Natty by Nature

Eating aliens to save the natives!

No this isn’t making a meal to go with the new Aliens movie, this is something much more pernicious– invasive plants!

Do you know this native Hawaiian plant you can make soap from?

If you want to learn about lonomea (Sapindus oahuensis) and other native plants we’d trying to make more space for by eating alien invasive plants, come to my talk today at 6 pm in Kona.

I’ll talk about foraging and even sample some of be delicious dishes and effective medicines you can make from these alien plants that are eating the native Hawaiian ecosystem alive, so you can help eat them out of existence, make more room for beautiful natives like lonomea, and save yourself a trip to the market, pharmacy, therapist and gym at the same time.

Hope to see you there if you’re on Hawai’i island!

A fruit lover’s best sunset over a tree full of delicious jaboticaba harvested by the gallon.

Couldn’t ask for a better end to the weekend than snacking on these taste explosions!

These are often called Brazilian grape even though they have no relation to grapes at all and are in the guava family along with ‘ōhia, mountain apple, Surinam cherry, allspice, and eucalyptus. This fruit has very little of the potent smell of any of those other plants but is mostly just sweet with a nice pop when you bite into the tougher skin concealing the soft inside. They do look and taste vaguely like a muscadine grape and are one of the few tropical fruits that are good for making wine since they have some tannins in the skin.

If you know anyone with a jabo tree or have the patience to wait 6-10 years for fruit, these are well worth growing! Come in a million varieties and related species too that you can graft all onto one fruit cocktail jaboticaba tree.

Oh, and since they’re from Brazil originally it’s pronounced “JAH-bow-chi-KA-ba”. And they’re cauliflorous like their Amazon mates cacao with the fruit growing on the branches so they’re super striking trees especially when they flower with white “snow” all over the branches.

‘Tis the season for…

Plant classes. Who knew that September was the month for learning all about plants, but in addition to my grafting class with and last week, and my fruit management class this Saturday at Waikiki Elementary School, I’m giving a talk on foraging next week, giving some love to my former home on Big Island this time, at the Amy Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden in Kona.

The talk with will be on “Eating Aliens to Save Natives” and we can all as foragers do our part to help the fragile Hawaiian ecosystem by eating invasive plants and removing any seeds, so there’s more room for the native plants to thrive. If you teach two of your friends to do the same, this can spread exponentially and we’ll have greatly reduced the tasty but invasive strawberry guava, haole koa, stink vine, ivy gourd, java plum, Kahili ginger, and many more in short order!

The talk is next Thursday, 9/12 at 5:30 pm and is free to the public. There’s a fun ethnobotanical based potluck after the talk to share all the yummy cooked aliens you can find. I’ll bring some too! Hope to see all my current and future Big Island friends there!

Want to learn how to keep your fruit trees happy, healthy, and productive?

Come to this workshop I am doing on 9/7 1 - 3 PM to learn the basics of fruit tree fertilizing, pruning, and pest management of this series put on by the and Waikiki elementary School as part of a series that will include propagation and grafting. Your instructor, Nat Bletter, aka Dr. Leaves, who has been growing high density fruit trees for 15 years, will cover both soil and leaf fertilizers, what fertilizers to use when, how to suss out plant pests and treat them organically, as well as the basics of pruning for good fruit production and light.

$15 for HTFG members, $20 for non-members, all materials provided.
Sign up on the eventbrite website or using the QR code in image.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fruit-tree-management-workshop-tickets-1004219977987

Want to learn how to copy and paste your fruit trees to make more of the plants that you love? Want to know how I made an 8’ tall citrus tree with 30 varieties attached to different branches to make the best living fruit cocktail you’ve ever seen?

Then come to the grafting and air layering workshop I’m leading n 8/29 & 8/31 in Mānoa in conjunction with so you can become a graftmaster too!

I’ll show you all the techniques I’ve learned over 25 years of grafting and air layering which are simple in concept, but just take a bit of practice since it’s more less like plant brain surgery.

Well get to practice while I coach you with tips so bring a potted plant to practice on if you have, like a citrus, mango, hibiscus, gardenia, or fig which are easy starter grafting plants.

