Natty by Nature, Honolulu, HI Videos

Little nipples of deliciousness! As founder of the Nightshade Anti-defamation League, I have to get the word out that chilis are one of my favorite fruit, and these chilis called biquinhos (little beaks) or chupetinhos (little nipples) are one of my favorite chilis. In English they’re often called sweety drop or kiss peppers due to their little protrusion at the tip making them look like a water drop, kiss, beak, or nipple. Despite being the same species as habaneros (Capsicum chinense), these have no heat, but all the beautiful floral aromas and flavors of habaneros, so if you want a sweet pepper that grows well in Hawai’i (bells and many seasoning peppers in the Capsicum annuum species of chilis grow terribly in most wet parts of Hawai’i), grow these tasty little pepper drops instead! You can mix them with true spicy habaneros or ghost chilis to get the exact heat level you want without having to compromise on that beautiful floral taste, which is actually a terpene related to the smell compound in roses, believe it or not. Now you can stop and eat the roses instead of just smelling them! Biquinhos also come in red, orange, white, yellow, and purple (no blue or black, so far!), so I’m trying to plant all of them to have what I call chili skittles with a bowl of all the colors together. Some of the other colors retain more of the heat than red so it’ll be a little bit of Russian roulette eating them. Your heat mileage may vary since within a variety, chilis will produce more of the spicy capsaicin in wetter areas since it’s thought to be anti fungal and the chili’s defense against mold in those wet spots. I made a long video about all the different species of chilis and which grow well in different parts of Hawai’i, so check me out and follow me on YouTube for that. Thanks to my friends at @KaawaloaTrailFarm for growing these so well in Captain Cook! Get their also delicious cacao that we @MadreChocolate help turn into chocolate, and th

How do you get two trees to grow closer and share their fluids? Put them in bondage of course! Asking for their consent first, clearly. This is a technique called approach grafting or inarch grafting where both plants still keep their leaves and their roots and you just shave off a bit of the side bark where you can bend their branches to touch, and then wrap it securely in parafilm or other moisture retaining plastic wrap, plus some good zip ties or even hose clamps as you have the entire trees springing back from being bent together. You can have both trees in the ground next to each other, or one or both trees in a pot. Why in the world would you do this instead of just grafting a small branch from the variety you like? You can come to my grafting and air-layering plant propagation workshop this Thursday and Saturday @FECHOahu with @GrowGoodHI in Mānoa at the FECH garden near the marketplace. But for those of you not on O’ahu, this is one of the easiest graft styles to practice on cause if you screw up, both trees still keep all their leaves and roots so you can just try again till it works. You are also doubling the root system of the plants so they can extract more water and nutrients if they’re in a dry or nutrient pour area. That’s why it was discovered this technique can really help mangosteens, the Queen of fruits which often take 10-15 years to bare fruit, fruit in only 5-7 years since on their own, they have a very slow growing root system. By approach grafting the mangosteen to 1-5 other mangosteens or even other Garcinia like achacha or madruno, you are doubling or even sextupling the root system so they can get more nutrients into their branches and leaves quicker. So if you want to practice grafting without destroying any of your trees, this is the safest method to try, and try again. You can even graft sculptures or living furniture with this method by grafting 4 trees into the legs of a leafy chair or table. The skies the limit! J

Beachside picnic! Here’s a preview from my friend @drisabelcasimiro of some of the great tasting plants we found to eat on coastal foraging hike like haole capers, pink peppercorn, naupaka, cinnamon basil, nopales and prickly pear, nettle-leafed goosefoot, tree heliotrope chips, kiawe, and much more. I lead the foraging hikes every third Sunday of the month on O’ahu with even months in a drier coastal area like this, and odd months in a wetter inland forest so you can come multiple times and see many different plants each time. Every walk ends with a tasty salad we make from all the gathered greens, flowers, and pickles topped with my rich cacao nib balsamic vinagrette that ties it all together. Sign up at the link in my bio to learn about the bounty of edible invasive plants growing all around us that we can eat to help Eat the Aliens and make more room for Hawaiian native plants! #Foraging #WildEdibles #FreeLunch #FreePharmacy #FreeAntidepressants #FreeGymMembership #WildFood #WildGreens

