Finca is Spanish for farm. My fruit farm continues to grow each time I visit Puerto Rico. Most of my plants come from a local nursery or jardinera. It is adjacent to the owners home. I love that place and really wish I was fluent in Spanish so I could share more stories with the owners. I now have all the fruit trees they always stock. We have used Facebook local to acquire some plants. Once we made a trip to the west coast to visit a tropical fruit farm. And there is also the amazing orchid store owned by an Asian couple, introduced to us by Neftali. They just happened to have a Longan and Rambutan.

More recently I have just gotten lucky at Home Depot. Home Depot has a fairly small plant section with a small table of tropical trees. And on the random times I am in the store, I escape the boring aisles Santosh spends much time studying, and make a beeline to the plant section. More often than not I have been pleasantly surprised to find the exact tree I have been looking for!

So top of my list has been Custard Apple/ Cherimoya/ Sugar Apple/ Sweet Sop. And I found a decent specimen!

I also found a second Lychee variety named Mauritius Lychee. Previously I planted a Brewster Lychee. I decided to make two bets having a fruiting tree, so we have one on each side of the house. We created a shade for this tree also to protect the tender leaves.

I planted a Valencia orange tree. Fresh squeezed orange juice sounded good to me so I added it to the finca. I also added another papaya tree to the mix. So far there has been a lot of flowers but no fruit. I’m hoping I now have the right mix of male and female plants.