Tropical Storm Earl Visits

 

I spent the first two weeks of August at my house in the Knockpatrick part of Mandeville, Jamaica to do some clearing of my property and spend some time with my wife, Denise, who has been living there since we bought the house last September. While there we had an uninvited visitor show up, Tropical Storm Earl. While Earl didn’t stay long, only about six or eight hours, he did dump a lot of water on us and blew over some of my banana plant…what a jerk. The problem with bananas is that they have really small root balls for such a large, heavy plant and they only root in about 6-12 inches deep. That’s fine when its dry out but when it rains hard and the ground softens up they become very susceptible to falling over due to being top heavy. Its like kicking the Cool-Aid man in the leg...he's going to fall over and break. The good thing is you can usually prop them back up and they’ll continue growing. Earl knocked three of mine over but I was able to save them all so Denise will still be able to enjoy them soon when they ripen.  



 (Normal view across the road)

(Tropical Storm Earl's rain making the hill across the road disappear)

(Damage to the bananas)

(Propping up the bananas)

Besides the fact that Denise was born in Jamaica, the main reason we chose Jamaica as our retirement destination is due to the year-round growing season for fruits and vegetables. I love the fact we can grow our own food all year and not have to rely on a grocery store. Here are some pictures of our food growing on our property. 

 (Young lime tree)

 (Tangerine)

 (Coconut)

 (Plum)

(Pimento)

(Okra) 

 (Peppermint bush for tea)

 (Blackberry)

 (Bird peppers, tiny but very hot!)

(Cherry)

 (Mandarin)

 (Sugar cane)

 (Grapefruit)

(Scallion, Dashine, Coco, orange...)

I also like the fact that our home is off the water grid. We use a full-roof rain collection system which feeds into a huge holding tank in our back yard. It then runs through a filter in our garage on its way into the ready tank inside our roof. Even though the island has suffered its worst drought in years, it rains almost every day up on our mountain so our water system is always full. The best part about it is i's free!

(Our holding tank is about 5 feet underground as well)

 

We also plan to get off the electric grid in the future by installing a hybrid wind/solar combination system called Solarmill from Windstream Technologies. Since we have an almost constant breeze on the mountain, we should be able to generate power both day and night with this type of system. More information can be found on their company page: https://www.windstream-inc.com/