🍷 We discovered that Barbados Cherry (Malpighia glabra) we introduced earlier makes an excellent fresh-squeezed juice!
🍷 Barbados Cherry is a vigorous grower that starts producing right away, and by the second year you have so much fruit that you don't know what to do with it - you can eat only so much fruit out of hand!
🍷 Here is our Top Tropicals Signature Recipe -
🍒Barbados Cherry Juice:
1. Collect berries and rinse them with cold water
2. In a bowl, press the fruit with a potato musher, spoon or cup, and drain the fresh juice into a cup - put the juice aside.
3. Add a few spoons of sugar to the mush (optional), push-mush some more to extract more juice.
4. Add to the remaining mushed pulp some hot boiled water, stir, and let sit for a couple of hours.
5. Drain the liquid through a colander (you may add a little extra water in the process of extracting more tasty pulp out) and add to the fresh juice you made earlier. 6. Refrigerate for an hour, then serve in a clear glass to enjoy the color.
🎀 The Barbados Cherry juice made this way tastes very similar to Guava juice. It is very aromatic and tasty, and has a beautiful Baby-pink color!
❤️ Enjoy and stay healthy!
🍊 Remember Barbados Cherry fruit contains 65 times more of vitamin C than an orange!
Four must-have herbal edibles for your instant Food
Forest
Q: What attractive and useful edibles or herbs
can I grow in my yard landscape without needing dedicated garden beds?
A: When we think of an "herb garden," parsley and
chives often come to mind -plants that aren't particularly showy and
typically require a dedicated vegetable garden, space, and regular maintenance.
However, creating a food forest in your yard doesn't have to be a complex
project. Useful edibles and medicinal herbs can also be exotic and beautiful,
enhancing the charm of your landscape. Here are some examples of unusual tropical edibles that are not only stunning ornamentals but also bring
delicious goodness to your kitchen.
1. For drinks: Jamaica Tea flower - Karkade
Hibiscus
Hibiscus
sabdariffa - Flor de Jamaica, Karkade Sorrel, Roselle, or Jamaica Tea flower
(Karkade Tea) - yes, many hibiscus species are edible!
- Flowers of Roselle hibiscus are used to make a tea "Agua de Flor de
Jamaica". To be exact, those are flower bracts around flowers and seed pods.
- Medical studies show that it lowers blood pressure and has diuretic
effects.
- The pleasant flavor is similar to a cranberry juice and it's so good, you
may not even want to add any sugar. We make this cold tea every day -
perfect for hot summer.
- Karkade Hibiscus grows into a large bush within just one season from
seed! Lots of flowers to harvest will last you the whole winter. It can be
treated as annual in cooler areas due to its fast growth and same-year harvest.
Thrives in full sun.
- Short video:
Lippia dulcis
- Aztec Sweet Herb, Sweetleaf is a wonderful fragrant groundcover.
- Fragrant Mexican herb with incredibly sweet and aromatic leaves.
- The fresh leaves can be eaten from the plant like candy or tossed into
fruit salads for an unusual addition, or used for making a healing tea.
- It has been used since the time of the Aztecs for coughs and colds.
- The sweetness tastes great, and can be used by diabetic patients. We add
this herb to Karkade or Mint tea as a sweetener, instead of sugar or
honey.
- Grows like a ground cover, in shade or semi-shade, great perennial
container plant.
3. For salads and stews: Longevity Spinach, or
Cholesterol spinach
Gynura
procubens - Longevity Spinach, or Cholesterol spinach is a perennial spinach, and
once you plant it, you have it for many years, and can grow many more easily
from cuttings!
- Longevity Spinach is one of the Superfoods, and there are many claims
that it lowers cholesterol.
- We use Longevity Spinach in our cooking all the time and so far we are
all alive, so it works! :)
- Longevity spinach can be eaten raw in salads or cooked wherever you would
use a regular spinach.
- Grows as a large spreading herbal bush, in full sun.
- See some recipes with more pictures
4. For meat wraps: Vietnamese Pepper or Wild Betel
Leaf
Piper
sarmentosum - Vietnamese Pepper, Lalot, Wild Betel Leaf, Chaa-plu adds wonderful
peppery flavor to meats and is great for wrapping meats and cooking in the oven,
on a stove or grill. We use it all the time, wrapping ground beef of turkey
and putting wraps on a grill or on a frying pan, very easy!
- Vietnamese Pepper leaves are eaten raw in salads or cooked with other
greens or dishes.
- The leaves are used as food wraps in Vietnam. It is used medicinally in
India and SE Asia.
- It is also chewed with Betel Nut as a tonic and medicine, very similar to
Betel Leaf (Piper Betel) which is very popular tonic in Indian culture.
- Vietnamese Pepper grows as a vining herbaceous shrub or ground cover, in
both sun or shade, and spreads with runners so you can have plenty if you
want to have more. Can be grown in container and indoors, too.
- Check out recipes of meat wraps for grilling
How to choose the right flowering trees for your landscape
Phymosia umbellata - Cranberry Malva Aparasolada
🔍 How to choose the right flowering trees for your landscape
🌷 There are so many flowering and blooming trees to choose from, where should you start? Well there are plenty of questions to ask and several answers for each.
🌷 Are you looking for trees that bloom in winter or are you looking for summer flowering trees? Maybe you are looking for the fastest growing shade tree. The choices are endless. Depending on your answer, there may be several trees that meet your needs.
🌷 One good place for beginners and even seasoned growers is to use the search features in our Top Tropicals Plant Encyclopedia. Here you can search by name, size, growth habit, light requirements, watering needs, color of bloom and cold hardiness.
🍀 Vines, by their nature, are almost always climbers. There are also some that make good hanging flower vines for your baskets hanging under trees or on the front porch.
🍀 Some vines are also in the fruit category. The Passiflora is a beautiful perennial climbing vine that has very showy flowers and then a fruit that can be eaten off the vine or made into a wonderful juice. It would make a nice fast growing vine for a fence or trellis. The Barbados Gooseberry also falls into this category.
🍀 One of the most popular fast growing flowering vines is the trumpet vine - Allamanda. It is an evergreen vine and will take some cold without damage, although it is still considered a tropical flowering vine. It can be grown as a large shrub or small tree and makes a beautiful focal point in the landscape.
🍀 If you have some large trees in your yard, a great climbing vine for shade that also produces a usable product is the Pepper family. Yes, they flower and yes some of them produce pepper that you can use in your kitchen. If you like to know what is in your food, grow your own!
🍀 Another perennial, fast growing and evergreen climbing vine is the Monstera. Monsteras will climb the side of a large tree and can produce an edible fruit after a few years. It is very tropical looking, but will take some cool nights as it is protected under the canopy of the tree.