Sign up via the website or the QR code above.

Bacon of the sea– turtle w**d 2 ways.

Turtlew**d or picklew**d (Batis maritima) is a delicious salty treat found on many beaches around Hawai’i and the tropics and tastes like a salted pickle straight off the plant since the plant sequesters salt to be able to survive in the intertidal zone.

Since the gnarly little seed pods were pretty succulent, I decided to make “bacon of the sea” from them by frying them in coconut oil and drizzling with a little smoked hickory syrup for sweetness and miso or nutritional yeast for umami, and they turned out like little bacony sweet/salty nuggets of goodness!

For the succulent leaves, I just lightly parboiled them, let them cool, then put them in vinegar with Thai bird chilis (prik chii faa), garlic, and black peppercorns to sit for a bit, and then they’ll give a great burst of flavor to anything you’d use pickles on or compliment seafood in place of capers.

So look for turtlew**d on any beach near you, and make your own sea bacon and pickles to zest up all of your meals!

**d

Might look like a tub full of wet tribbles but this is an extension of great mainland mimosa craze of 2024.

Am I the only one who has seen the number of videos of people making antidepressant tinctures from invasive mainland US mimosa flowers in the last month, or has it become a botanical meme cause everyone needs antidepressants this year?

Friends have asked me if we can make a similar antidepressant flower tincture from the many Hawaiian legumes that look like mimosa like the monkey pod tree (Samanea saman), the invasive albizia (Falcataria falcata), or powder puff tree (Calliandra species) all of which are minusoid legumes with the powder puff/pom pom flowers.

So I dug into the lit and the only legume easily found in Hawai’i that had reported psychological traditional uses or psychoactive compounds in it is sleeping grass or sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica) whose leaves wilt when touched as a way to avoid herbivory, the invasive thorny groundcover in Hawai’i with pink pom pom flowers.

This turned out to be a fascinating plant that can actually learn the difference between being dropped and being shaken to close its leaves and remember that for 28 days. It also learns that difference faster when it’s grown in the shade vs. in full sun since it needs to return to photosynthesizing open leaves faster in the low light and know the difference of threatening vs. non-threatening leaf movements. Also when the leaves of of sleeping grass are touched, if it’s connected to a Venus fly trap by wires, it transmits the signal to close to the Venus fly trap, so they share an electrochemical communication system.

Clearly a smart/evolved plant, however you want to look at it. It also has the psychoactive 5-MeO-DMT in small amounts in its leaves and roots, like the Bufo toad that people smoke the exudate of to get high (and where the misconception of toad licking comes from since the exudate is toxic without combusting it).

So this is an experiment in progress where I’m tincturing the Mimosa pudica flowers in 190 pr grain alcohol for 2 weeks and then I’ll bioassay it and let you know how I feel, just happy, normal, or ~trippy~. I’ll check in in a fortnight!

The X-men of Honolulu or should I call it X-plant?
This was a super cool find on my grafting clients citrus tree, a mutant branch of cara cara orange that spontaneously became variegated.

This is called a “sport” when a branches mutates and expresses different genes from the parent plant, either from UV light exposure or other environmental mutagens. It is supposedly fairly common in cara cara oranges as at least 5 other people I talked to had spotted this similar sport on their trees.

But it is also how many fruit or nut varieties were discovered instead of bred intentionally, like nectarines (from peaches), red Anjou pears, ruby red grapefruit, pink eureka lemons, red Valencia orange, late blenheim apricot, the broken heart plum, the perrine giant yellow apple, and the converse major pecan.

Traditional fruit breeding can take a lifetime normally as you have to wait 3-10 years for a fruit to mature and flower from a seed before you can try cross pollinating it to get new desirable traits, and then demo that a few more times from seed to fruit to stabilize the new fruit characteristics.

But if you’re lucky enough to find a sport with desirable traits, you can shortcut all that and have a new variety in only a few years, though you can’t direct the new mutant characters at all. The new sport can then be spread by grafting it onto other plants of the same species or genus.

