimes they just nap in the flat spot. Kind of fun.

Random Stuff Around the House

I have discovered breadfruit and it is my new favorite thing (although I am partial to habichuelas guisado). First off you can boil it and it tastes kind of like artichoke hearts. That is what I have done here and I really like the honeycomb pattern the fruit has. I think breadfruit makes the best tostones - they are much flakier than guineos or platanos. Surillos are pretty good but mine sometimes fall apart or stick. My neighbor makes the best ones and they have to have mayo-ketchup to dip in which is something I will never ever understand. When we first got here I had a recipe where you take a maduro breadfruit, pull the stem (and innards) out, stuff the hole with brown sugar and butter and bake it for una hora. When finished it tastes just like a banana. Eating a banana is quicker! But having things taste like what they are not is part of Puerto Rico's magic!

When I was collecting laundry Princess had a new game of "pull the socks down." Only I think this is cute.

Despite all the bugs in the garden the calabaza continues to get bigger and bigger. I just want it to stop and get a little color near the base so I can eat it. I'll probably cube it up and freeze a bunch since it is HUGE and there is more than one!

?Que is eso? When hunting for more horned tomato worms I came across this foamy insect house on a papaya leaf. Maybe this is an egg mass, but the little tunnel suggests something lives inside and is currently out eating my garden! Any ideas?

Outside the kitchen door is the hilly mess that is the new project. I have decided that there will always be grass on it. Jeff can week whack down a little and I can goat-crawl up aways but we can't get it all. My latest thought is to not fight things. Grass is what grows there for a reason. So I am going to make a dividing line of "good" fountain grasses staggered zig zag like half way up and the upper will remain wild and the lower can become flower land! The kitties are not like Wally was, but they are amusing to have around. Any new thing and they mob around like meer cats. Here Princess and Chicken Little are sparring in the fountain grass. Princess thought the flower heads were really fun and in the end all five pots (five out of twenty) were knocked over after a few hours of "obstacle course."