OK, when I had my last birthday and we were still in Virginia, my brother had given me a wonderful gift card for Amazon and one of the books I bought was a book on foraging:
The Forager's Harvest, A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting and Preparing Edible Wild Plants, by Samuel Thayer. I LOVE plants, especially native plants, herbs and wildflowers, and this book is a gem, with photos and detailed information, focusing on all the great foraging one can do....in the woodlands and wetlands of the east coast. I absolutely ate it up, learning about tuckahoe (arrow arum) and wild rice....only to leave for Arizona a couple of months later where I might find some wapato or arrowhead plant up in the mountains but where no tuckahoe ever thought about growing! :-) Wow...talk about switching gears! THESE are the plants we see every day...various cactus in our daughter's front yard, including a couple of barrel cactus that were encouraged to bloom because of the summer monsoon rains....(click on any views to make them larger)
All so very beautiful...in a vastly different way. And many with their own foraging properties. These prickly pear fruits of course can be eaten. When we lived here before I made prickly pear jelly and also a kind of chow-chow out of these fruits. They are covered in tiny stickers that are harder to deal with than the larger spikes on the leaf part of the plant. I plan to use a little blow torch to burn them off when I deal with them now....we had those tiny things all over us in my last endeavors, and they were in the carpet...it was torture! :-) But, I think a little creme brulee torch will do the trick...I'll let you know. Other cacti are good for eating the fruit, or cutting into for water in a survival situation. And I have learned that the beans of the very prolific mesquite tree are completely edible and have a honey-like taste! Plan to get a cookbook of recipes, and I will be sharing some of what I learn about doing that, as well! In the meantime, there are the plants we grow....
OK, here's the other part of the plant story...how I have been dying to have my own place again so I could start a garden. I borrowed my brother's book
Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew (a Rodale book) and was so ready! And, then (again....) we moved to Arizona! There is NO dirt here, only desert sand. OK, so you can do square foot gardening in raised beds with store-bought plus compost-enriched soil in containers. Water....another issue. OK, there are rain barrels one can put out during the monsoon season, and heck, you can always reclaim some of your grey water! And the sun....BRUTAL! But, if you play your cards right, and protect the plants part of the day, one can be overjoyed to discover---HEY, the growing season here is about 300 days a year! So.....Two months ago, I started my seeds in little peat pots covered with plastic wrap, and started watering everything twice a day, moving the shelf in and out of the sun. By the way, those two taller plants on the shelf are the plumeria cuttings Mom gave us when I left. They spent two weeks in the back of our car with no dirt and no water, with their sticky resiny ends just inside a plastic bag, and when I arrived here, I potted them. Years ago, I sent Mom such a cutting from Texas in the mail with instructions for her to stick it in a pot of dirt. Hers didn't even have the beginnings of leaves. It was just a stick, and looked like a weird Mother's Day gift. But, oh how that tree grew, and every year bloomed and bloomed! So....
And here are the squash plants, sprouted, rooted and repotted into larger pots....They have blooms!
And here are the basil! Plus, on the far left is a turnip plant, and on the far right, a mesquite seedling that came up in an empty pot of dirt!
This is the okra!!!! Aren't okra plants gorgeous! I love their blooms, too, but that lies ahead. The taller plants on either side are two sunflowers that I grew for our grandson, but some kind of little black bug comnpletely stripped them of leaves!!!! I am only using soapy water for a deterrent. The bugs never touched the okra, and now I think I have them under control, but all that's left of the sunflowers are two very distressed flowerheads that may or may not bloom!
And here is what the plumeria looks like today!
Plus, some of the basil we repotted and brought inside to our daughter's kitchen window. We've used the leaves several times already for spaghetti!
And, by the way, we also planted the top of a pineapple and it is doing fine. Plus I have a number of little sweet pepper plants as well. So far so good! And very SOON now I can get my square foot garden started, because GUESS WHAT!!!!! yesterday we signed a lease! Yay! We'll be moving into our new hose in the next couple of weeks!!!! More to come....
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