The strange use of the word sport to describe a mutant probably derives from the meaning to wear as in “sporting a new shirt” since the branch is “wearing” a new phenotype.

Have you spotted any sports on your spotted spatoglossums?

Something baked, something brewed, something foraged, something I grew…

Need some nourishing food to reconstitute my sad soul at multiple losses this week, so I combined several of my favorite foods with vibrant colors to lift me up:
• Baked deep, tasty, tangy sourdough rye from topped with
• Brewed Burmese green tea salad koji fermented brewed tea with chilis, garlic, sesame oil, and salt. Mahalo to for figuring out this recipe!
• Foraged avo, sautéed inkberry/tagpo leaves, and bright magenta fried bougainvillea flowers (actually bracts).
• I Grew zippy lemon basil in my garden plot to top both the leaves in the avo and the tea salad and bring it all together. The garden where I retreat for solace, digging my hands in the soil and bringing new life from death.

Try a few of these new foraged, grown, or fermented foods each day and I’m sure your soul will feel uplifted little by little too.

We’ll always remember you and everything we’ve learned from you, Cathy & Pequita, so many things will grow from what you taught us about music, resonance, chin rubs, and the best way to eat chilis.

Haole fries, at least that’s what I call them.

If you take the immature pods of haole koa that are still completely green and you can’t really see any seeds in them when you hold them up to the light, drizzle them in oil and air fry, deep fry, or microwave till crispy, they’re delicious snacks that even kids will love with the hint of garlic naturally found in the pods.

Everyone will love and devour these and can help eat this extreme alien in our Hawaiian landscape and make more room for native plants.

Just don’t make them so good that you want to eat more than 10% of your diet in the as they have a compound mimosine in them that can cause hair loss in large amounts, but in Mexico where these plants are from, they are beloved, available in every corner store to snack on, made into moles and salsas, and not everyone there is bald, late time I checked.

In Mexico, haole koa is called guaje and there’s an entire state named for them– Oaxaca, which was originally “Guajaca” or the land of the guaje growers and eaters but the Spanish couldn’t pronounce that name so well, so they dubbed it Oaxaca instead. When I was last in Oaxaca happily munching on guaje, everyone seemed to still have all their hair, as do I despite eating some of these and Haole capers every day.

So enjoy these delicious haole or guaje fries and help eat the enemy out of existence! They’re basically an infinite source of protein growing all around us that pretty much everyone finds super tasty.

Everyone in Hawai’i has been talking about dabai (Canarium odontophyllum) and safou (Dacryodes or Pachylobus edulis), two members of the Burseraceae or frankincense/myrrh family that taste like avocados in that they’re savory and oily, instead of sweet. But they are hard to find so far here.

So I treated a much easier to find member of this family the pili nut from the Philippines, also called nangai in Vanuatu, ngali nut in Solomon Islands, or Canarium ovatum in the same way as dabai or safou, using the fruit pulp rather than the nut it’s usually harvested for. You have to soak the whole plump ripe fruits in hot water for 30 minutes or so to soften the pulp, but then it’s pretty rich and tasty, like a cross of a Kalamata olive and an avocado.

When I had enough, I made a yummy pili fruit spread or more like a guacamole (pilimole? Pinoymole?). Much better than the pili tapenade I made last time since I took the pulp out and discarded the skins but it’s a lot of work since each one only has about 2 teaspoons of pulp, but easier than cracking the seeds for the nut, which puts max nut cracking to shame! I think if you only ate the nuts you would lose weight from all the calories you expend getting into the nut. Wait for it to succeed the paleo and keto diets– the pili nut diet!

They’re beautiful fruit though with the gradation from deep purple to bright orange! I might hand chop them next time, rather than using an immersion blender, to preserve the beautiful color gradation of each piece.

I call this my “poor man’s dabai” since pili nut grows abundantly in Honolulu but not its relative, dabai or safou,.. yet! But wait a few years and hopefully we’ll have all three and maybe even hybrids.

