Best pineapple ever!

What's bright yellow, sweet and juicy? The best pineapple ever, that's what!

And I grew it myself!  

Wahoo!  Look what I grew!

This wasn't the first pineapple I've grown - far from it - but it was certainly the biggest, the juiciest and the sweetest one yet.

A bowl full of sweetness!

What makes one pineapple better than another?  Each one I've grown has come from store-bought fruit.  Just your typical grocery store pineapples.  It could be the soil or location, weather conditions or a combination of those factors that enabled this most recent pineapple to develop into such a large and tasty fruit.  I suppose I'll never know for sure.  What I do know, is the delight I've found in growing (and eating!) my own pineapples.

The mother plant behind me has two more suckers on it
that might develop more fruit 

If you haven't tried growing one yourself yet, give it a try.  Pineapples are among the easiest fruit to grow.  Simply cut off the top of a store-bought fruit and place it in a scraped away spot of soil.
 

Lobbed off top ready for planting

Pineapples can be grown in a sunny spot or in the shade.  I've successfully grown them in both.  The pineapple top doesn't need to be buried deeply.  It doesn't need any special soil. Pineapples, which are in the bromeliad family, are no-fuss plants.  Once one has been set in the ground its only requirement is to be left alone.

To learn more about growing pineapples, check out my post from last August:

Pineapples - easy to grow, yummy to eat

Who says you can't grow raspberries in Florida!

We've always called them 'black caps' but most people know them as black raspberries.  

When Ralph and I lived on Cape Cod, picking (and eating!) blackcaps was one of our favorite things to do when the fruit ripened in early summer. Black caps canes grew wild all along the edge of wooded areas. To protect ourselves from the plants' prickly thorns, we'd don long-sleeve shirts and jeans before heading out to the woods to gather our bounty.  

And what a bounty it was!  Small but sweet with slightly tart overtones, wild black caps were the perfect fruit to usher in the start of Cape Cod's short but welcome warm weather season.

Look what I picked!

Fast forward several years.  We moved to Florida in 1987 and found ourselves needing to learn a whole new way of gardening. We were told by experts that so many of the plants we loved in New England would simply not grow in Central Florida's semi-tropical climate.

Including black caps.

For a long time we believed the experts, but that changed about four years ago when a friend who knew how much Ralph missed his berry fix suggested we try planting Mysore raspberries.

Mysore raspberry is a large scrambling shrub native to the lower Himalayas that has adapted well to Florida's limestone or acid sandy soil. Our friend gave Ralph a young plant to begin with and in just one growing season that small start sent out many new shoots and grew considerably taller.

At maturity, Mysore raspberries top out between 10 to 15 ft tall, which, after four years of growing, is about the height of the multi-caned plants now thriving in Ralph's garden.

A clump of Mysore raspberries growing in a planting bed
next to the compost pile

Yesterday I went into the garden to check on the raspberries.  I brought my camera with me because a few days before when I was there (without my camera) I noticed many bees on the raspberry flowers. I wanted to see if they were there again.

Sure enough, they bees were busy buzzing around the pinkish-purple blooms flying from one pretty blossom to another as I followed them with my camera.

When I finished taking pictures, I gathered a small handful of ripe berries to give my husband. Mysore raspberries aren't nearly as prolific as their New England relatives but they still provide a tasty treat for Florida berry lovers.

While Ralph loves the berries, for me it's all about the wildlife and I was more than delighted to see not only such beautiful flowers on the Mysore plants, but to find so many pollinators attracted to the bushes.

If you're a northern transplant who misses growing raspberries, consider adding some Mysore raspberries to your garden.  Below are two nurseries that sell Mysore raspberries.  If you decide to order some or already have a bed of black caps in your garden, let me what you think of the fruit and how they're doing.  Experts tell us one thing, but those of us experimenting in our own backyards are the ones who really know what works and what doesn't.

The more we learn from each other, the better gardeners we all become.

Mysore Raspberry Sources:

Just Fruits and Exotics

Florida Hill Nursery

An excess of plenty

The fruitful season has begun. The wild blackberry vines around the lake are covered with flowers and a few berries on the mulberry trees near the north side of the house have already started to ripen.

Blackberry flowers portend a fruitful season ahead

Without a winter frost to deter growth, our papaya trees continue to produce large, orange-fleshed fruit and the carambola tree is covered with clusters of shiny, yellow starfruit.

