SEEN IN KERALA, INDIA

  Recently I spent four weeks traveling slowly around the state of Kerala in the south of India.  It is very tropical there and maybe not what you think of for India.  I moved from coastal towns with waterways and rice paddies up to forested hills and then mountains covered with tea gardens.  A wonderful trip and finally I got to India.

One evening in Fort Kochi I shared a restaurant table with a young Irish backpacker who had been traveling for several months and was feeling a bit jaded about the vagabond life.  He asked me if traveling lost its appeal even more when you are older. After thinking about it my answer was no.  In fact, as we grow older, we pick up so many interests in things that we just passed over when we were young.  When I was young, I was just traveling to see the sights.  When you are older you are exploring things that now interest you like history or arts or religion.  My acquired interest in plants and how people in other countries grow and use them gives extra depth to my travel experience.  I enjoy learning from gardeners out in their yards and cooks in their kitchens.  I also enjoy taking a few photos that I can share here with you.  Click on any one of the photos to see them enlarged.

 A house near my homestay in Fort Kochi/Cochin

A vegetable store in Mattancherry

These walls covered in small pot plants were very popular
 in crowded commercial areas and gave some green relief.

Krishna playing on a flute in the public waterfront park at Ernakulam.

Street view in Mattancherry

A vegetable seed seller and his stall by the road.  
Alleppey/Alappuzha

Flowers being sold for temple puja.
Alleppey/Alappuzha

Container garden at my homestay.
Alleppey/Alappuzha

A quiet home garden in the back lanes of Alleppey/Alappuzha

Cardamom and using some old forest trees to give shade.
These cardamom plantations could be seen for miles along the road
 through the hills near Kumily.

A modern looking house and garden in Kumily.

A fruit stall in the hill country town of Munnar.  
Passion fruit and tamarillos hanging in front.

Tea gardens covered the hills around Munnar.

Aloha

GARDENS IN NEGOMBO, SRI LANKA

 Negombo is a coastal town a few miles north of the international Colombo airport.  It was a good place to spend a few quiet days to adjust to a new country on arrival.  I was eager to explore the reminders of Sri Lankas colonial past as the Portuguese, Dutch and English all used Negombo as a trading port for Cinnamon harvested from a tree that is native to Sri Lanka.  What I did not expect was the amount of fishing going on in the town.  Hundreds of small boats bring in fish to be sold at the markets or cleaned and dried on acres of coconut mats spread over the sandy beaches.  It was an amazing and fascinating sight.  As always, I also enjoyed walking around town exploring the quieter residential lanes and looking at family homes and gardens.  Here are a few photos from that to share with you.  You will see them much clearer if you click on one and get the slide show.

Plants for sale at the street market

Green leafy vegetables that are chopped up and added to a
 rice porridge eaten for breakfast.

Aloha

SHOPHOUSES OF SINGAPORE'S CHINATOWN

 On my recent trip I stayed a few days in a hotel in Chinatown.  I fell in love again with the shophouses there so am sharing a few photos of them here .....along with the small garden ideas they used.  The shophouses are from the late 19th, early 20th century era and were very practical buildings that allowed families to live above their businesses.  These are considered heritage buildings now and since the 1980s there has been a movement to restore them to their former grandeur.  The budget hotel I stayed at was formed from several of them.  New generation restaurants are moving in next to the old school coffee shops and community temples.  Young professionals are buying up old dilapidated shophouses, and moving in after restoration work is done.  Note the old Peranakan style tiles that are part of their beauty.  You will see them better if you click on one of the photos to see an enlarged slide show.

Aloha

FLOWER OFFERINGS AT THE TEMPLE OF THE TOOTH

 I have been off traveling for a few months in Asia and am now back home and going through my travel photos.  I will be posting some of them over the next few weeks as I get myself organized.  Today is just a quick one about my visit to the lovely city of Kandy up in the mountains of central Sri Lanka.  At the center of the city is a royal palace complex next to a man-made lake.  The most important building of the complex is Sri Dalada Maligawa or the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic.  Buddhists, both local and international, arrive as white clothed pilgrims with floral tributes to offer along with prayers at the home of the Buddha's tooth.  There are many stalls outside the temple gates selling flowers or you could bring your own from home.

