The Beginnings Of Danés Boricua Farms

Dreaming of doing a farm with thousands of different fruits and vegetables is a great dream! But what about when you have dreamed of it for so long, that you can't even imagine it becoming a reality? And then it does....

Well, to this very logical Dane it's all just about starting "from the beginning". What does that mean?

Well, it literally means buying two pieces of land. One is 24 acres of more or less completely untouched land. This was the case for our land in Adjuntas. And then there's the second piece of land, "only" 3 acres in Lares. Land, that used to be a banana farm, so it is a lot more manageable, and obviously already has banana trees there, plus other things like pana and mangos.

Despite the fact that I come from a Danish farming family, doing it here from scratch, in the tropics, is a bit different than on an acre or two somewhere in Denmark.

So we have literally bought your average gardening equipment and then we have just started from one end of our 24 acres to make a "garden" of sorts there, taking down some trees after carefully making sure they are not important, indigenous or of some other importance to the eco system. Luckily - if you can call it that - most of what was growing where we decided to start was "Bristletips". A large tree, with small berries, that's considered invasive and somewhat "useless" apart from feeding some birds. So we didn't have too much trouble downing them and replacing them with our fruit trees.

Over the past 2 years we have been collecting fruit trees in pots at our house in Isabela on the Northeast coast, so we had quite the collection of about 300 pots that are now, little by little, going into the ground. Here is a bit of a "before" video of where we started, before we began to take down some of the trees and planting others. You can see some of the many pots there too.