Chomping on some natural salt & vinegar chips, or as I call them, “helio chips”… If you’d like to taste these naturally ocean seasoned chips made from the leaves of the crazy octopus looking tree heliotrope (Heliotropium arboreum) and many other delicious oceanside plants, then come on my Sunday afternoon Honolulu beach foraging tour. You can sign up at http://www.nattybynature.net We’ll enjoy a beautiful view while eating a salad of these, Chinese violets, haole capers, pickled turtle weed, Christmas berry, nettle-leafed goosefoot, and many more wild edibles topped with my famous delectable cacao nibs balsamic vinagrette that’ll have you running to the beach to collect more delicious greens, flowers, and spices! Once you’re comfortable identifying plants like the tree heliotrope, which I’ll give you 4 easy tips on doing, you can quickly and easily turn these into helio chips by rinsing them, tossing in oil, baking for 10 min, flipping them; and roasting 10 min more. Then they’re crispy, deliciously lightly salted from growing at the beach, need no other seasonings, and even your kids will be snapping up these wild sun chips. The leaves have even been found to treat ciguatera toxin found in some “hot” reef fish if you’re spear fishing and accidentally ingest fish like roi. You have the cure growing right on the beach! So not only tasty but super healthy and nutritious. Come learn about all these delicious and curative wild plants on Sunday’s foraging walk, and you can also turn to the sea, or the beach for all your food wants and needs from these invasive plants. #Foraging #Heliotrope #TreeHeliotrope #FreeLunch #ForagedFood #WildGreens #MedicinalPlants #HerbalMedicine #FreePharmacy #EdibleWildPlants #EatTheWeeds #ForagingWalk #ForagingHike #SunChips

Night blooming not so serious… This is how the Latin American native dragonfruit or pitahaya starts as these gorgeous flowers larger than the fruit and only open and receptive at night. Since we don’t have the native bat and moth pollinators from Latin America in Hawai’i, it helps a ton to get more fruit set if the flowers are hand pollinated, especially in pitahaya varieties that aren’t self fertile. With those, it helps to cross the flower pollen or stamens from one plant to the flower stigma of another unrelated plant. This is why your rarely see fruits on all the cacti that people call “night blooming Cereus” on the @PunahouSchool wall, or the wild dragon fruit growing on Tantalus by the lookout– these are all clones of one non self-fertile dragon fruit so they need to be crossed with flowers from somewhere else. I’ve done that in the past, bringing pollen from other pitahaya flowers to those plants, but since they were hard to keep an eye on the developing fruit, I never got the ripe fruit, so wasn’t worth all the effort. Someday I should just graft other varieties to those stands and then they’ll have more variety attached to them. Dragon fruit grafting is fairly simple, but it has very different styles than most other fruits since it’s on soft triangular tissue. The cactus on the Punahou wall is also the Hylocereus genus, not Cereus which is a different cactus that also has showy night blooming fragrant flowers but smaller less tasty fruit, hence why I call it “the night blooming not-so-Cereus cactus.” If you’re a night owl gardener like me and you catch these flowers blooming, spread some of the pollen between plants pretending your a bat, and you’ll get more of the luscious beautiful fruit! Some of the less known varieties like Megalanthus and Sugar Daddy have a great perfume to them, and aren’t like the beautiful but bland ones you get in stores. Stop and smell the flowers at night, like a bat/moth, and you’ll be

