After a very busy December, our holidays were pretty quiet. Around Christmas I ended up catching a cold that lasted for about a week, so we just laid low. That doesn’t mean we just sat around, we accomplished a bunch of projects, we just didn’t visit with too many people. Besides that, there was a cold front that came through around New Year’s with the nights getting down to the low 60°s and even a couple in the upper 50°s. After chopping all that firewood a few weeks ago, we sorta wished we had a fireplace in the house. The good thing was that we had hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps and coffee with Irish cream to help keep us warm.

Our favorite New Year’s Day tradition is when Ruben brings us Gibnut tamales wrapped in banana leaves.  He usually shows up around 6:30 am with a bag of warm tamales. It’s a good thing we don’t stay up till midnight anymore. This is something he has been doing every New Year’s Day since we moved here. A week or so before New Year’s, Ruben will go out hunting for a couple of these delicious wild animals. This is the only time of year he will get Gibnuts, and he only harvests enough for them to make tamales.

Now that the new year is here, it’s time for us to start making our corned beef briskets again. The first 45 lbs. of briskets just went in the brine and will come out in about 14 days. Then the next batch will go in, and we’ll keep doing this for the next two months or so. There seems to be more and more people requesting them every year, and I really don’t know if we can make that many. I guess we’ll just see what we can do.

We finally got around to dehydrating some of our green chiles that had turned red. This was the last of the chiles until we get some more planted, which might not be for another year. We dehydrated somewhere between 150-200 big red chiles. You can find dried red chiles like this in the market occasionally, but they want $1.00 a piece for them. Between all the roasted green ones and the dried red ones, we should be set on chiles for quite a while.

We just picked a bunch more cacao that was ripe, with more being ready in a couple weeks. The wheelbarrow was getting full, so we decided to just pick the cacao and toss them out from under the trees and pick them up as we go. This picking gave us another 20-25 lbs. of seeds that we fermented for a week before setting them out in the sun to dry. It’s looking like this year we need to concentrate on making a lot more chocolate.

Amanda saw that one of the plant nurseries advertised that they had pink lemon trees. The next time we went to town, we swung by and picked up two, one for her and one for us. The pink lemon was discovered in California around 1930 on an Eureka lemon tree as a mutant, and since then, they’ve been cultivated as their own. They are yellow with green stripes on the skin, pink flesh and a variegated leaf color. Besides being called pink lemons, they are also called a zebra lemon or a variegated Eureka lemon. They are perfect for lemonade as they are sweeter than a yellow lemon. And no, this is not where pink lemonade comes from, that needs red berries or a coloring of some type.

Right after the first of the year we decided to remove about 20 banana plants that were out by our front gate. Over the past couple of years this area seemed to hold a lot of water after the big rains. All the banana plants there got some type of disease and were not looking healthy, and were only producing a small handful of bananas, so we decided to take them out. Ruben got us a few new healthy plants and Amanda also brought over a few apple banana plants. She also scored us a Red banana plant from a friend. Red bananas are thick, shorter and creamier than a yellow banana, plus have a hint of raspberry flavor. They all got planted up on higher ground, where they should do much better and hopefully later this year we will start getting bananas again.

It was time to trim back our variegated leaf philodendron before it got too much higher on the palm tree. This plant was from a cutting that we got from a restaurant a few years back. We cut a six-foot and a four-foot section off the plant, then we planted them around the base of a couple trees along our new paths. The past couple of weeks, we’ve planted another 70 or so plants around the paths, all from cuttings around the yard.

As we were at the nursery picking up the lemon tree, we saw another plant that we didn’t have and thought it would look good out back. We picked up a couple of red Anthuriums. Some common names are Flamingo Flower, Little Boy Plant, Red Peace Lily or Red Heart Plant. They get this beautiful red flower and they supposedly spread and propagate well. So this will be another plant that will go in our new area to give it a little more color. We’ve got a ways to go, but the new garden paths should look pretty good once all the plants mature.

Speaking of our new garden paths, we finally have a plan (sort of). Besides all the different plants, we decided to make it a little whimsical with a few other things. I’m currently casting some mushrooms out of cement and painting them bright colors to mix in with all the other plants. I’m using a bowl and a plastic cup as the mold on the bigger ones and a small bowl and a piece of wood for the smaller ones.

I also made up 50 or so ladybugs out of bottle caps to place on some of the trees. I’m even thinking about making some topiaries, so we can train plants to grow on them in the shape of animals. There will be an area in the middle where we will plant more cacao trees (because we need more)? Then we are going to put a small section along the back with local medicinal plants and little signs explaining what each one is used for. Once that’s done, we will spread gravel over the pathways so you can walk around without getting muddy. It’s not a very big area, but it should be quite the tropical garden once we are done.

We recently checked the trail camera in the driveway. Besides a lot of pictures of us going back and forth there were also a few smaller animals. The most interesting one was a Tayra, locally known as a Bush Dog. He was headed down the driveway towards the garage or maybe the house. Tayras are omnivores, although they are classified as carnivores. A favorite food is the spiny rat, but they will eat anything that’s available, including squirrels, birds, poultry, fruit, invertebrates and reptiles. They have a rather long lifecycle in captivity where they have lived 18-22 years.

Kelley has the Merlin app on her phone that identifies birds from their sound. In the past she has heard a Green Jay,  but has never gotten a picture until now. One landed in the tree right off our front porch and she managed to get a couple of pictures before it flew away. It’s a beautiful bird, we just never see them, let alone get a picture.

Then on Christmas Day, a Summer Tanager landed right next to the porch. We don’t see these too often, so to see a bright red bird on Christmas Day was pretty cool.

I know some of you have already made your New Year’s resolutions, but it’s never too late for one more. 2026 could be your year to come and explore Belize. Unbelievable wildlife, Mayan ruins, caves, waterfalls, cave tubing, Caribbean beaches, fishing, diving, lobsters, or just chillin’ on the beach with an umbrella drink. However you choose to spend your time here, you won’t be disappointed. We hope to see you down here this year.