Vegetable Gardening Frustration and Improvements(?)

So here is my main garden site. Doesn't look like much right now because I got frustrated and pulled everything out! Cherry tomatoes grow great. Tomatoes grow great. Green beans grow great. Peppers grow great and pumpkin grows great. Just not now (except pumpkin). All my tomatoes were cracking. I had great big nice tomatoes for a long time and then when the climate got a little wetter all the problems started. Too dry of weather and things were getting buggy - tomato worms, white fly on the gandules and green beans, and then it got wetter and peppers and tomatoes started to crack. I had nice rows made and then the hard rains washed them flat. I'd go out and make the beds again. They'd wash down again and on and on. I got sick of it and decided I needed a solution. So here is the test bed. I decided to make a raised bed of sorts (not raised much, just one cinder block high) so I can control the moisture better (won't get saturated in big rain and won't crack and get rock hard in dry weather) and keep the beds from washing out. Since there is a little slope I ended up sitting cinder blocks on the down side and digging them in on the upper area so it is all square and level. My hope is that the cinder blocks hold the compost and soil inside. When things get buggy I can make a tent-pole type rig to cover it so it keeps things out! I can also put shade cloth over it for certain crops.


So it kind of looks like a grave right now but in a month it will look very different! I have amended the soil in half of it and double dug the whole thing. I am filling the holes with dirt and planting culantro and other small things in them. A friend has a good composting method - she puts onion skins, banana peels etc in a big zip lock in the freezer and when it is full she dumps it on the pile. I am using mainly weed whacked grass and small twigs with some kitchen waste. I rake after weed whacking to make long rows where I want trails and then I steal the compost from below and move it. I may just make a three-sided bin in my little area if I decide to actively toss it. But right now I just make it and move it on the upper part of the hill! And when the work is done I look out at the odd clouds in the south-east. I dream about getting lettuce to grow and about having tomatoes again. Why did I pull things out? Ah well - I have room for a couple more raised beds in that area and as I work the soil and amend it more I think it will be less frustrating than constantly rebuilding the rows. And luckily it is now the time to grow things - I had nicer vegetables in the winter than summer. Here's to the little seedlings and their new home!

It's Been Almost a Year ...Then and Now Photos

On the left is a Tamarind tree and the next biggest stick is an avocado. There were a couple mini-waterfalls and lots of sediment collecting in the grass.


This is what the area looks like now - a little cleaner with much larger trees! You can see the clumps of ornamental grass I've planted and the little wall that does a decent job collecting dirt. The wall only took a couple days to build...these blocks are great!

This area was even more overgrown - this shows it post weeding and dividing.

Here it is cleaned up. I've relocated the pots and used them for different things. I've re-stacked the rock wall and brought in rocks from up top and divided and moved and pruned things! Not much soil here though so it is hard to grow much until I build the soil up (which isn't on my list).


Here's the driveway when we first bought the house - In Puerto Rico they weed whack to the ground. We understand why - the way things grow it buys you some time. We don't do that though because we don't want to watch the soil run into the road, down to the river and out to the sea where it will smother the reef system.

In an effort to keep soil where it is we built a wall and I am still planting things to help hold soil. The "Trinitaria" (aka bougainvillea) is growing slowly since it is a little wet and you can barely see little grey sticks just past the gate that will grow up to about 6 or 8 feet and hide the waterlines. On the right just after the gate I am slowly putting in croton cuttings as I get them to root. So those are some of the things we've done around the house.

More Faces in the Yard...a Long Story That Ends Well

Here is a long saga of trying to do the right thing by spaying and neutering stray cats. I'll try to make it short. As you know we have spayed/neutered 5 animals so far and thought that was the end of it! We had a cat, Bepo, whose daughter and son (Princess and Junior) hang out and have been taken care of. Well awhile back before we spayed her Bepo was pregnant and then she wasn't. We tried to find kittens and figured they were stillborn or something because she was in the yard always and was not lactating. We waited and waited. Then my sister visited and took special interest in her. Cats get pregnant immediately after giving birth and we didn't want her to go through that again (she is little). So we spayed her. She was in the shower for 5 nights and like all the others ran out and stayed away for a day when we released her. Then she was down here like always. A week later I hear something way up on the hill that doesn't sound right. Jeff doesn't hear it, but I go and investigate. I hear crying in a log pile and you guessed it...a little kitten face appears. This guy (only smaller at the time).