Working on a topless mango today, top work grafting tasty huge Rapoza mangos onto this unproductive mango seedling tree at @farmofthefearlessmonkey. Maigee who grows many amazing things like rollinia, huge jackfruit, cacao, eggfruit, galanga, mamey sapote, and chico at her farm, wanted to copy and paste her beloved Rapoza mango onto this tree so we first stumped it at 4’, and then made 3 bark grafts into slits in the outer bark with chisel shaped scion cuttings. This should give a lot of surface area for the cambium or blood vessels of the plant to regrow together within a few months. We sterilized each scion in phytosanitary, wrapped them in parafilm wax tape, and after cutting the chisel end with a sharpened single bevel grafting knife, dipped them in an aspirin solution which literally acts like a painkiller for the plant, blocking its signal that it’s been cut off the mother tree and it’ll last much longer before drying up. Grafting is basically a race against time to get the cambium xylem and phloem vessels (the green layer right under the outer bark) to reconnect before the scion dries out. All the layers of parafilm and plastic bags are to extend the time things stay wet and give the scion more time to reconnect with its new mother tree rootstock. Since I don’t like using all the single use plastic, I try to reuse whenever I can with reversible zip ties and washed bags I can use on the next graft. But grafting is a lot like plant surgery so everything needs to be super clean and sterile, sprayed down with alcohol or diluted bleach. Next step, I’ll have to bring a whole operating theater to the farm! Give grafting a try! It’s super fun when you get the hang of it and you can make your own fruit cocktail trees! Simple idea that just takes some practice to get good at. Start by grafting something easy like citrus, mango, or dragonfruit back onto the same plant so you know there’s no graft incompatibility and then when those take, graft

Oh yeah! Ollas! This isn’t the sound of the kool aid man busting through the walls of your garden to quench your thirst but another pot-bellied creature quenching your plants’ thirst– ollas which is Spanish for pot. You plug the hole in the clay pots with cork or silicone, bury them to the level of the soil, fill them with water, cover the top with a lid and a rock to keep it down in the wind, and as the soil dries out, the water will slowly leak out of the olla into the soil, keep your plants hydrated much longer than even well mulched soil would be. Traditionally they were made from pot-bellied terracotta pots that have a large volume and a small top surface area so the water doesn’t evaporate from the heat, and you can buy systems like that that have feeder tubes to refill the ollas from a bucket or tank off to the side, but they’re pretty easy to cobble together from any unglazed clay pot that water will seep through, as long as you plug any holes at the bottom and cover them with a pot saucer so the water doesn’t evaporate. I even made one from a half coconut shell which isn’t a huge volume and doesn’t seep out as fast as terracotta but does the job keeping the Thai basil, parsley and mint next to it happy. We only planted the basils and blueberry 2 months ago and even in the middle of record breaking temperatures, they have grown so well and so fast due to the constant water from the ollas plus planting them with symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi, mulching super well with cardboard and wood chips, plus quarterly soil and foliar fertilizing. So well in fact that we have to deadhead the lemon basil every day or it’ll burst forth in flowers that can cause it to become bitter. We’ve been eating a lot of lemon basil pesto! We call lemon basil the rabbit of the plant world given how much it wants to reproduce! So if you’re in any hot area or have to leave your plants unwatered for vacation, give ollas a try, and I bet you’ll be saying

Want to know which plants make free french fries and lower your blood sugar and which plants taste like lemons?! Then come on my O’ahu foraging tour this Sunday to learn the difference between this scarlet spiderling with potato tasting roots and young edible leaves vs. desert horse purslane that has tangy leaves you can eat at any stage. We’ll spend 3 hrs learning how to differentiate edible plants from toxic ones, gathering the edible ones, and tasting lots of fun concoctions made from them like haole fries, guajemole (not a typo), hot pink lemonade, carrot tasting leaves, macadamia tasting nuts that are flammable, wild liliko’i, and wild greens that taste like spinach and have seeds you can survive on solely if you’re vegetarian and make a million times better rice crispy treats from Oaxaca that have the Spanish name Joy (“Alegria”) cause they’re so damn tasty! We’ll cap off the afternoon by making a salad with everything we’ve gathered to eat off of leaf plates that we dress with my beloved cacao nib honey mustard balsamic vinaigrette! If you want to spend a refreshing day in the forest learning where to find the true free lunch, free medicine, and free antidepressants, sign up at the link in my bio or at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/urban-foraging-in-honolulus-jungles-with-dr-nat-bletter-tickets-180705965407?ref=estw After this class in a new location with new plants, you too will not only survive, but thrive your way through life! Thanks to @sunnysavageofficial for pioneering another Hawaiian weed we can eat! #ScarletSpiderling #RedSoldierweed #BoerhaviaDiffusa #Nyctaginaceae #FourOclocks #Foraging #ForagedFood #FreeFrenchFries #FreeLunch #FreeMedicine #WildFiod #MedicinalPlants #HerbalMedicine #Ethnobotany #WildCrafting #EatTheWeeds

