The Mystery Sprout

It's been a while since I've had much good news in the garden. Even since we moved into our apartment over three years ago, my plants have been suffering. It's strange since we only moved about a mile away from the last house, but the ecosystem here is much more windy, salty and dry. The ocean air blows furiously through the garden, and many of my precious plants have passed away. I still keep planting seeds whenever I find promising ones, but that hasn't been too frequent.

I was overjoyed when, a few weeks ago, a sprout popped up in my planter. There were actually two of them from what appeared to be the same type of plant, but one of them didn't make it. After watching the sprout carefully for a while, I decide that it was safe and prudent to transplant it into a larger vessel. The only problem is that I have no idea what kind of plant this is from! I didn't sow any exotic seeds recently, and perhaps this is something that I found on the beach or on a hike, but if so it was from so long ago that I forgot about it. So I have to keep an eye on this mystery sprout and try to keep it alive long enough to find out what kind of plant it is! Readers, let me know if you recognize it!

Pottery in the Garden

This Fall I took an introductory hand building class at the wonderful Hawaii Potter's Guild. I was able to make all sorts of art, and some of it turned out better than others. Thankfully, a few of the projects were suitable for the garden! My teacher Esther had us make planters of various sizes. This was our application of the slab technique, one of the basics. Then on the last day of class she brought in a variety of succulents and cuttings for everyone to share. I love my cute new plants in their homemade planters.                                                                                        

Another project was to make shrunken heads. This was actually done near the very beginning of the class, as an introduction to one of the most fundamental hand building techniques: the pinch pot. The heads have clay beads in the middle so that they rattle. I think they turned out pretty cute, and I experimented with iron and cobalt oxide instead of glaze coating. I really didn't know what to do with the little guys at first, but realized that they will work just as well as the rocks and cinderblocks we have lining the garden path!

Growing Family

When I first moved back to Hawaii, I started my pineapple growing experiment, which has been fruitful. This winter, I was overjoyed to see that the original pineapple stem was growing yet another pineapple baby! The flowers are so colorful and lovely, and they take a few months to grow and ripen, so it is quite a pleasure to watch their development.

After a busy beginning to the summer, being away traveling, I came home to see what looked like a fully grown pineapple on my plant. I had planned to wait until it was yellow and fully ripe to pick it, but while I was watering the plant, I brushed up against the fruit and it fell off! I took that as a sign that it was ready to ripen in the kitchen.

The fruit did ripen beautifully within just a few days, and it is so delicious. The taste can't be compared to store bought fruits, and let's face it, even those are yummy in Hawaii! Of course I had to plant the stem in the garden. Now I have three pineapples growing, though no more fruits are on at the moment. Look at how big the original stem is now! It probably won't be long until we see more offspring.

Camping with a Side of Sprouts

We went to visit family in Oregon this summer. Almost as soon as we arrived, Adam's mom decided that we should get out of town. We rented a lovely cabin on the Mckenzie river about an hour outside of Eugene. We had a great time, with activities that included fishing, hiking, visiting the Belknap hot springs, and nightly saunas at our cottage. It was super relaxing and we were happy to get away, but I still had sprouts on my mind.

A couple of years earlier, while back in Oregon we went hunting for morel mushrooms. While we were out that day, we found some baby pine tree sprouts and took them home. I was eager to see how they were doing when we arrived this summer, but Adam's parents claimed innocence in the fact that they had disappeared. So it all clicked when, up at the cottage on the Mckenzie, I saw the pine trees had littered the ground with sprouts!

We picked a few of varying sizes, planted them temporarily in Nancy's yogurt containers, and brought them home. We purveyed proper planters and the sprouts are now settled in what we think is the ideal location: under a pine tree in the backyard! We hope to see them again next time we go back to Oregon.

Cat Grass

It has been a while since I posted. The garden has been experiencing quite the dry spell! Many of my sprouts have turned into plants and although they are thriving, there isn't much to report.