This isn't the source of the noise though - I can hear things but it sounds like it is underground. I get Jeff and he can't tell where it is coming from either. We go down to the house but I am still disturbed. I can still hear it. It is now dark. Jeff knows I can't sleep worrying about it so we go up one more time with a dental mirror and flashlight. We put the mirror in this really narrow hollow branch and stick it as far in as we can and look with a flashlight and we see this little white face!

We use pruners to prune the branch and wedge it open further and further and a white ear pops out! We keep doing it and then an arm pops out! Finally it is free and disappears into the tangle of brush. Meanwhile we see an orange flash squirt out of a brush pile. We can't catch any of them. Talk about guilt. Are these Bepo's babies? Yes - we follow her up there. The next day the orange one is stuck - you guessed it, same log. Turns out it had another entrance so we got this one out and then dismantled the death trap. It was an odd shaped log that made getting in possible but not out. The next day we bring food up and the babies have been moved! For more than a month she has moved them around and we have only seen one at a time, never all three at once. Finally we hear meows in the yard. The kitties have come down, but now there are 4. The original orange kitty is short haired and tiny like Princess. This one was with them. It appeared first and I thought it was Bepos until the other 3 showed up. All cats have stunt doubles! Then I am in the yard and there are 6 kittens and I know they are not all Bepo's. Bepo had the Junior look-alike (Strippedy), the Princess sort-of-look-alike (Angel), and the short haired orange one (Mars). Meanwhile, Bepo's look-alike/stunt double/sister? shows up in the yard with the hairy orange one (Puffball). Then we see all of them together with the addition of a black and white one and another striped one. We think Puffball is Bepo's sister's kitten. We think the sister nursed all of them while Bepo was in the shower or they were big enough already to find food. We know that they trade off babysitting all of them which is kind of cool - Bepo's sister isn't as good a mom and kind of abandoned Puffball who roams around crying. But now they are all in the yard and have friends to cuddle with. They eat avocados (and ample servings of cat food) together and the story ends well. Very traumatic though. We tried to be careful and do the right thing. We now feel responsible for her kittens and how can we ignore Puffball, the outsider? The other two have gone off somewhere else thankfully but now we have 4 little ones cuddling up together near the front door. We really aren't cat people.

When I took an evening stroll around the yard I saw 3 of the kitties mobbing this toad! They were fascinated and not much bigger than it. They would inch closer and just watch it.

The toads are weird because they don't move. You can lift them by the chin and they are stiff and then ooze a white ooze out of their back. Here's a view from up top. Weirder still...

So the story ends until the next round of spaying, neutering or finding homes for the new faces around the farm...

Orchids and a Pitahaya

We've got orchids hanging in baskets under the Maria Tree and a couple of them are blooming! This one had a couple sprays like this one (they are at the end but nice anyway).


This is the first time I have seen this large one bloom. For an orchid this is a pretty large flower!

A friend just gave us this orchid this weekend - believe it or not it is vanilla bean - the kind you cook with! I don't know what I thought the plant would look like, but I didn't realize that vanilla is an orchid! I haven't decided where to train it - probably just on the Maria Tree branch (one that isn't covered in Philodendron).

What is this thing a photo of? When we got here there was barbed wire along the driveway fencing off what is now guineo/papaya land . We didn't like all the fencing and wanted to put the bottom area to use so we took it down. There were however a couple of these super heavy and immovable cement posts. Hmmm, what can I do with those? They look weird. So I have planted a Pitahaya (dragon fruit) and am training it up the post and then will connect the two posts with some sort of structure for it. The dragon fruit is a cactus that produces flowers over 2 feet across!!! The fruit is kind of cool as well. I have only had it dried but this plant has cool factor! Do a web search on it and take a look at the fruit and flowers - way way cool!