It’s summertime baby, so time to make summer rolls! And these were made with wild foraged edible purple Chinese violet flowers (Asystasia gangetica) that looked great in contrast with the orange, red, and green of the mango, peppers, lemon basil, mint, spouts, and other filling ingredients. Only hard part of making summer rolls aside from overfilling them like I do, is the rolling technique and getting them not to stick to the cutting board or plate they’re on. Otherwise it’s kind of free form with the filling ingredients. For the sauce we made a super tasty Thai tamarind peanut sauce with basically - 1/4 cup of tamarind paste softened in water - 1 cup peanut butter - 1 cup coconut milk - 2 tbs green or red curry paste - 3 cloves of garlic - 1-2 chilis of your choosing for heat (we used aji limon) Whiz it all up in a jar with an immersion blender, add maybe another 1/4 cup of water to thin it out to the proper consistency. Dip your summer rolls in the peanut sauce and enjoy your beautiful, simple, AND amazingly delicious light cooling meal! If you have any fun spins on summer rolls, favorite sauces, or foraged additions, let me know in the comments. As Jane’s Addiction always sang, “Sum, Sum, Sum, Summertime rollllllllssssss!” #SummerRolls #PeanutSauce #ThaiPeanutSauce #recipe #ForagedFoods #ForagedFlowers #EdibleFlowers #EatTheWeeds #WildFoods #FreeLunch #EasyMeals #SoutheastAsianFood #ThaiFood

Back in Hawai’i and I got one for the cat lovers dedicated to my kitty who is quite sick right now. This is cat’s whiskers, spider wisp, or Cleome gynandra, another great cooked tropical green I learned about from @sunnysavageofficial. It’s native to Africa but found around the tropics and subtropics now. Being on the Cleome family, close cousin of the mustard and brassica family, they have a bit of peppery taste even when cooked, and I really want to try the Malaysian dish rendang maman where they’re braised in coconut milk till crispy. Sounds delish! But maybe best to boil them rather than stir fry since my gf, who can even handle bitter melon, thought these were super bitter just sautéed, while I did not, as I seem to be missing one of the ~30 bitter receptors for things in or near the mustard family. These had no bitterness to me and I love super spicy arugula that’s gone to seed and nobody else likes, however coffee, wine, and beer are all too bitter for me to even have a sip. Cleomes used to be in the caper family till things got moved around, so I like to make capers from par boiling and pickling the long skinny seed capsules, to meet my monthly caper consumption quota. These are super easy to spot, especially when they’re flowering or gone to seed with the wispy flowers that give them their cat whiskers and spider wisp name. The leaves are alternate and palmate compound, a bit like a horse chestnut or octopus tree, but on a tiny herb that only gets to 3’ max. The leaves even when cooked are high in beta carotene, folic acid, vitamins E & C, and calcium, plus being high in antioxidants and antiinflammatories so used traditionally for rheumatoid arthritis among many other conditions like headache, toothache, colic, and scorpion stings. A nice herb if you can find it in disturbed drier areas, but not super common. Though perhaps becoming more common recently. Have you spotted the cat’s whiskers peeking from behind the weeds? Give