I placed another order with seedrack.com but had a lot less luck this time: none of my exotics have come up! I have even been having bad luck with the sustenance plants like kale and tomato.

However, there is one small glimmer of hope: cat grass! I bought it at the hardware store with the edible crops. Every time I plant it, the grass shoots right up. However, Haole Boy had shown no interest in it. After sprouting a few batches just for fun and watching kitty ignore them completely, I planted the very last of the seeds. Much to my surprise, he went for the grass! At least someone had some good luck with my garden. Hopefully summer will bring more sprouts and more blog posts.

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!

Grass-tastic

One of the first plants we got upon moving to Honolulu was what we call Manoa Grass. Our friend Dan gave it to us; he told us that it is a kind of native Hawaiian grass. I guess because he lives in Manoa, we assumed it was native to there, though he later told us that we completely made that up; nevertheless, the name stuck. At first, I had some trouble growing the grass. It was perhaps over watered and seems to get moldy in the pot. While we were still at our old apartment, we simply moved the grass into the magic sink, and it began to prosper. However, upon moving to the new apartment, the grass was moved back into a pot. Although we are still in the exact same neighborhood, this area seems a bit more sunny and dry, and it has done wonders for the grass! 

 

Not only has it grown taller than me despite being in a pot, it has developed many lovely seeds. 

 

They take quite some time to turn brown and mature, but once it finally happened, there are grass sprouts everywhere! The babies are well and growing just fine. 

 

Knowing all of this, we were intrigued on a recent visit to the Disney Aulani hotel and resort where we encountered what looked like a different variety of Hawaiian grass. I took a few seeds and planted them in a plastic container. 

 

Now there are dozens of sprouts of what I like to call Disney Grass. Grass-tastic!

Big Island Bonsai

Adam and I had a lovely relaxing long veterans day weekend on the Big Island of Hawaii. On our very last day, we decided to stop by what looked like an interesting tidbit, the Fuku Bonsai state bonsai repository and store. After driving down the dirt road in Kurtistown, we were amazed to arrive and see hundreds of bonsai plants, including many banyans, pine, and others.

After browsing for a while, we were greeted by Mr. Fukumoto himself. He was extremely friendly, and after chatting with him for a while, he introduced us to the dwarf schefflera plant. His philosophy is that everyone should be able to have success and to enjoy bonsai, for if this is the case, then more people will be happy, pursuing the hobby, growing plants and perhaps even promoting world peace. He had found this plant to be one of the best houseplants for growth indoors, in the tropics but even also on the mainland where they experience winter. The Fuku Bonsai staff take 2-4 years to cultivate a perfectly charactered specimen of a tree. They chop the leaves and growth down; 95% of plants will die this way. However, those that live are showing themselves to by excellent material for bonsai. We were very impressed and excited with the operation and decided to take the introductory workshop in creating bonsai. We were treated to an individualized lesson. As a teacher, I was impressed with Fuku Bonsai's teaching philosophy: beginners should teach other beginners; also, students need to try by themselves to be able to learn. We observed the steps to choosing and planting a dwarf schefflera that had developed good character. They we tried by ourselves. It seems that my strength is in choosing the plant, and Adam was strong in the planting. We are each going for a different style of Bonsai. Mine is the sumo: short and fat.

Adam's is roots--the roots are covered in tin foil and stuffed with soil; after about six months he can open it up and the roots will be showing.

This is a delicate art and I am so excited to train my bonsai plant. As Mr. Fukumoto insisted, so I follow his instructions: look at your bonsai every day and smile!
When we got home, Adam was so excited by the lesson that he tried to apply it to his ficus. We found this plant in Manoa about a year ago, and it has grown quite large despite an initial desire to bonsai the plant. Adam followed the steps that we learned in class at Fuku Bonsai. My only fear is that this is such an extreme measure to take on a plant that hasn't been trained at all. Only time will tell what happens.