Being a farm girl, I firmly believe in using the resources you have around you. I recently planted a vegetable and herb garden. (And my tomato seeds sprouted in just six days!) We will use the produce to feed the people we host here. I try really hard to collect the fruit produced by the trees on our yard. For example, mango season just finished, so I have a freezer full of mango jam, and Karl made a delicious mango chutney.
We also have lots of coconut trees. (I do believe we have 17, to be exact.) Coconut trees actually inspired the name of this blog (Falling Coconuts). When we first moved here, we picked the occasional green one do sip on, or a dry one to make shredded, dried coconut, but most of them were just being wasted. Then our gardener, Daniel, told us that people actually buy them! Better yet, they come around every month or two and pick them themselves! Sign me up! Now those coconuts aren't going to waste PLUS it's about the closest thing to free money that I can think of. Yesterday I earned R$20 during my lunch break - sitting in my hammock, playing games on my iPad - while two guys went around and picked coconuts that we would have eventually had to remove ourselves, plus they did a decent job of doing some pruning while they were up there!
How many coconuts did they pick? Yesterday it was 70, but this is the slowest time of year for coconuts. A month or two ago they picked around 140! That comes out to about R$0.30, or $0.15 Canadian per coconut. Not a bad deal for having done absolutely nothing!
If you are interested, here is a video clip of how they pick the coconuts. It's a job for two people, one long stick with a hook, and a gunny sack. Enjoy!
(Thanks to Karl for being kind enough to get out of his hammock and get this video for me!)
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