Ralph reaches up into a productive papaya tree to harvest a ripe fruit

 

In many yards, loquat trees, which start producing in February, are reaching the end of their season. But at our house several late blooming varieties are still bearing a crop of apricot-colored ‘Japanese plums’, another name for these underappreciated landscape edibles.

Loquats coexisting with a grove of bamboo

In the orchard, our nectarines, peach and plum trees are flowering, but I’m not expecting much of a harvest. In order to produce reliable crops, stone fruits require far more attention - yearly pruning, fertilization and protection from pests - than Ralph and I are willing to provide. Considering the amount of neglect they receive, any fruit those trees give us will truly be a gift.

Peaches aplenty in 2012
We don't expect as big a harvest in 2017

 

But some types of plants actually thrive on neglect and those are the kind of plants I especially love. My Surinam cherry bushes, for instance, look more promising now than ever. In the dozen or so years since I first planted them beneath the shade of a live oak along the driveway, I’ve never seen as many flowers as I’m seeing this year. If even a fraction of those flowers develop into fruit, I’ll be on Surinam cherry overload when picking time rolls around.

Surinam cherries in various stages of ripeness

Pineapples are another fruit requiring little if any attention. Lately I haven’t been eating many pineapples but for several years a few slices of pineapple were a daily part of my diet. I’d buy a pineapple at the store, slice it up and save the crown for planting. The evidence of my consumption can be found tucked under rose bushes, hidden beneath orange cosmos flowers and scattered haphazardly elsewhere around the yard. 

A new pineapple growing amidst a bed of orange cosmos blooms

The lobbed off top would find purchase in the sandy soil and I’d forget all about it until one day while out picking flowers for a bouquet or taking a stroll around the yard, I’d notice a young pineapple starting to develop. A few months later a homegrown pineapple would be ready to pick.

A small but flavorful homegrown pineapple

Pineapples are a type of bromeliad, and like other members of the Bromeliaceae family, they have minimal soil and water needs. I grow them by simply inserting a lobbed off top into a semi-sunny, dry location and then let nature take charge. Over the course of a year, the crown develops into a mature plant producing a brand new pineapple. Delicious to eat and ridiculously simple to grow, just the way I like gardening to be. 

During the years when our four children were young we never had enough fruit to fulfill the needs of our fruit-hungry family. Although we planted our own bananas, pineapples, peaches, plums, nectarines, figs, loquats, persimmons, starfruit, Surinam cherries, blackberries, mulberries, oranges, pomegranates, grapes and avocados, some edibles produced better than others and crops varied from year to year. 

Grandson Atom enjoys a mouthful of black mulberries fresh from the tree

Yet regardless of how great or small a harvest might have been, when the kids were young no harvest was ignored. We picked them all, savoring the flavor of homegrown fruit. What a joy it was to experience.

These days, with only two of us at home, Ralph and I are surrounded by an excess of plenty. Fortunately, my daughter Amber lives nearby and I can mail the occasional “remember your roots” packages to our faraway offspring. But as much as it helps to send care packages to my kids, it still troubles me to see fruit falling to the ground.

More wild blackberries than we can ever pick or eat

These days, our fruitful obsession is feeding the birds, squirrels, feral hogs and other wildlife as much - if not more - than the humans who planted them. 

Squirrel eating fig

But I suppose that’s the way some things go. We plant. We grow. We harvest what we sow. We share when we can with those in need and if some of those recipients happen to have feathers or fur, so much the better. At least the crops will not go to waste.

It’s the start of Central Florida’s fruitful season, for all of nature’s creatures.

Wild hogs feeding at dusk on fallen berries beneath the mulberry trees

Join me on a stroll through the rainy-day yard

Just came back from a rainy day stroll through the yard.  We haven't had a full day of rain for a long time. The plants must be so happy. I can almost hear them slurping up moisture, growing greener and fuller by the moment.

It was wet out there but not too wet to take the camera along to capture a few snapshots.

Growing beneath one of my birdfeeders are several volunteer sunflowers.
It's almost as if the rain is encouraging them to open up their petals.