The passionfruit that’s called Jamaican liliko’i in Hawai’i but not in Jamaica– Passiflora laurifolia. Unlike the regular yellow or purple hard shelled shiny liliko’i you see more commonly– Passiflora edulis– this species is ripe when it’s more orange, soft when you squeeze it, and has a bit of peach fuzz on the skin. It’s also not sour at all like regular liliko’i, and is more just sweet with that nice passionfruit aroma and a touch of cantaloupe or melony taste. These tend to like cooler higher altitudes so look for them on mountain hikes or grow them if you live above 400’. Plant 2 genetically distinct vines i.e. not 2 cuttings from the same vine, but can be 2 seeds from the same original fruit, so they have something to cross pollinate with. Since there’s been a decline in the natural main pollinator for these in the last decade, carpenter bees, it’s even better if you can make a habitat for the solitary bees in your garden by drilling 1/4” holes in an untreated 4x4 near the vines, as long as your not worried about the bees attacking your wood house as well. If you have time to hand pollinate, you’ll get even more of this delicious and unfortunately rare fruit, but you need to collect pollen from the 5 powdery stamens of one vine and put it on the 3 sticky stigma of the other vine. Don’t just cross 2 flowers on the same vine or your effort will be wasted as these aren’t self fertile. And even if you don’t get any fruit, the flowers smell and look amazing and you can use the dried leaves as a tea to help you fall asleep from the antianxiety compound in them called passiflorine. The raw leaves have slight amounts of cyanide that well nourished humans can handle pretty well, but to be safe, dry the leaves to drive off all the cyanide. 3-5 dried leaves in a cup of hot water steeped 5-10 minutes will chill you right out and help you go to sleep without worrying about all the things you have to do the next day. How many o

Sheeps in a field, not snakes on a plane… And these are sheep you can eat raw since they’re the plant sheep sorrel or Rumex acetosella in the same family as buckwheat. These are pretty easy to spot with sheep head shaped leaves with little ears at the bottom (botany jargon is cuspidate for this shape) that are alternately arranged on a red stem on a low 10-18” herb growing in many temperate areas. The seeds are edible like buckwheat if you can shake off enough when mature into a bag and cook like wild kasha/buckwheat/soba. It has a great subtle tangy taste like wood sorrel (Oxalis) that goes great in salads but don’t have too much if you’re prone to kidney stones since it is sour due to oxalis axis which can form calcium oxalate kidney stones if consumed in large amounts just like with purslane, spinach, or almonds. But in moderation it’s delicious anywhere you’d use greens and since it’s such a unique leaf shape, it’s a great starter foraging plant for the mainland or upland parts of Hawai’i like on Maui and Big Island. Look for the sheep’s in your fields and let me know how they taste! Mahalo @alecsail for the keen camera work! #RumexAcetosella #Polygonaceae #SourGreens #TangyGreens #SheepSorrel #Buckwheat #Foraging #WildFood #FreeLunch #FreeSalad #WildSalad #ForagedGreens

The topping for your cakes is old. It needs to be elder! So if you find berries on your elder tree, you can make an amazing syrup or jam that’s not only antiviral, but is also crazy delicious, like blackberry jam on steroids! Also makes an excellent topping for your elder blow fritters (elderflower pancakes) I showed you how to make in my last vid, if you find flowers and berries around the same time of year, which doesn’t always happen. Definitely want to cook the berries before eating them since they’re mildly toxic raw. Even if you find them dried in a store, still need to cook them to make them edible. Get yourself a foodmill which is super handy for taking seeds out of puréed fruit which you want to do with the elderberries. This kind has interchangeable screens with different sized holes for different sized fruit. Needed the smallest holes to screen out elderflower seeds. These were pretty early season berries so they were fairly tangy and needed a bit of sweetener to make them palatable, but I didn’t add enough sugar (equal weight) to preserve it since I knew I was going to devour this delicious sh*t so fast, it wasn’t going to last either way. I also wanted to make a sugar free version so I used monk fruit. But if you want to can it for long term storage, add an equal weight of sugar and cook it down till it passes the spoon sheet test where it comes off in a sheet rather than in drops. You may need to add some pectin to get it to gel if you don’t food mill out all the pulp, but this was so thick from the pulp and skins, that I didn’t need it. Also you’ll want to sterilize your jars and lids beforehand in boiling water. But this stuff tastes so good on top of elderflower fritters, pancakes, fruit salad, pies, NATella and toast that it’s not going to last in my house more than a week so it went straight into the fridge to be devoured in an instant! Have you eldered today? If not, get on it! #Elderberries #ElderberryJam #Elderbe

