spiceoflife's Blog

I don't know Jack! Jackfruit, that is!
Jul 28, 2008 | 6:50 AM PST
Tags: jackfruit , dragonfruit

Score!

I went to Russo's again yesterday originally to replace my sapotilla/Mamey that the the rodents ate last week, but decided I would look around first and see what Russo's had newly available and stuck gold! They had both fresh jackfruit sections and fresh dragonfruit!

In case you don't know, I've heard it stated (on the Food or Travel channel somewhere) that the jackfruit is the original source of the falvor for Wrigley's JuicyFruit gum. After tasting the fruit, I believe it. (Although, I think I would have been better off getting the fruit last week as it didn't smell/taste all that fresh. I could still get that distinctive juicyfruit flavor, though. According to http://www.crfg.org/pubs/ff/ja
ckfruit.html, "Jackfruit is the largest tree-borne fruit in the world, reaching 80 pounds in weight and up to 36 inches long and 20 inches in diameter. ... The jackfruit tree is handsome and stately. In the tropics it grows to an enormous size, like a large eastern oak. ... The tree is too large to make a suitable container-grown plant." I'll see about that. ;-)

I bought a pretty decent size section of jackfruit sure to have lots of whole seeds, and a nice firm dragonfruit. Total, they cost me about $7. Bargain! I got about 8 whole undamaged seeds and about 4 more that got nicked when the fruit was cut, but that I think are still usable.

I already have several dragonfruit plants. I got this fruit just to taste what the fresh fruit tastes like.

The mameys/sapotillas will have to wait.
I'll keep you updated.

What was that word again? Oh, yeah: patience!
Jul 26, 2008 | 10:43 AM PST

Warning - this entry has a fair amount of complaining. It's not my usual type of entry, but there it is.

This has not been my week.

Firstly, I went outside to check all my outside containers that I have been brave enough to put out:

my newly purchased Chinese elm that I'm going to bonsai

one of my lemon seedlings

my two sapotilla sprouts that took weeks

four of my pomegranate seedlings

one of my longan berry seedlings

my sassafras seedling

and my walnut seedlings, which are growing so fast they might even be saplings soon.

And what did I find? Some little punk of a mammal, I haven't pinned it down yet, had eaten both of my sapotilla seedlings, cotyledons and embryos and all, right down to the soil! Now I need to start all over again. I'm hoping I can manage to get some more to sprout before the weather turns chilly. One more annoying thing about this was that these are the second most expensive fruit I had bought to try and grow from seed at almost $4 each. Not to mention that I don't even know if Russo's still has any in stock.

The annoying little furball had also dug into my walnut seedling's pots and dug out the shells, looking for the nuts. Luckily the plants seem to have come through it okay. Last year the little b@$t@rd ate the tiny seedlings, too. At least this year he was too late and the stems had already gotten too woody to be palatable to him.

You think that's all? Oh no. Just for kicks and giggles, the punk pulled my lemon seedling out of the pot. It didn't even bite it - it just pulled out the whole thing. I put it back in and pushed the soil around the roots. Initial prognosis is good. With all the rain we've had this past week here in Mass., the roots didn't have a chance to dry out too bad.

So that's all the bad news. Now for some good news!

I didn't kill my locust seedling. I had found a volunteer locust seedling in my sideyard and decided to try to keep it as a container plant, and maybe bonsai it. I've read recently, much to my surprise given it's compound leaves, that it has the potential to be a striking specimen as a bonsai with it's large racemes of flowers in the spring. I've always liked this tree. I had found another volunteer locust in my back yard two years ago, but didn't realize how large and sharp the spines on it already were and got stuck pretty bad in the thumb. I immediately ripped it out of the ground and tossed it. Whereupon I immediately regretted it. So the birds have been kind enought to deposit me a second seed. I'm going to try to hold onto it. I've already had a close call with it, though. I potted it up in a bonsai pot and placed it too close to the living room window. (Mind you, every bonsai book I've read has said in no uncertain terms that this is a BAD idea.) In less than one day, the pot had totally dried out and all of the leaves on the seedling had become totally dessicated. My son touched one of the leaves and the whole compound leaf just fell right off the stem. I checked my bonsai books and they said that all might not be lost. Just submerge the pot in water for about 10 - 20 minutes, and put it in a shady spot. Sure enough, yesterday I saw new growth coming out of the stem. Whew! That was a close one.

And now for the patience part. If you've been following my blog entries you might recall that some of the plants that I've been trying to grow from seed/fruit/leaves, etc. have been the Opuntia, or prickly pear cactus, leaves. I've been saying that they've been doing nothing, yada, yada, yada. Well, this week, I checked them again. The first one I checked was the cutting I made from the top of the opuntia leaf. It had finally made the decision to give up the ghost, and was starting to shrivel, turn dark, and rot on the bottom. So I pulled it up and sent to the compost pile. Unfortunately, with that little experience fresh in my mind, I reached for the other two pieces of the opuntia leaf that were in another pot. Still seeing no activity on the leaf surface, I pulled them out to check them expecting to see a similar result, or the same old "nothing happening." RIIIP! I felt the roots tearing as the leaf pieces came away from the pot. STUPID! So I tucked them back in the pot and now I wait again.

Update on my longan berries and Lychees. I now have three more of each, and I can tell them apart. They are all about 4 inches high with several sets of compound leaves. The longan berry leaves are more oval, start out almost purple, and develop into a dark green. The lychee leaves are more pointed, delicate looking, and asymmetrical. They start out a bright pink and turn a lighter shade of green. They're very pretty. Somehow they remind me of pixies, or fairies. (I need to trace that association in my head and see where it came from.)