Aloha

GOOD GARDEN READS 7

 A Samoan gentleman who is using YouTube to teach other Samoans how to grow vegetables under different conditions when they move to New Zealand.  Good ideas in the article for any gardener.

The 87-year-old YouTuber teaching gardening in Samoan from his Auckland garden | Stuff.co.nz

PERPETUAL SPINACH

 

I have a new favorite green leafy vegetable these days.  In Hawaii and the US, it is called Perpetual Spinach, but I was first introduced to it a few years ago as Perpetual Silver Beet in New Zealand.  It is a member of the Beet family and so it does a have a light Swiss Chard/Silver Beet flavor.  I tried growing the seeds a few years ago but they did not do well but decided recently to give it another go when I bought some young plants from a nursery here.  I am pleased to say that these have done well, and I have become a big fan of this plant.

I only have four Perpetual Spinach plants growing in a large container along with two kale plants.  Enough for one person meals.  I added compost to the container before planting and I do have netting over the top, mainly to keep the white butterflies away from the kale, but also to keep the birds from getting interested in the spinach leaves.  Now that the plants are a few feet high I am harvesting a few leaves at a time to add to salads and stir fries.  I tested the taste of the Perpetual Spinach to see how strong the Chard flavor was by just eating leaves that had been boiled for five minutes.  (This is the way it was eaten in New Zealand in my childhood years.)  Yes, there is a bit of Chard flavor, but it is very light.  I ate it with a grating of cheese on top and decided it made a very nice side dish.  I am trying to eat more leafy greens these days to support my little gray cells.  If you throw the Perpetual Spinach leaves into a stir fry or a quiche you do not notice the Chard flavor at all.  I think this is why it is called Spinach in the US because it is a more familiar green leaf flavor for Americans.  In New Zealand you grow up on the flavor of cooked Chard.  (It was interesting to see the same in coastal Croatia last year although I found out that Chard cooked in lots of olive oil was very different!)  As you would expect of any green leafy vegetable, Perpetual Spinach is high in vitamin A along with lots of other good nutrients including having good amounts of vitamin K.

The best thing about Perpetual Spinach is that it is a tough easy plant to grow.  It is a biennial so you can expect it to live for two years.  I have seen video of a gardener dividing baby plants off a large mature root like you would for taro.  Hopefully my plants will get to the point that I can try doing that.  It has big sized seeds which is helpful in spacing when sowing seeds which is the usual method of propagation.  Space the plants 6-8 inches apart.

In the tropics Perpetual Spinach prefers the cooler time of the year and likes to be in semi-shade.  Hot weather slows down leaf production.  I have mine growing in the sparse shade of a curry leaf tree and it seems to like it there.  The soil needs to have good drainage and a high organic content.  High nitrogen feeding helps push out the lush leaves.  The most important thing is to keep the soil moist, especially in the summer.  Just as well my container is positioned near the hose by the kitchen door.  Mulching is good to help keep the soil moist.  You need to keep an eye out for slugs too.  That means night time inspections around 10pm.

Aloha

Nov. 2024

Below is a photo of my latest Perpetual Spinach that I am especially proud of because I grew these plants from seed.  I need work on my seed growing skills so am always asking master gardeners how they do it. I think if helped to not transfer the seedling out until they were several inches high and had some reserve of strength.  My first lot of Perpetual Spinach in the photos above got overtaken by the powerful kale plant.

MAY DAY IS LEI DAY

 May Day in Hawaii is a day for wearing lei and also for lei making competitions.  We have just finished our rainy months, so the vegetation is lush and green with lots of flowers in bloom. It is the right time for making lei. On our island, the big lei competition is down at Kapiolani Park (June 2021) in Waikiki but on our side of the island there is a local competition held in the Hawaiian village at the Polynesian Cultural Center.  My daughter and I went over to check it out this afternoon and I thought I would put a few photos up sharing this bit of Hawaii life for those who do not live in Hawaii.  Viewers from Hawaii are likely to be scrutinizing the flower combinations for ideas in making their own lei.  Clicking on one photo will enlarge all the pictures for you to see closer.