Making blow, the natural way… Cause these are elder blow fritters, aka elderflower pancakes. Not sure why only elderflowers held onto the ancient name “blow” for flowers, but don’t matter, cause they’re delicious and nutritious and you should just pick some blow, dip it, fry it, flip it, smother it in elderberry syrup, and pound it! Here’s how: - Find your friendly neighborhood elderflower tree using your friendly neighborhood forager like Nat here, or a friendly app like iNaturalist. - Pick a bunch of large umbel blooms with NO leaves (they’re toxic, so not SO friendly). - Rinse and dry the flower umbels, unless you like all the extra protein for breakfast. - Whip up a pancake batter with flour, eggs, baking powder, & soda water, or your favorite alternatives you can add any loose flowers that fell off to the batter. - Dip your umbels in the batter and make sure to sooon it over the flowers if they’re not fully immersed. - Throw them into a hot oiled skillet. - Cut off and discard any stems that stick out of the fritter as you don’t want to eat many of them. - By that time, the bottom is probably brown so you can flip it over. - Give it another couple minutes on the other side to brown. - Stick it in the oven just set to warm to keep it toasty with all its mateys while you fry the rest. - Travel back in time to collect elderberries in the fall as well and make elderberry syrup to smother the pancakes in, or be lucky enough like I was to find flowers and berries on the same tree at the same time. - Eat, be merry, and be virus free, cause these flowers are some potent virus killers! Try ‘em! You’ll like ‘em! You’ll be frittering away the time dipping every flower you can find in batter and frying ‘em up before you know it! #Elderflower #Fritters #ElderBlow #Elderberry #Sambucus #SambucusCaerulea #SambucusNigra #SambucusCanadensis #SambucusPeruviana #BreakfastOfChampions #Antiviral #FreeLunch #FreeBrunch #FreeBreakfast #Fora

Listen to your elders… Whether they’re flowers or berries! Cause they’re trying to tell you how delicious they are! Back where I first learned foraging In the Bay Area stalking wild blue elderberry or elderflower, which is now classified as Sambucus cerulea and is native to western North America but used to be classed as a subspecies of the European Sambucus nigra. Regardless of the species you find in Europe, Eastern or Western North America, or even South America which all have opposite compound leaves with serrated leaflets, white flower umbels, and black or blue berries, as long as you don’t find the very different toxic red elderberry, they make amazing antiviral flower tea, syrup, flower fritters, cordials, and jam. I’ll do separate videos about making elderberry jam and “elder blow” fritters, and no, it doesn’t involve cocaine. In numerous lab tests, the tea of the flowers and the syrup or jam of the berries has been found to be effective as a preventative against coronavirus like the common cold and COVID. So I take the dried flowers on every plane flight and ask for hot water to make a tea that keeps all the viruses locked up in that tin can with me at bay. However If you do get Covid, stop taking the elder as it can exacerbate the cytokine storms that give them bad symptoms of Covid and switch to other antivirals. You also always want to cook the flowers and berries as they have toxic cyanogenic glycosides when raw and don’t use the leaves or twigs for tea. I’ve even had friends get quite nauseous eating sun dried elderberries that they got at a store which were clearly not cooked enough. So elder can be delicious and a potent medicine when you use the right parts and prepare it properly. So go out and find this tasty nutritious plant. It even grows in Hawai’i in upland wet areas! More videos to come on one of my favorite foraged plants- the elders that we need to listen to. #Sambucus #MedicinalPlants #HerbalMedicine #F

