Puerto Rican Homestead: Regenerating our Ancestral Lands

Puerto Rico has an interesting agricultural history. What was once a farming society became heavily industrialized under U.S. economic policy—Operation Bootstrap—which pushed people off their farms and into urban factory work. By the 1950s, imported and canned foods had replaced local harvests, and an island blessed with sun and fertile soil was relying on shipments from the U.S., the Dominican Republic, and beyond. Only in recent years has a renewed “back to the land” movement taken root.

For this household, the unpredictability and low quality of imported foods—combined with the threat of hurricanes disrupting supply—sparked a desire to grow more of their own food. The family also comes from an agricultural lineage whose grandparents were farmers and homesteaders. Much of their inspiration came from reconnecting with the wisdom of the land and their ancestors.

The land project was first conceptualized during Natalie’s Permaculture Design Course, and the principles translated beautifully. The family wanted food close to the kitchen and at a small and manageable scale, so the property was organized using the permaculture zone system:

Zone 1 (daily use): a kitchen garden of vegetables, herbs, and quick‑fruiting papaya.
Zone 2 (frequent): a tropical orchard of coconut, guanábana, banana, plantain, guava, pomegranate, and citrus—checked every few days for ripe fruit and fertilized seasonally.
Zone 3 (occasional): coffee and pigeon pea (gandules) shrubs needing occasional tending.
Zone 4 (foraging): extended family lands with wild coconuts, bananas, mangoes, and plantains.

Guilds and food‑forest strategies fit naturally into this tropical context. Alma guided the household in expanding the orchard by carving out planting islands around each tree and building soil through lasagna‑style mulching—layering dried coconut fronds, spent banana stalks, and other on‑site debris. This mimics the forest floor, where organic matter breaks down into a rich microbial and fungal ecosystem rather than ending up in a landfill.

These practices echo ancestral methods. Long before home depot existed, with its ready-made mulch and fertilizer, people created fertility from the land itself, in a regenerative rhythm that sustained entire communities. They used their own kitchen scraps and even fish remains to close the loop and reduce dependence on outside inputs. Over time, the vision is for these micro food forests to become increasingly self-sustaining, offering abundant harvests with fewer and fewer external resources.