I don’t know if I’ll be selling this anytime since it took me about an hour of scooping just to fill up this pint mason jar. But otherwise it was mostly like a guacamole recipe with lime juice, onions, chilis, salt, pepper, a little olive oil, coriander, and cumin. Great spread on bread, chips, tacos, or the great NY bagels sent me.

Give it a try if you can find a pili nut, dabai, or safou tree near you!

People on O’ahu, my nissan Xterra was stolen from Hawai’i Kai drive yesterday with all my gardening & grafting equipment. If you see a sand colored 2002 Xterra with a bunch of putty patches on the roof rack and license RFD441, please let me know, since I can’t do either chocolate or garden work without a vehicle. I have already filed a police report, posted on stolen stuff Hawai’i, and searched online markets for the car and more expensive garden gear.

Thanks for keeping an eye out for it so I can keep making fun plant videos for you!

The neighbors security cam showed it there at 9:30 pm on Tuesday but gone by 6 am Wednesday, the next time the camera detected motion.

Funniest couple plants I saw at the dump the other day when I was dropping off green waste. Guess they weren’t a good variety!

Happy belated earth day from the mainland where even in the wilds of Crown Heights, Brooklyn I’m finding grafted fruit trees like this cherry tree with pink and white blossoms at the same time.

Was it guerrilla grafting or just the white flowered rootstock busting out from below the pink flowered graft on top which often happens.

At first I thought it was the former but then I noticed that all the cherry trees on this street had a graft line at about 5’ off the ground, probably since the non-fruiting graft cherry on top needs some sort of disease or cold resistant rootstock to let it thrive there.

But some enterprising guerrilla grafter could easily come graft all these trees with fruiting cherries and maybe even plums, peaches, apricots, pluots, and nectarines which are in the same genus and have a brooklyn street fruit cocktail tree! just had an article about guerrilla grafters in NYC grafting apple on hawthorn trees even!

I did this to a flowering plum tree outside my house in San Francisco 25 years ago when I first learned grafting to give it abundant fruit, and most of the grafts took and were starting to show different leaf colors till PG&E meanly came and lopped the tree off at 4’, killing all my grafts but not the tree, leaving an eye sore stump. 😭🌳🍒

Go out and explore grafting in your hood and bring new fruit to your neighbors! I bet there’s more nearby you than you think, even in the middle of cities.

If you’ve wanted to learn about all the many edible wild greens popping up in your garden and all around you in the forest, I’m co-teaching an online 6-session wild greens course on Wednesday and Sundays April 10-28 with the great Sunny Savage that you can take from the comfort of your own home. We’ll cover coastal, dryland, jungle, and upcountry greens from tree heliotrope to tropical chickw**d, both edible and medicinal. There will also be time for showing the plants from your garden and having us help identify them. Should be a super fun and educational course you can take from any island, even the continental one!

Wild Greens Online Course | Sunny Savage | Savage Farms Wellness Center Gain confidence in identification, preparation and recipes, along with deepening nature connection. Build up your foundation with deep nutrition from wild greens.

A day in the life of a forager and a chef:
Ube yam got turned into gorgeous purple ravioli filled with eggplant and walnuts by on a bed of fried foraged greens– inkberry leaves, peppergrass leaves, Chinese violet leaves, New Zealand spinach, picklew**d fruitlets and topped with pōhinahina brown butter sauce and Chinese violet flowers.

Around the plate clockwise from the fruit are the spoils of a day of foraging:
• bulletwood or balatá fruits (Manilkara bidentata) a chico sapote/sapodilla relative
• Chinese violet leaves and flowers
• Picklew**d or turtle w**d leaves and fruitlets- great salty pickles and fried fruitlet topping
• Sea purslane or ‘ākulikuli or dampalit or bilang in Tagalog– and Filipino and Hawaiian native used to make yummy pickles.
• Peppergrass– a relative of maca that has a kick like arugula or horseradish.
• Inkberry or tagpo in the Philippines where it’s native– give a great sour taste where they’re stir fried.
• beach heliotrope or kipukai– another salty beach leaf with beautiful tiny white and purple flowers.
• Pōhinahina– a native in the sage/mont family that makes a great “sage” brown butter sauce which I posted the recipe for a few months ago.
• (Center) New Zealand spinach– a great succulent green found on the beach that you can eat raw or cooked.