Whipping chocolate good! Haven’t given updates recently since I’ve been traveling on the mainland for a bit but one of the fun things I’ve been doing is a workshop on traditional Mexican foaming agents for cacao & chocolate drinks at the @societyofethnobiology conference at @mobotgarden with my friend Richard. Historically and to this day, the Maya, Olmec, Aztec, Zapotec and other groups in Mexico have been amazing plant chemists finding many regional plants to make a beautiful foam on their cacao and chocolate drinks which they love, usually from the plumeria/milkweed family Apocynaceae or the mamey sapote/chico family Sapotaceae. They are all super regional too with different foaming plants used in each state, sometimes even neighboring towns using completely different plants from each other. So we wanted to test which of the chocolate foaming agents that we could get our hands on in Puebla, Oaxaca, Tabasco, Vera Cruz, Chiapas, and some even in Hawai’i would give the best foam. We did the following combos and individual ingredients: • Cacao solo • Calcified pataxte/Jaguar cacao (Theobroma cacao) solo • Chilate de cacao (corn masa with cacao) from Puebla • Chilate de pataxte (corn masa with jaguar cacao) from Puebla • Chilate de pataxte calcificado(corn masa with calcified jaguar cacao) from Puebla • Bu’pu (plumeria flowers with cacao) from Juchitan, Oaxaca • Pixtle/sapayul/mamey sapote seed (Pouteria zapota) solo • Agua de barranco (corn masa, cacao, and cuajuayote [a Gonolobus species that hasn’t been identified yet]) from Puebla • Tejate (cacao, pixtle, masa, Rosita de cacao flowers which will be discussed on @weirdexplorer YouTube this Sunday) from Ciudad de Oaxaca Which one looked the foamiest to you? Which would you like to try? In precolumbian times these would be foamed by pouring the liquid back and forth between to vessels, as depicted on many Mayan ceramics. Later molinillos or low-tech immersion blenders as I call

Fruta de Miami! Helping my friend @dylanjawless plant out his garden in Miami Beach and in only 5 days we went from design to having 30 trees, herbs, and vines planted in his yard with some nice mulching and wind protection. He’s a great chef so wanted some raw materials to work with for making chocolate, Thai food, Indian food, Mexican food, and beyond! Read on for everything we planted… Get in touch if you want to make your garden lush with fruit trees like this and turn all ornamentals into beautiful & productive plants, even in a small urban garden. Many thanks to the @fruitandspicepark, Pine Island Nursery, Excalibur Nursery, Marc Bud, @bobbybiswas81, @robertisherefruitstandandfarm, @rarefruitmiami and many others for ideas, inspiration, connections, and seedling trees! In only a few days, we found and planted all these plants: vines • passionfruit • giant grenadilla • grapes • black pepper herbs • Galanga • Cardamom • Turmeric • Makrut lime • Lemongrass • Mint • Thai basil • Rosemary • Thyme trees/bushes • Blueberry • Miracle fruit • Dwarf Banana • Curry leaf • Pickering Dwarf mango • Guava • Cacao x6 • Red Jaboticaba • Pitomba • grumichama • pitangatuba/star cherry • Achacha • atemoya • wampi • Pakistani mulberry Next step is we got to graft all the trees so each species/genus has many varieties on it producing fruit most of the year. Stay tuned for updates! #GardenDesign #UrbanGarden #FoodForest #EdibleLandscaping #FruitOrchard #CacaoOrchard #MiamiCacao #MiamiChocolate #FruitTrees #TropicalFruit #FloridaFruit #SubtropicalFruit #FloridaCacao #FloridaChocolate