Looking back at the house from beneath one of the white mulberry trees

Although the trees are not fully leafed out, I was surprised to see a few white mulberries ready to pick 

Pausing on my way up the hill to Ralph's high garden, I looked down on the sheds' pine needle-covered roofs

A volunteer papaya covered with fruit is growing out of one section of Ralph's compost bins

Below are a few pictures of some of the many veggies growing in Ralph's two gardens, the high garden up the hill from the house and the low garden, growing on the west side of our house

Pretty pink-stalked Swiss Chard plants

Peas - three different kinds growing on a fence
I munched on some and picked a bunch only I mixed them up by putting them all in one basket.  Now Ralph has to sort through and separate the English peas from the Sugar Snaps.  The snow peas are easy to tell apart.

Look at that!  Raspberries ripening!

Lots of little broccoli side shoots ready to be eaten for dinner
Yup, I picked some of them too

Ralph loves his greens
Here are containers of two kinds of lettuce and tatsoi growing next to containers of broccoli plants

More lettuce growing in the low garden on the west side of the house

Containers filled with potato plants
I love potatoes the way Ralph loves his greens

Below is a picture of a stinkhorn fungus.  It's not a vegetable and definitely not edible, but nonetheless, I found it growing in the garden next to the pea vines.

After meandering up and down the rows in Ralph gardens I headed over to the starfruit tree to see if any fruit was ripe.  Lots!

Next stop was to check out my flowers.  Ralph grows veggies.  I grow flowers.  Except he puts much more work into his vegetable gardens than I do to my overgrown, weedy flowerbeds.  That's okay.  Even with all neglect, I still have plenty of pretty plants to enjoy.

Honeysuckle growing up the clay wall along with confederate jasmine, which will bloom a little later in the season

The bottlebrush trees are covered with sticky red blooms attracting birds, butterflies wasps and bees

This jewel orchid that I got at a plant exchange
(thank you Mark and Judy Loftus!)
just recently started to flower

A little bit of this, a little bit of that
Many different plants growing together on a low table

My kitchen window garden
Another assorted group of succulents, bromeliads, wildflowers and perennials
in the forefront with white mulberry trees in the distance

Lots of oak leaves covering the walkways

And another edible - a pineapple - growing under the Louis Philippe Rose bushes.  I keep waiting for it to turn yellow so I can pick it but it's taking so long to ripen, I worry that the feral pigs will get to it before I do.  I might just have to pick it while its still green to be sure I won't miss out.

Practice mindfulness - eat a pomegranate!

Pomegranates. Do you eat them? I do.

During the last few months of every year, pomegranate fruits begin to appear in the produce bins at local grocery stores, and I eagerly buy them. I don’t add them to my shopping cart just because they’re pretty, although the shiny, round, hard-skinned, red orbs are attractive enough to be Christmas tree ornaments. I hand the cashier money because I like the way pomegranates taste.

The edible part of this Middle Eastern native fruit are its seeds, also known as arils. Cutting a pomegranate in half reveals masses of small, dark-colored pea-sized arils, each one covered with a slippery, juicy pulp. Biting into a spoonful of seeds yields a mouthful of sweetness tempered with just the right amount of tartness to produce a flavorful punch combined with a satisfying crunch as the seeds are chewed.

With 200 to 1,400 seeds per fruit — pomegranates vary from the size of a small navel orange to the girth of a medium-sized grapefruit — a single pomegranate lasts for about a week in our two-person household. Maybe less if I fail to practice self-control.

As much as I look forward to pomegranate season each year, I wasn’t always a fan. When I was growing up, I recall neither eating one nor even trying one when I was a young adult. My introduction to this seasonal delicacy happened within the last decade when, out of curiosity, I decided to give one a try.

I’ve always been curious about different foods. When I see an unfamiliar fruit or vegetable in the produce bins, my interest is piqued even if I have no idea what the item tastes like or how it’s prepared. These days, learning about unfamiliar foods is easy, thanks to Google and YouTube. Type ‘How to eat a pomegranate’ into the computer’s search bar and more than a million instructional videos and Web page results appear.

I’ve watched a good many ‘how-to’ videos on the subject, but my preferred method remains a slow and pleasant process by the kitchen sink in which seeding a pomegranate forces me to practice patience.

While standing over the sink, I cut the fruit in half and proceed to squeeze the juice of one cut half at a time into a large bowl. As the juice drips into the bowl, numerous seeds fall in as well — but not all the seeds. To extract the remaining arils, I use my fingers, which is where patience comes into play. Poking and probing dislodges the seeds. Then, after they’ve fallen into the bowl, I poke around some more to find and remove any white membranes that have adhered to the seeds.

