Avocado Adventures

Recently we had dinner at Maguro-ya sushi restaurant and were inspired by their decorative avocado sprouts. Their plants are entirely in water, not having been placed in dirt. Living in Hawaii, it is easy to get avocados year round. Sprouting them is a lot easier than in Tennessee as well, especially with the trick of leaving them in the shower where it's nice and humid. 

 

This recently sprouted plant has been growing at an amazing pace! I had to remove it from the bathroom as it had reached the ceiling! It is now in the living room, and it may well reach the ceiling in there pretty soon as well. Since taking the picture, it's leaves have increased in size and the small chute at the bottom has grown and has a couple leaves of its own now. It is fun to watch the plant grow every day -- and because it is in water, we can watch the roots grow as well.

Sprouting for sustenance I

 

This is a bit of a prelude to a longer story, but I figured that if I don't start now, it will never get told. Of course I love sprouting as a sport and a hobby, but recently we've been trying to also sprout for sustenance. As part of "Project Garden" we emptied the garden beds. They had previously been a dumping ground for old soil, and miraculously sometimes basil or other hardy sprouts would come up. This time, we decided to take a more dedicated approach.

While we were at the Home Depot, we made an effort to get more soil and pots. In addition to re-potting and moving many of our plans, we also dug up the beds. We removed some of the old soil and replaced it with fresh. We also purchased some starts and placed the seeds both directly in the beds as well as in small planters.

Among the sprouts that we got are: basil (pre-existing), shiso, cilantro, scallion, tomato and kale. So far the kale and the tomato are surviving. We still have hope for the others in the future, as well as even more (details to come). As I said, this is just Part I!

Project Garden

Since moving into our new apartment last year, I'd been feeling a little disconnected from my beloved garden.This new place had a pre-made garden bed in the very back of the yard so we gravitated to that area to keep the plants. Everything has been going fine, but I just kept missing our old house where the plants lined the walkway to the front door and greeted me every day. So we decided to do something about it! Project garden was born. After a few trips to city mill to get supplies, we started building.

We ended up with a great new home for all the plants, and much closer to the front door and driveway. It makes it so much more friendly for me to visit them, water them and see them.

We have the sunny side lined with certain plants, and the shady side lined with the others. As for the garden bed, we do have plans for that as well, but a future post will reveal all.

Pineapple gets a haircut

Yes, this post really is about a pineapple that gets a haircut! :) I've started work now and perhaps my energy level is down, or my silly level is up, but either way, this is what you get today! You may remember that my pineapple recently had a baby. So I kept it in the pot, hoping that it would eventually have another. Right on schedule, a new sprout has emerged!

But the plant is so old and it's leaves were just getting too wild, so I gave it a haircut. Don't worry, the new growth was unaffected.

Mystery vine

About a year ago, my friend and fellow sprout enthusiast Dan gave me some seeds from what he called the okole vine. Despite finding a surprising lack of information about it on google, I trusted his word that this is a native Hawaiian vine and eagerly planted it. After waiting for months, I assumed that it wasn't going to sprout. I moved on and put other seeds in my planter. A while later, still possessing a few okole vine seeds, I decided to try again and replanted them. The exact timing of all these events is a little hazy, but at some point, in some planter, a mysterious sprout appeared. According to my sprout diary, it was a lychee from a seed procured after eating the fresh fruit. I was of course excited, and I cultivated the sprout. It grew happily and I eventually moved it to a larger pot.

Fast forwarding to just a few weeks ago, I found a new sprout in my planter. I was actually surprised given that I haven't planted any seeds for a while. Looking back in my journal again, I couldn't figure out what it was. I decided to go way back into the journal to the point where I had planted anything in that particular spot. To my amazement, it seemed possible that this was an okole vine sprout! Does it look similar to you? Compare the two pictures.

What struck me as even more interesting and surprising was the fact that upon inspection, this seemed to be the same plant as the one I originally took as a lychee. My journaling isn't perfect, but it seems that both sets of okole vines may have sprouted! They just took their sweet time. I suppose a lesson I learned is that I need to work on my plant patience.

Home Renovations

Almost half a year ago, Adam and I collected a few mangrove pods. At the time, we put them into 12 ounce glass beer bottles with some soil and brackish water. I hoped for the best as I watered them with fresh water from the tap. Months later, they appeared to be doing quite well. They have grown in size as well as added an abundance of leaves. As an experiment, we moved one of the mangroves to a bigger home.

The first step was to drink a gallon of root beer (hello, floats!) to obtain the larger container. We then had to break the glass beer bottle holding the mangrove to free it for the move.

Finally, we simply added soil to the new plastic container and voila, a new home for one of the mangroves. If it thrives, we will then move the others.