Aloha

FALSE HEATHER (Cuphea hysopifolia)

 

False Heather is our tropical substitute for real Scottish heather.  It has that same low bushy growth with the purple haze appearance.  It has been around for decades in Hawaii gardens and usually used for edging.  A year or so ago I was looking around a nursery for something with color but low growing for a large low container I have near the kitchen door.  The container has a solar light standing in it so I needed something that would not cover the light that shines towards the doorsteps.  I ended up buying three 4" pots of False Heather for the first time and am pleased at how they quickly filled up the container.  After several months I did need to give them a trim, but the plant quickly recovers with new fresh growth.  Overall, the plant choice was a good one and it makes a nice display.  What made me absolutely delighted with the False Heather was to see all the honeybees it brought into the garden.  I had no ideas that False Heather was a pollinators plant, but I have recently learned that honeybees like purple flowers.  I really enjoy watching the happy and busy bees collecting their pollen in the sunshine as I walk past.

False Heather is native to Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras and, like many of the plants from that area of the world, it belongs on my tough plant list.  This is an easy care, not fussy, plant. It does like to have good drainage, but it will tolerate poor soils and periods of dry weather.  A bit of feeding and watering will make it happier though.  In the tropics it can be treated as a perennial, but it does get a bit straggly over time so that changing out the plant every few years will improve your gardens appearance. False Heather can grow up to 2 ft high so could be used in a very low hedge.  An occasional trim helps the growth stay low and full.  

Usually, the flowers are purple but there are different varieties sold with colors going from white, lavender to dark purple.  It does spread out so that if you were using it as an edging it needs at least a foot space between plants. I have not noticed seed pods on my plants, so it was a surprise to find a few baby plants springing up underneath the first planted ones.  I guess the seeds are tiny, but I was happy to pot up the new free plants.

Aloha

FA'AALA, SAVAII, SAMOA

 Fa'aala is a small village on the island of Savaii in Samoa.  (Often the name of the village is shortened to Fa'ala in daily usage.)  I was lucky enough to spend 4 nights in this village recently while on a two-week trip to Samoa and I thought I would put up a few garden related photos for you.  Remember that you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on one.

I lived a total of 9 years in Samoa during my younger life and Savaii has always been a special place for me.  Over the years I have traveled to maybe a dozen different Pacific Island nations and I still think Savaii is the most beautiful of the islands.  There are a few small beach type hotels on the island but I stayed in a lovely guest house in Fa'aala village where there is no sandy beach, but I could just relax and watch village life from my comfortable, cool and open walled house, by the round-the-island road.  The owners also own a farm, so the wonderful meals are from home grown produce and meat. The guest house is called Florence's Place and you can contact them through Facebook. Savaii is still waiting for the tourists to come back after all the covid shutdowns.

The guest house, Florence's Place, that I stayed at.

Samoans really go all out in having nice flower and shrub gardens around their homes.  Villages care how they look, and you will notice how neat the gardens and lawns are kept and how colorful the gardens are.  Is seemed that Savaii was especially big on new bright hybrid crotons which were just ablaze along the roads and wonderful when viewed from a local bus window.  Bromeliads have also become the latest craze in Samoa.  A few years ago, it was just a few ladies in the main town of Apia who were growing them.  Now they seem to be in every garden, often perched on tree fern trunks or in recycled rubber tire containers.  Savaii is rather volcanic, and it is interesting to see how gardeners use small volcanic rock rubble to mulch their gardens.....it should stop those roving chickens from scratching all the plants out too. Of course, it is not just ornamentals in the gardens but also fruit trees like breadfruit, papaya, bananas and citrus as well as things like sugar cane and lau pele.  Then there are the plots of taro that are mostly found up the farm access roads that lead into the hills. It really was lovely to wonder around in the cool of the evening to view the gardens and it is hard to choose which of my many photos I should put up here.

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Aloha