Gardens in belize

We are moving to the San Ignacio area as soon as our house sells in Canada. We want to grow most of our vegetables, and fruit. How much land is required to do this? I gather one can grow all year round (I expect different things in the different seasons).

I have lots to learn in this regard so I am all eyes and ears.

2 fly away..........  just wanted to say that I got my dog.   I have used the BEST tick repellant/killer known and my boy is covered with ticks.   be prepared to go over your babes by hand several times a day, stem to stern.   be prepared with a tweezer and alcohol.  I knew it was bad here, but did not realize it was this bad.

about the gardening.  since we are near the equator so the amount of sunlight and its angle remains fairly stable, I think you can plant things out of season if you like    I think trial and error with some help from the internet and your neighbors will work.  In Basil is doing well.  cantalope did well until the yard man used a weed wacker on them.  lemon grass doing well.  cilantro did poorly, do not know why for sure, think I may not have given enuf water.  I think that irrigation is going to be required to maintain a steady source of moisture.  I really want my own rain water tank.  maybe next year.best luck   Kris

Kris:

Thanks for all the information. Ticks will be a new experience for us as we don't even need to worry about ticks where we have lived all our lives. Thanks for the advice. We will take that advice and watch over them carefully.

Thanks for your experience with the garden items. We will get a bit more rain than you, but still in the dry season we will need to water too.

Jody

How much land do you need?  Wow, tough question.  If you want to do more passive farming (not a lot of maintenance) you need a few acres.  You would grow a wide variety of fruits and get short seasons where you have a lot of one thing.  This is what happens with mangoes, for example.  For 2 weeks you have so many that you can't give them away, then there is none for the rest of the year.  But having a lime tree, you can pick them slowly all year.  Many fruits require the dry season to force the flowering and fruiting -- the idea is that they drop the most number of seeds just as the rains start again.  You don't really want to water them  in between unless they are very young and just planted. 

You can have a smaller yard if you want to do more work on smaller plants -- some will need watering and others will need protection from heavy rains. 

So pick the kind of garden you think you can maintain.  I tend to over plant like a jungle, then maintain it by hacking it back.  Others prefer to have trees spaced 50 feet apart and keep the whole thing mowed.

Thanks Prestonia for the reply. We have a bunch of fruit trees including large mango trees. We do want to have a garden for various vegetables as well though. I'm sure that I will have a lot to learn about how to grow, plant, keeps the insects at bay. Watching an unending line of leaf cutter ants, and seeing the very large ant hills brings this message to me.

We are thinking that around the trees we will keep things mowed down nice. We are also thinking that we will have green houses that have raised platforms for our more delicate vegetables. This I hope will help us restrain the insects.

Jody

Instead of green houses check out poly tunnels. they are less costly in the long run. You will not see many green houses around but in rural areas a lot of poly tunnels. The government did a huge education effort about 20 years ago and that is when the improvement of soft vegetable crops, tomatoes peppers etc, took a big leap in Quality. I know I saw several last year when we were last there.

Terrific:

I will check out the polly tunnels. Thanks