I started a few more date palms, too. I had given away a couple and felt like starting some more. My first one is nowalmost four years old and taller than I am - it's approaching 6 feet tall, but still only has about 6 leaves. lol The good thing is that the last couple of leaves are getting the classic mature date palm look where the fronds are splitting. Very cool.

My one, small cherimoya tree is doing very well, sort of. It had lost all of it's lower leaves, but then got a whole new flush at the top. The stem isn't quite strong enough to hold up all of the new growth. I tried putting some wire around the stem bonsai-like, but being the first time I ever tried it, the wire was too short, too thick, too loose, and ultimately too ugly. I'm going to remove it and just stake it for now. I'll repot it and put it outside for a month or two to thicken up.

Some of this years crop of sunflowers are over 10 feet tall. One has already opened and it's a whopper.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you, I finally set up a small trellis for one of my grape vines. It's just three pieces of pine strapping and some wire, but it came out pretty good if I do say so myself. Unfortunately I lost a good deal of the crop when moving the vines from the ground to the trellis. I'm looking forward to next year. The trellis will only last a couple of years. This is by choice. I actually haven't decided if I'm going to keep the grapes there or not. If I do, then I'll rebuild the trellis using metalconduit. If I decide to get rid of the grapes then the trellis I made will be easy to take out. And either way, I've only spent about $15 on it, plus my time.

That's all for now. I need to go to Agway and get some chicken wire and surround the plants on my deck to keep the varmints away. Anyone have a good recipe for squirrel schnitzel or groundhog goulash? ;)

Regards,

Robert

Haven't I learned the first thing about gardening?
Jul 14, 2008 | 7:46 PM PST

Well, maybe not the first thing.....

The first thing is probably what you need to put together to make a plant grow. You can learn this much as a child - seed, dirt, water, sunshine.

But then comes the hard part, the part I still struggle with when it comes to plants. You may ask, "What is it that Robert has still not learned yet after all these years?

Patience, my friends, patience.

Yesterday I went outside to take the string trimmer to the former lawn portion of my front yard that has been overgrown by violets. (I read somewhere that the leaves and flowers are actually edible, but I hate the invasive buggers so much I can't bring myself to try them. I get an image of Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction talking about eating pork. "That would have to be one emmer effing charming pig." lol) Anyway, while I'm out there, I find two surprises. Firstly, one of my malanga coco corm/bulb/tuber/whatevers, after believing them all dead for weeks now, has sprouted wonderfully. Surprise! I think I'm going to be VERY happy with this plant.

Secondly, my purple datura has also self seeded, although I'm afraid that the seeds have germinated too late to get anywhere near the quantity of blossoms I had last year. But perhaps germinating right in place will allow it to catch up.

So, while I might need to work on my gardening zen a bit, i.e. a LOT, I do still manage to be pleasantly wrong once in a while.

Regards,

Ro
bert

PS: My ongoing apologies to all those whom I still owe seeds. I do still have the seeds and your envelopes, and I'll add the additional postage since it has gone up in the time between when you sent me the SASEs and now. My intentions are good, but let's just hope they are paving a better road than the proverbial one so paved. ;-)

Have you ever done this?
Jul 1, 2008 | 5:04 PM PST

I have this side yard that last year I let get taken over by volunteer tomato plants.  This year I decided that since I wasn't paying much attention to it anyway, I might as well just grow wildflowers and attract the birds and the bees.  So I cleared the area out and took a few packets of seeds that I had laying around - mixed wild flowers, foxglove, lupines, etc., (etc. you get the idea) and scattered them over the spot.  done.

Well, the other day, after what seemed like days and days of rain, I decided that my yard needed to have a little weeding done, just the beds, a little tidying up.  I worked my way around the house, slowly, taking my time, and suddenly I realized that I was in my sideyard pulling up all my new sprouted wildflowers.  Dummy! We'll see what hapens.  I left a bunch, but in all honesty, since I have never grown these before, I won't really know which ones are weeds and which are the "flowers" until they get around to blooming.  At least I'll be surprised.  lol

Oh, and something is eating some of the wildflowers.  The ends and tops of the plants are gnawed right off.  It's got to be that freakin' groundhog.  well, that's okay for now.  I really don't care all that much about the flowers and he's apparently pathologically afraid of stairs because he's yet to make it around to the front of my house wher eall the "good stuff" is.  I've decided to call him Gorca - half gopher and half orca, killing my plants by partially eating them, just for fun.  The jerk.

I think the third mango seed is dead, but I don't have the heart to pull the plug on it yet.

Opuntia (prickly pear) leaves are still doing nothing, not even rotting. Still weird.

Nothing yet on the mangosteens, I'm not optimistic here.

Two Avocado pits are sitting happily in small pots full of moist peat moss covered in a sandwich bag. I'm cautiously optimistic on these only because of how long they took last time.

I'm not sure what's going on with the lychee's/longan berries.  They are apparently very closely related and I have about half a dozen seedlings now and I didn't keep careful track of which seeds where in which pot.  So now I have what might be lychees and might be longan berries.  I'll let you know if I figure it out.

Sassafras is doing great. I'm going to need to up-pot it soon. 

My two walnut seedlings are doing great, too.  I was going to try bonsaiing them, but after doing a bit of research I found out that they don't respond well to the techniques.  I've decided to keep them anyway for now. 

That little maple seedling is doing GREAT in it's new bonsai soil and pot. I hope it works out. 

My dragonfruit plant that I put outside is looking horrible.  :-(  I'm going to need to give it a serious pruning.

Oh, and I almost forgot.  The malanga coco and the malanga blanco all didn't make it.  They rotted in the ground.  Good thing they didn't cost much. 

But what DID grow, and now looks pretty darn cool, is the sweet potato.  Cool color leaves.  I like this one a lot.

Pictures soon. ;-)