Grow with What You've Got

 

Plants gone wild (Bee Balm, Echinacea, Kale, Squash, Concord grapes) 

 My vegetable and herbal tea garden in Tennessee would start with a fresh all dirt showing when it was still technically winter. After spring hinted its arrival, I started sowing and as the teeny seedlings began to emerge, it would quickly turn into a wild beautiful landscape filled with flowers, veggies, bees and butterflies. Okra as tall my fence, bergamot as tall as me, everything growing with everything creating a treasure hunt for each day's harvest. Every year it got bigger as I added and previous years plantings returned. 

Seedlings in their starting rows - On your mark, get set, GO! 

   I've been yearning for my garden lately. Collecting plants in my head. I've tried things off and on here in Hawaii on the coast but most everything hates salt water. They seem to do well for a month or so until high surf arrives and the salt spray kills them. Among the deceased are a number of ghost pepper plants (not just a clever name) and jalapeño. Still hangin' on though are 3 pineapples (crowns started in a glass then put in the ground) and a couple of local chili peppers. I'm still waiting on them with bated breath to bring forth their pickable heat. It's a mini hot sauce garden really. Who doesn't love pineapple in their hot sauce? 

Pineapples, Hawaiian Chili Peppers

   I found a couple of what I thought were prickly pear paddles that turned out to be cochineal cacti on the bike lane just down the road. They'd taken a free dive off the mother cactus spilling over the rock wall border of a tropical domicile. I instinctively thought to save them since surely they'd parish on the concrete, and lo and behold one had grown roots to grip the road. Okay, that one is a survivor. I found a couple others that were more recent jumpers. 

The Street-wise Cactus 

I came home and found a terracotta pot of previously tried herbs that said absolutely not to the salt air and disintegrated into the dirt for which they came. The grow your own community said Cacti like succulent soil.. quick search on what's in that...but also keeping in mind that one was growing on the concrete. Is buying special soil really necessary? Prickly yes, but not picky. I decided to make my own concoction with "a little of this and a little of that" (my motto) in soil, sand and rocks around the property. They need to also set out and form a callus over the part that came off the mother before you set them in soil so they don't just rot when you water them. This can take anywhere from days to a month. Wrong again! Maybe it was the desert climate here combined with laying on the concrete but they were already callused. Moving right along...I stuck them in the soil, watered and waited. After a week they didn't appear to be rotting and by week two they had roots!!! 

Father & Son

And then those babies bloomed! 

This was a tad disappointing as this is the full bloom
and not what looks to be a amazing bloom about to break forth!

   Next I wanted a hanging basket of mint. In my previous setup, I had hanging baskets of various kinds of mint just outside my backdoor. My coffee/tea area was just inside the door, making it very easy to pick a couple of sprigs to throw in my coffee or tea. The Salty outside had already killed the herbs so I wanted to try the sunny frosted window in the kitchen. It's not that the air inside the house is any less salty really but there's less without the additional spray from the waves. I found a couple of baskets but needed a plastic saucer with high sides since they tilted. Nothing workable in the recycle stuff, but surely I had a container in the fridge I could cut down soon that would work. The basket was in-between size for store bought trays but really there sides weren't high enough anyway. 

Then I tried the Bitchin' Sauce tub that I was nearly finished with and it fit like a glove! A perfect water tray! And the Costco super sized Bitchin' was the perfect size to re-pot the square potted herbs! It's so satisfying to reuse food containers, especially when it's a staple item. =) This one needed a video. 

When they cut back the coconut palms, they'd left me a couple stocks of green coconuts. I'd bought a nifty coconut opener on Amazon that is basically a corkscrew with a sharp end to pop the top. What I learned while opening green coconuts is all you need is a steak knife. It's like cutting into an apple. I also learned that you will get sprayed in the face, every single time. No matter where you do it or how slow. They are premature guys. No video for that one. There is so much yummy water in the green ones before they absorb it all and fully ripen into the brownish ones you see, which are more about the meat inside. 

Pop the top stem and cut a hole in the middle...mind the overspray.

Choke full of water and a surprise days later when the water I'd collected from a few coconuts had turned PINK! I looked this up immediately. I had seen pink coconut water in the store but never from the fresh out the coconut kind. Oxidation and the sugar content are the culprits, which is why it started out clear and gradually got more pink...or should I say more beautiful. Another reuse...those Costco vodka and gin containers. This was someone else's!! I have a cocktail about 5 times a year these days. haha      It was too cool of a glass container just to toss in the garbage.