If I’m not careful and fail to focus on what I’m doing, seeds will fly off, and juice will splatter everywhere. However, if I pay attention to the task at hand, my kitchen stays tidy as tasty morsels fill my bowl.

Seeding a pomegranate promotes mindfulness. Separating the seeds from the spongy, white membrane in which they reside takes time. It takes me about 15 minutes from start to finish to fill a bowl with edible seeds and juice from a single pomegranate. Fifteen minutes is not a lot of time, but in our hyper-active lives, we’re often too preoccupied to allow ourselves even a quarter-hour of contemplative practice.

That’s all the more reason to do so, especially during this time of year when pomegranates are plentiful in the produce section. There are many ways to practice patience but few provide the added benefit of tasty, nutritious fruit to eat when practice time is done.

Try a pomegranate. Pick the biggest, reddest, firmest fruit you can find. When you’re ready to eat it, settle down by the kitchen sink for 15 minutes of quiet concentration. Relax. Have fun. Focus on what you’re doing, and enjoy the moment. When you’re done, you’ll be rewarded for your effort by not only having a clearer mind but by having a big bowl of pomegranate seeds to eat by the spoonful.

Delicious — mindfulness doesn’t get much better than this.

Yes, we have LOTS of bananas!

I thought about the idiom “A watched pot never boils” as I took yet another look at the two hands of bananas suspended by rope from the porch rafters. 

Lots of fat, green, unripe bananas hanging from the rafters

Much to my disappointment, the fat, green fruit were no riper this time than they had been the day before. Darn! I hoped at least a hint of yellow would appear.

The bananas are hanging in our porch because the plants on which they had been growing snapped in the recent storm. 

The banana plants that broke in the storm

Fortunately, none of the fruit was damaged when the banana trunks broke. After the rain died down, my husband, Ralph, and I went out to cut off the two hands. We brought them inside to ripen.

On the ground with all fingers intact

Ralph and I have been growing bananas at our Groveland property for a couple decades. Since we’ve been doing it for so long, one might assume we’re pretty good at producing a bountiful supply of America’s most popular fresh fruit. One would be wrong.

The fact that banana plants have had a place in our landscape for a long time merely means we’ve had more opportunities than most to make mistakes. Although we have experimented with different varieties and planted them in various locations, our ability to successfully produce reliable crops of fruit has been abysmal. Our most common failure has been in timing. Fruit often grows and looks promising but cold weather appears before the bananas are mature enough to ripen. 

Little frog hiding out in the bananas

Banana trees, which are aren’t really trees at all but are large perennial herbs in the same family as gingers, die back when temperatures drop below 40 degrees. Fruit remaining on a plant which has suffered cold damage will stop developing.

It takes about nine months for a banana plant to produce a bunch of bananas. Plants develop from a system of large underground rhizomes. Growing points called suckers sprout out of the rhizomes and poke through the ground. Under proper conditions, each sucker will develop into a full grown plant that can support a single crop of fruit called a hand of bananas. The size and number of bananas growing on a hand depends on factors such as soil nutrients, sun and wind exposure, availability of water, mulch, crowding and, of course, timing.

Banana flowers

Since each banana plant dies once it has produced a single hand of fruit, growers only have one shot every nine or so months to harvest a crop. Fortunately, the abundance of suckers surrounding the base of each mature plant provide multiple opportunities to try again if the first crop fails to mature in time to harvest.

But poor timing wasn’t the factor for the two hands of (almost) mature bananas now suspended from the porch rafters. Hurricane winds shortened their natural maturation, leaving us to complete the process in a more contrived setting.

And so I continue to check on them daily. If they’re like every other hand of bananas we’ve taken inside to ripen over the years, they will slowly begin to yellow and then — BAM! —every banana in the hands will be ready to eat at once. I counted over 30 fruit in one hand and even more in the other. 

The first sign of ripening!

The idiom says “A watched pot never boils.” But when it comes to hands of bananas, a more appropriate saying might be: “I’m going bananas.” Or at least I will be when the two hands finally mature and I am faced with more ripe fruit to do something with than we can possibly consume.

The same two hands six days later

Guess I better get out the dehydrator. Dried banana time should be here soon. 

Dehydrating time has arrived!