Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening: The Secret to Growing Piles of Food in the Sunshine State by David The Good

Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening: The Secret to Growing Piles of Food in the Sunshine State by David The Good

Author:David The Good [Good, David The]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gardening
Publisher: Florida Food Forests, Inc.
Published: 2015-08-31T17:00:00+00:00


My wife uses them interchangeably with cranberries in her sauce making… and the results are delicious. (Check out Rachel’s faux cranberry sauce recipe here.) The light cycle effects when these start their blooming, so keep that in mind. You’ll have lovely flower-less bushes until sometime in October, then the blooms arrive in profusion. Pick regularly to keep the plant going, which it will until frost.

Another great thing about these plants: the leaves are delectable. They have a lemony-tart and satisfying flavor that’s perfect in Caesar salads. Try it—they’ll blow your mind.

You can start these guys from seed in the spring, then transplant out—or simply direct seed after the last frost date. They’ll grow like crazy with a little care. We’re talking 6 feet! Finding seeds may be difficult, but search anyhow. They function as both a salad green and a tart fruit. Very worth growing.

Moringa

Moringa has been called the “Miracle Tree,” and for good reason.

It has an incredible assortment of attributes in its favor. From cleaning water to fending off malnutrition, it’s a tree of many uses. Fast-growing, easy to grow and containing complete proteins in its leaves, the Moringa is a must-have for Florida survival gardeners. If you’re stuck living off rice and MREs, you’re going to want more nutrition—and that’s where this tree shines. The leaves are absolutely loaded with nutrients, brought up from deep down by the tree’s questing roots. The tree has been named the “most nutritious on earth.” One of these days we’ll have to put it in the ring with kale for a death match. Moringa is also anti-bacterial and anti-fungal, as well as being a really fast producer of biomass. Its pods are often called “drumsticks” and feature prominently in some regions of South Asia, however, it’s sometimes hard to get them to set pods in regions with frost.

From seed, the Moringa will easily hit 10 feet during its first year of growth. In the tropics the tree apparently reaches 60 feet, though the wood is very weak. Some of my moringa trees blew through 20 feet in their second year.

But tall trees aren’t really what you want. You want trees that are easy to harvest. To get that, simply cut the trunks at about 4 feet and let them shoot up lots of tender new growth. The compound leaf stems are easy to break off so the tiny leaflets can be dropped into soups, sprinkled into salads or dried/frozen for future use. After learning of its incredible nutrient profile, I’ve started putting the leaves into everything from smoothies to scrambled eggs. Bonus: they taste good when cooked.

The trouble with this tree, however, is that it’s a tropical all the way. It quits growing when the weather gets cool—and freezes to the ground during a frost. That means those of us in the central to northern part of the state won’t get 60 foot trees that collapse onto our roofs during thunderstorms. Fortunately, the Moringa is hard to kill and in spring will generally come back from its roots.



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