Is it a nut? Is it bread? Or is it a nut for making bread? Ramon, iximché, breadnut, or Brosimum alicastrum is a fruit native to Central America in the Moraceae (fig, jackfruit, breadfruit, mulberry, Osage orange) family that is/was revered by the Maya for its nut or seed more so than its fruit but both are delicious. The thin red fruit pulp surrounding the gum all sized seed is said to taste citrusy but I found it to be closer to watermelon like its close relative the che fruit. The seed inside which is not technically a nut but is used as such has a similar look and taste to jackfruit seeds which make a great hummus after boiling. Supposedly the roasted ramon seed can have a chocolate taste as well, but that might be a stretch. But this may have been a staple food for many Central American cultures who used the flour from the ramon seed to make flatbreads, hence the name breadnut. It was so important in fact that the trees were almost always found around Mayan archaeological sites and some have suggested you could find hidden Mayan archaeological sites by looking for the spectral signal of ramon trees in satellite images or looking for higher density of the these trees on the ground. The fruit is not super well known today outside of Central America but it’s well worth planting for both the taste fruit and nut. You could even make a breadnut flatbread topped with breadnut fruit jam if that’s not too meta! Have you ever tried ramon or other fruits that tasted like watermelons? This is the 4th plant I’ve tried that tastes watermelony including che and Vietnamese rice paddy herb or rau om. Thanks to the great videography by @dylanjawless ! #MayanCrop #MayanStapleFood #Ramon #Breadnut #TastesLikeWatermelon #Moraceae #Iximché #Iximche #MayanFood #ArchaeologicalClue #ArchaeologicalSite

The viral Roxburgh fig, but what does it really taste like behind all its visual appeal? I peel back the veneer and reveal the true story here for you. The most interesting thing about these figs is probably the color and the cauliflorous nature of this plant, meaning the fruit grows on the trunk of the tree rather than on the ends of the branches like you might be used to from temperate trees like apples and peaches. But cauliflory is pretty common in the tropics as with cacao, starfruit, bilimbi, jackfruit, cannonball fruit, and even some rare temperate plants like redbud that are in bloom across the mainland right now. Also interesting is that the part of the fig you eat is actually an inside out flower that is pollinated by wasps, which is why you’ve never seen a fig flower with petals on a fig tree as you might expect, since the minuscule flowers are hidden inside the figs “fruit” which only really becomes a fruit when the female wasps just escaped from another fig and came to lay eggs inside this fig with their ovipositor. In a few months when the wasp larvae develop, the males hatch first, mate with the females inside the fig, then die, and the impregnated females fly out through the little hole at the end of the fig to pollinate and lay eggs on the next fig. See the amazing documentary “Queen of Trees” about how fig trees have an entire ecosystem around them supported by the animals feeding on the fruit and on the wasps inside the fig! So the rumor/urban legend that fig newtons have but eggs in them is kind of true, though commercial figs have been bred so they don’t necessarily need pollination. More fun fruit from Miami coming up in a bit! #Moraceae #FicusAuriculata #UrbanLegends #Memes #EatingBugs #Entymophagy #Figs #RoxburghFig #FruitAndSpicePark

Remembering all my temperate botany I haven’t done for years while at the @SocietyOfEthnobiology conference in St. Louis, Missouri talking about traditional Mexican chocolate foaming agents. I got a cold from all the mainland travel so was forced to listen to the other talks on zoom, but that meant I got to practice ethnobotany while listening to talks about ethnobotany and gather lots of tasty local edible and antiviral herbs in the park. I found • gallium or cleavers (edible or antiviral) • honeysuckle blossoms (antiviral and tasty!) • creeping Charlie or ground ivy (both) • dead nettle (both) • chickweed, one of my favorite temperate greens that tastes like sprouts • bee balm or Monarda (antiviral or good on fruit salads) • oxalis or sour grass (edible), that looks like clovers but is unrelated • wild chives (edible) • mustard greens (edible) • violet greens (edible) Made all the antivirals into a tea with store bought ginger and turmeric that got me over the cold in just 2 days. Thanks to @sunnysavageofficial and others for refreshing me on Midwest medicinal plants! The rest I made into a delicious stir fry with shiitake mushrooms and topped with rich ajvar (Macedonian roasted red pepper spread) that my copresenter Richard had nicely brought me from Chicago, and a garnish of beautiful purple tinged dead nettle, it was both yummy, fortifying, and gorgeous! Have you had any of these mostly temperate edible and medicinal greens? #Foraging #MidwestGreens #ForagedGreens #WildFood #FreeLunch #MedicinalPlants #HerbalMedicine #LawnAsPharmacopeia #EatTheWeeds #NativeUSplants #BeeBalm