The beach heliotrope/kipukai has such gorgeous little flowers (last 2 pics) that exhibit one of my favorite botany words– circinate vernation– the gradual unfurling of coiled leaves or flowers. We were looking for flowers all day in Botanical Gardens, found nothing, and didn’t realize we just had to look down at our feet on the beach nearby for these little marvels.

All turned into a delicious and beautiful Sunday dinner!

I’ll be co-teaching a couple sessions of ‘s wild greens online course in April if you want to learn more about these tasty wild edibles! Sign up at https://sunnysavage.com/product/5244/ or Sunny’s bio link.

I’m giving a talk on biodiversiphilia, agroforestry, foraging, and cacao growing today with the Club 6-7 pm if any of you are interested in attending in person in Kaka’ako or online via the link below.

https://lu.ma/rmgxl5ie

Made a delicious nom nom cheong (say that 10x fast!) out of the nom nom/natal plum fruit I picked yesterday that I put on yummy cinnamon french toast made by that was a great sweet/tart combo!

Korean sugar-preserved uncooked Cheongs seem to work best with tangy fruit like nom nom, citrus, pomegranate, guanabana, liliko’i, etc. I have made them out of low acid fruit like cherimoya and mangos but they can a little too sweet, even when I use sugar substitutes like monk fruit.

I encourage you to play with your food!

Such a sweet welcoming plant!

Well, it is if you can get past its 2” long thorns and consider its South African name “nom nom” and it’s delicious raspberry-tasting fruit that are abundant even by the seashore. Others call it Natal plum or Carissa macrocarpa in the Apocynaceae or plumeria family.

Though most plants in the plumeria family can be quite toxic giving it the name the “dogbane family” since they’re particularly poisonous to dogs, there are a few delicious and entirely non-toxic members like this.

I found this growing next to Kal highway where it’s easily recognizable from the long paired thorns, white plumeria like pinwheel flowers, leathery leaves that exude latex when plucked, and bright red plum or cherry sized fruit. If you’re careful to avoid the skin-ripping thorns and get to the deepest red fruits, they taste exactly like raspberries to me if you let them get a little bit soft to the touch after picking. And definitely wash them when they’re growing next to a highway like this.

This is often planted as a security hedge around houses with its long nasty thorns, but many people don’t suspect it has delicious soft edible fruit to go with that tough exterior. This plant is so metal on the outside, but warm powder pop on the inside.

You can find this in almost any coastal or dry tropical area, so keep an eye out for this tasty toughie.

Great native planting day at Āwawamalu (Sandy’s beach) with , , of , , and yesterday where we cleared out tons of invasive plants (even found some to eat like spiny amaranth) and planted many natives like ‘ūlei, milo, naupaka, kou, kamani, ‘ilima, and ‘ōhai (Sesbania tomentosa) to shore up the beach, provide some much needed shade, and restore some of the native beach habitat.

If you go by the west end of Sandy’s and have extra water, give it to these young seedlings so they have a better chance of survival and enjoy the cool new greenery while you’re there. There will be more w**d removal days in June or July if you subscribe to the Parley account. Mahalo for all the volunteers help!

One of my favorite podcasts talking about my favorite subject ethnobotany this week with the great indigenous ethnobotanist and her work with the Squamish First Nations group on plants like this edible Northern Rice Root (Fritillaria camschatcensis) bulb.

If you want to learn all about the issues in the ology of ethbiology, this is a great listen, and I recommend all ‘s other episodes too!

Now we just gotta convince her to have me to talk about grafting (inhertology) and how to make Frankenstein fruit cocktail trees where you have the cacao, sugar cane (or monk fruit), and vanilla all grafted into one chocolate tree! Then you just put the entire tree in a blender and pour it out and you have chocolate!

No it wouldn’t really be that simple, but it would definitely be fun to have them growing all together!

Listen to the podcast here or on any podcatcher under Ologies:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ologies-with-alie-ward/id1278815517?i=1000641003108

Photo reposted from and with all credit to them.

