After the 15 inches of rain we had while we were in the States we returned to a nice week of warm and sunny days. We were hoping that this was the beginning of the dry season, but Mother Nature had one more big storm to throw at us.
The tropical storm Sara dumped a ton of rain all over Belize. The international airport was closed, the San Ignacio market was flooded, all rivers were way beyond flood stages, many bridges were closed and on Sunday all businesses were told not to even open.
Since we are up in the hills we did not see the bad flooding like a lot of the country, but we did have our share of water. The road just past our gate was flooded out, even with a 24″ culvert under the road. Our driveway turned into a river, but everything seemed to flow just the way it should. All in all we received close to 25″ of rain in the past month.
Hopefully this was the last big one of the season and we can start to dry out around here. The good thing is that all the trees should have another major growth spurt.
The other day after a light rain we had one of the most intense rainbows over the yard. After a few minutes, there was a second rainbow that showed up just above it. I did adjust the color in the picture in hopes of seeing the second rainbow better. If you look closely you can see it. Did you know that when there are two rainbows next to each other that the colors are opposite of each other as a reflection.
Ruben recently stopped by with some red bananas, grapefruit and a couple of lemons for us. The other day was the first time we had tried a red banana and we said how good it was, so he brought us a bunch down. They are shorter and plumper than a regular banana and a little sweeter. And supposedly they have a longer shelf life than a regular yellow banana. In the future we will be looking to get a couple of red banana plants, just so we will have a little more variety around here. It was perfect because that morning we had just picked the last of our dragon fruits and finished making bratwurst sausages. So it was good to be able to make a little trade with him.
The other evening as I was locking up the garage, I heard a faint noise up in the palm tree. I looked up to see some critter eating cohune nuts. I assumed it was a Kinkajou or a Possum, but it wasn’t. After calling Kelley back over with a flashlight and a camera, we could see it was a porcupine. We had never seen a porcupine here before. In fact, I didn’t even know we had them here let alone that they climbed trees. After a few pictures and a search on the internet, we identified it as a Mexican Hairy Dwarf Porcupine. They can live for 15 years in the wild, are nocturnal, rarely come down from the tree tops, have one baby per year and have over 30,000 quills. And no, porcupines do not shoot their quills. It’s always cool to see some new critter roaming around the property.
We have been making a habanero salt for a few years now and people who can stand the heat just love it. Recently we had to buy 5lbs of habaneros because we didn’t have enough from the garden. Over the past year we have grown different types of peppers in all levels of heat. They have been going in the freezer until we had enough to dry and make some different pepper salts. We now have different levels of the salts that go from ‘help me I’m going to die’ to ‘that’s really good’. Our hottest one is made with scorpion peppers, then habaneros, jalapeños, green chilis and then a heatless habanero. The scorpion pepper salt is extremely hot and it’s almost too hot for me. Then on the other end is the heatless habanero pepper salt. It has all the flavor of habaneros without any real heat to it.
We did a little more clearing up in the garden and now you can really see this one big Cohune palm. What’s impressive is the size of the split-leaf philodendron growing on it. To help put it in perspective the fronds on the palm tree are around 40′ long.
Here are a couple of pictures of the trails we put in out behind the house. The top picture was about 4 years ago after chopping all the underbrush before we started putting in decorative plants. The one below is after all the plants have grown. Along the trail there are Zebra Plants, Ferns, Yesterday Today and Tomorrow plants, Purple Moses, Corydalines, Philodendrons and a bunch of others. And the the best part is that they are all from cuttings that we rooted from others plants we had around the yard.
This next week is going to be clean up and waiting for everything to dry out around here. We had no real damage, just a few plants that will need tending to. All the rain we get is what keeps this place so green and lush, so we just take it in stride.