Rose Rising

A while back at a cute little plant nursery, I couldn't resist buying a desert rose. I got the smallest one they had; it cost about $3. The price of the desert roses in the store seemed like an exponential function of the size, which to me indicated that this would be a slow growing plant. It's been sitting happily in rocky soil for quite a while now. It does, like many of my plants, go through periods where it loses several of its leaves, but then it comes back to life after a little while. However, now that it's officially summer, even though it's Hawaii and the changes are less dramatic, they are certainly there. One lovely surprise is that my rose is blooming for the very first time!

Worth the wait

Almost two years ago, Adam and I moved back to Honolulu from Tennessee. Of course one of the first things on the agenda for me was to get my garden in order. I had left all of my plants behind (with loving owners of course) and was eager for some tropical plants. One item that I tried for the first time was a pineapple.

Back in March of this year, the now huge pineapple plant had started to bear fruit. It continued to grow and resemble the fruit we are used to buying in the market. We had wondered how we would know when it was ready, as it matured and continued to sit on the stem. Eventually the outside of the pineapple turned a golden yellow and we knew it was close. The last step was to flip the fruit so that the other side could be exposed to the sun to give an even coloring.

Last week, when checking the development of the ripening, the fruit just fell off in Adam's hand! I guess that was the pineapples way of telling us it was ripe. We ate the whole thing in one sitting yesterday and it was probably the best pineapple I've ever eaten: just delicious! And of course, I planted its stem so that we can enjoy the taste of home grown pineapple again in just two more years.

Koa time!

Not too long ago we hiked the lovely Nuuanu trail. I observed some beautiful Koa trees and couldn't help but notice that they were holding small seed pods. Naturally, I took a few of the seeds home and planted them. Now, I can never be sure that what comes up in my planters isn't a weed, but these two babes arrived at the same time as each other and in the exact places where I put the Koa seeds. Here's hoping that it's Koa time!

Pineapple babies!

Almost immediately after moving back to Hawaii, I started an experiment I had been wanting to try for a while: I planted a pineapple. You simply take the green shoots off the top of a ripe fruit from the grocery store, and plant it into the earth. Based on the research I had done, I expected that it would take a full three years, or until August 2014, for my pineapple plant to fruit.

 

The leaves were growing huge rather quickly, so I was not too surprised when just a few weeks ago I went to check on the plants, and I saw a pineapple baby emerging! It has been so exciting to watch the fruit grow and mature. It really is so pretty.

 

The most recent development has been the growth of small purple flowers on the plant. The baby pineapple is a little larger than a human fist at the moment, and growing and changing every day. We cannot wait for it to mature completely so we can eat it and complete the cycle!

It's a miracle!

It's a miracle...Miracle fruit, that is! This plant produces berries which when eaten alter the taste of other foods. A couple of months ago, two of my friends came into possession of some berries which they shared with me. Adam and I ingested them, and then went on a spree of drinking vinegars, spoiled wine, lemon juice and sour oranges all evening -- which tasted like sugar! Despite the stomachache the next morning, it really is a pretty nifty little party trick.

Of course, being who I am, I kept several of the seeds and planted them. Just a week ago, we got three sprouts. I am a little nervous about their survival, as I have successfully sprouted miracle fruit before and they tend to die soon afterwards. But my friend Dan had a huge, thriving plant, with tons of berries, so I know it is possible to succeed in this climate.

Norfolk Island Pine-Again

Just a little while after moving back to Honolulu, we went hiking at Lanipo. The hike is quite long, and we had started too late in the day, so we had to turn around after only getting halfway there. The place that marks the halfway point is a shaded grove of Norfolk Island Pine trees. I saw quite a few small ones, and decided to pull one and risk bringing it home. Although it turned a little bit brown at first, and it grows quite slowly, the tree is now healthy and prospering.

Buoyed by the experience with the first Norfolk Island Pine, I tried something even riskier recently. This time we were doing the Aiea Loop Hike. Well, actually, we were doing a variant of the hike that required us to slide straight down a mountain and walk down the middle of a stream, but that's a whole other story. While doing this hike, we came across several tiny Norfolk Island Pine sprouts. Feeling confident, I took one home and planted it in with the larger sprout. Although the baby was quite delicate, having only four small straight leaves at first, it has started to grow and even to look like a proper pine sprout! One Christmas, many years from now, we will have trees to decorate!

Many Mangroves

A while back, Adam and I tried to check out a new boating spot behind Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately for us, we arrived to a parking lot full of "no boating" signs. We decided to take a walk around the park, since we had driven all the way out there. It was a nice walk along the water, though that park houses mongooses possessing the least fear of human beings I've ever seen. While we were on the lake, we saw several mangrove plants; we noticed that their seeds had washed up on the shore.

 

I took a few of them and planted them in beer bottles with salt water taken from the beach. I have slowly been adding freshwater to the bottles as the water level lowers. Eventually they will be in entirely fresh water, which I fear may be harmful, but for now they are sprouting and happy as ever!