A Lil Green Update

So, it’s been a while since I talked about my garden or plants in general. That’s because I was mostly at school, but I felt okay, cause the entire family is garden-oriented, so I knew the crops would be in safe hands. There was a lot of harvest that I didn’t capture till it was too late, but I managed to take some just at their blossoming period, which is okay, I guess. But, I’m proud of what we’ve been able to achieve, especially since we didn’t have the best of planting seasons in my region.

I’ll start with the eggplants. Contrary to last season’s harvest, this time wasn’t the most bountiful. Also, the eggplants fruited a little paler than before. We had the wood ash sprinkled it on it which we hoped would neutralise the soil’s acidity and give a bit more colour to the eggplants, but that didn’t exactly work out. However, it was better than nothing. And we had enough eggplants to use for our stews and sauces.

Next one is our star baby, which we call our accidental sugar apple. The name came about because there was a bit of a mix up. So, my mom wanted to get a different specie of our sour sop seeds because the ones we had were of the extra sweet variety, and she wanted a bit of sourness for the next tree. She negotiated with a reputable fruit seed vendor and went to pick the seeds up at night. I don’t know where the mix up came from, but we ended up planting sugar apple seeds instead of sour sop seeds.

We aren’t used to it, so when it started bearing fruits, we just thought it was a weird specie of sour sop, especially since it refused to get any bigger. Eventually, we did our research and got to find out about sugar apple. The family immediately fell in love with it, cause it has a taste similar to the extra sweet sour sop, but with a less fibre kind of taste.

It’s got a lot of seeds to and so, we replanted in a few more places around the house. It doesn’t fruit too much and it’s a bit of a calm, kind of plant. It could get spoiled if you’re not careful, so we watch out for the colour of the leaves and the colour change in the fruit to determine. No touching unless you're harvesting cause Mom said it could stunt its growth. Superstitious, maybe. But we’re not about to take chances.

Next we move over to our plantains. The heavy rains didn’t do a lot of good to it, but the harvest wasn’t bad. By the time I got home, the family had already consumed two large bunches of plantains. And these were the last that were okay to be eaten. Looking at the pictures, you’d see that they are unripe. But there are a lot of delicious dishes we make with unripe plantain, especially for Dad who needs the iron and as limited sweet food as possible.

One thing about plantains is that they ripen very quickly and all at once, so we soon had a bunch of very ripe plantains in our hands to consume before they got bad. We gave some to the neighbours and ate the rest.

And then, we get to the bananas. This is our star girl of the season. The bananas did very well this season and it was month after month of enjoyment. A truly lovely experience because I thought the heavy rains would affect them as well, but they were resilient and did okay in giving back all the love we poured into them.

This is the part where I miss home because I’m back in college and the availability of food stuff is now a problem. It’s funny how growing your own crops make you oblivious to their market price, so I have my mouth open a lot of times when I see how much things that are so bountiful at home cost in the market. One of the main reasons why home gardening has its appeal is because of this.

I regret not taking pictures of our turmeric. That was the real winner, this season. They filled the biggest baskets at home and we used them for nearly all our foods. This season’s turmeric were especially flavourful and I can’t wait for the next planting season to plant them again, since they yielded so much. The only thing I have from our turmeric harvest are the soaps Mom made out of them which have and are still serving me a great deal.

Till next time, lovely gardeners and garden-enthusiasts. Have a wonderful season ahead!