One of the great ethnobotanists of all time, not just for Hawai’i, that everyone should know about is Isabella Aiona Abbott, and this article from gives a good overview of her excellent work from growing up on Maui learning about all the uses of limu/seaw**d from her mom to being the first native Hawaiian woman to earn a PhD at UC Berkeley and becoming the first woman and first person of color to become a full professor , my Alma mater.
https://apple.news/AF6RzdrpYRk2xcbwMSgxUOg

Unfortunately, I didn’t overlap with Dr. Abbott at Stanford, and I was an engineer studying virtual reality at the time, so wouldn’t have had any classes with her, but I did finally get to meet her and learn a bit from her when I post doced in the botany department, though it would take several lifetimes to absorb a portion of her knowledge.

People often ask me what a good book to get started learning about or delving deeper into Hawaiian traditional medicinal and edible plants is, and I always suggest Dr. Abbott’s excellent book La’au Hawai’i: Traditional Hawaiian Uses of Plants as the Bible in that realm so you can absorb a little bit of her extensive knowledge of the endemic, native, and canoe plants used by Hawaiians today and throughout history.

We unfortunately lost Dr. Abbott 13 years ago at the age of 91. She probably lived so long because she ate all the healthy Hawaiian seaw**d and land plants! I feel very lucky to have met this great mind just before her passing.

We should say her name often so we all remember this wonderful native Hawaiian woman who greatly expanded the fields of phycology (study of algae and seaw**ds) and Hawaiian ethnobotany. We can all learn from this great woman!

’au ’auLapa’au **ds

Happy new year all!

Hope you all had a wonderful 2023 filled with lots of delicious fruits, tasty greens, and helpful herbs and 2024 leads to many more wonderful plant discoveries.

After watching the amazing fireworks display that O’ahu has to offer, to ring in the new year I made smoking’ maries (fire roasted chipotle bloody Marie’s) garnished with edible Chinese violet flowers I found growing just outside my house, plus used the Chinese violet greens and flowers as a topping on some kimchi tofu.

Besides being beautiful and tasty, the Chinese violet (Asystasia gangetica) even has been shown in the lab to be effective against asthma so will even help with all the hanging smoke in the air from the abundant fireworks as shown in this paper:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378874103002277?via%3Dihub
This use of Chinese violet was originally inspired by African traditional medicine since despite the name “Chinese” violet, this plant grows all around the tropics.

See what you can learn from a Bloody Mary garnish leading to asthma remedies? And that’s just in the first day of 2024!

So what plants do you want to learn about the rest of the year? Let me know and we’ll learn about them together.

Turning red veined kiwis into tasty raw sugar preserved cheong today. I like these and the related yellow kiwis much better than green kiwis since they have much less of the acid and enzyme that can hurt your tongue in large amounts.

These were not grown in Hawai’i and almost never are since they need much cooler weather than Hawai’i has so you might have to be at 3000’ or higher in Hawai’i to grow kiwis. This is just one of my occasional mainland fruit indulgences when they’re tasty, perfectly ripe, and beautiful like these are. The cheong helps preserve that peak ripe flavor if you can’t eat them all when they’re ripe.

Kiwis are not actually kiwi either, i.e. not from New Zealand! They are originally called Chinese gooseberries or 猕猴桃 (mihóutáo meaning macaque peach) since they are from, you guessed it, China originally. The kiwis or New Zealanders just made up a great growing and marketing plan for them of renaming them after their national bird and selling them to the world as an exotic “New Zealand” fruit!

This is Actinidia chinensis and the green kiwi that came to the US first is Actinidia deliciosa but there are about 50 Actinidia species, many of them with edible fruit and there’s great variety in the tastes and sizes of these from grape to baseball sized as shown in the 2nd photo from wikicommons. There’s even the hardy kiwi A. arguta that grows well in cool areas with snow, but they’re pretty much all vines so grow one on your fence if you’re in a temperate climate so you can enjoy these fruits from your garden that were named after people who were named after a bird!

#猕猴桃