Using some of his lottery winnings, Rizal purchased a 16-hectare plantation in Talisay bordering Dapitan Bay. He cultivated on it a variety of fruit trees, crops, and raised animals and poultry. Rizal's family sent him seeds of kasuy, chico, ciruelas, cacauate, rimas, duhat, tampoy, and iba. In a January 1893 letter, he describes his property: "I have more than fifty lansones trees, twenty mango trees, macupa trees, some fifty lanka trees, santol trees, balonos, eighteen mangosteens... I have planted some 1,400 coffee seeds, 200 cacao; I have peho besides. The boundary of my land cannot be gone over in four hours. All of it is paid and I have my title in order. Over my land runs a small river where one can take a bath, only that it needs to be improved..."
In January 1896, he eagerly informed his mother of another plantation he acquired: "I bought here a piece of land beside a river that has a great resemblance to the Calamba River, with the only difference that this one here is wider and its stream is more abundant and crystalline... My land has 6,000 abaca plants... My land is beautiful; it is in the interior, far from the sea, about a half hour's walk; it is in a very picturesque place. The land is very fertile. In addition to the abaca plantation there is land for planting two cavanes of corn..."