First Pawpaw Harvest

All right, PAPAYA.  I just like the word 'pawpaw', it's South Pacific equivalent. My tropical cookbook from Fiji has great recipes: pawpaw slaw, pawpaw seed salad dressing, lote, mousse, fresh green pawpaw pickle, and mango pawpaw punch, to name a few.  There are some creative uses for papaya and I was thrilled to harvest the first ripe fruits today.   Below is a photo of the tree, growing in the front patio, from what may have been sunrise papaya seeds from Guatemala, or not. 

They are huge and have been ripening fast.

Pablo stood on the ladder and used the new weapon we created:  a strong kitchen knife well-taped to an old squeegee pole...not too tall but effective for now. Look how beautiful this fruit is!

Sorry, I forgot to take a photo of one cut into thirds because it was so sweet and delicious it just didn't occur to me!  We got caught up in the moment! 


This week I have to get back out into the yard and finish cleaning up the garden areas.  The cilantro below is flowering and will soon go to seed. Must stay on top of that.  My project these past few weeks has been to add dirt to the perimeter of the yard where we try to grow things.  The dirt washes away and all that's left is a shallow bed of tierra and lots of limestone rocks.  The plants are very happy with their new beautiful black dirt.

I think tiny flowers are interesting, they are so intricate and delicate.  These are the cilantro flowers. I'll try to get some closeups and maybe post them another day with the rosemary flowers from last week. 



Ropero Closers

What the heck?

It's a ropero closer, Mokito!

When a friend of mine moved away from Mérida, she gifted me the above ropero (armoire).  She gave me keys for it, but not the actual keys for THIS ropero.  One side is locked shut, and the other side doesn't close at all.  It swings open.  I thought I'd use my macrame skills to create a ropero closer.  The first one I made fell apart before I got the photo taken, and the dreamweaver replacement below might have been made after too long a day of macrame-ing..  I might have to change it again. 

Here is a photo of the second one I made.  Merida Mikey loved my prototype and said his ropero doors swing open all the time too. So I made one for him and gave it to him this morning.  He sent me this photo of it on its new home. 

The first macrame project I started recently was new window pulls for the tall windows in the front living rooms.  The beads are those we found at the elderly Lenca Indian woman's home in La Calma, Honduras, and later painted.  When I first moved in I made pulls using plastic beads and thin wire and they didn't pass the test of time.  That inspired me to make new solid pulls out of strong jute-like material.  Below is an up close shot of the simple swirl knot and the colorful beads. 

Here's a pic of  the window wearing it's new ornament.  After making two of these the ropero closer idea occurred to me.  There are still more beads, so I think I will replace the tall ceiling fan extender pulls....in the same style. 

The First Edible Dragonfruit

Here it is! The first pitaya we harvested from the plant growing over the wall from the neighbor's property. I'm not sure what kind of gardening this would be....YOU plant, I reap??? We have a tall ladder thanks to the cable guys, so Pablo climbed up and cut back the vine that was choking this poor pitaya plant.  It was so happy it gave us one fruit for starters.  It was delicious!

The fruit above was harvested(big harvest) on the 1st of September. A few flowers opened up over the first week of September.  I know I posted these kinds of photos last year when we had a few flowers....but this freak of nature that opens up for one night, then creates a wonderful fruit at its base amazes me.

This information quoted below I copied from a website called Foodlywise.  It descibes the health benefits of dragonfruit, more commonly known here as pitaya.  It's written in poor English, but the info is worthwhile.

"One special health benefit of dragon fruit which has been verified by the authors of this web site is the special dragon fruit health benefit that dragon fruit helps control levels of glucose blood sugar levels in type 2 diabetes (and type 1 diabetes by some reports). This is one of the health benefits of pitaya fruit in addition to the pitaya fruit nutrient profile being full of dietary fiber and Vitamin C. The pitaya nutritional benefits even include a high level of pitaya fruit antioxidant levels. All these great dragon fruit nutrients make fresh dragon fruit or dried dragon fruit both great additions to a healthy diet - and you get the nutrition benefits of dragon fruit from the dried or fresh fruit just as well."


Here is the pitaya cactus reaching over to live on our side of the wall.  It had 13 flowers ready to open.  I kept my eye on them.  In this photo, they still have a couple days....

Voila!  What a great site to wake up to. They stay open for a day so the bees can do their thing, then they just disintegrate and fall off, leaving behind the green base which becomes your tasty dragonfruit.  I was surprised how tasty the fruit is.  Usually I stay away from food with little seeds, they all get stuck in my teeth and that annoys me.  But the flavor was light and sweet.  It is tasty when juiced, but it turns a funny gray color that isn't too appetizing. It would be nice with vodka. 

Papaya

This is our papaya tree.

It sits in the front Zen garden (and cat box).

 

I planted it from seed approximately a year and a half ago.  We have finally harvested two fruits!  The first one I blended with vanilla ice cream, a banana and milk.  It was delicious.  The second one we ate like fruit, though it tasted more like candy.  The third fruit is almost ripe.

This was grown from a local Yucatecan papaya seed.  It is not a seedless variety and I have no idea why it has no seeds.  It was delicious though, and the tree is still healthy and sprouting new fruits. 

Since the early 70's when I first started traveling through Mexico, I tried to like papaya. To me it tasted like my dad's stinky feet. Although I have never chewed on my dad's feet, my brothers used to have sniffing contests.....and I was put off papaya (among other things) forever.  Or so I thought.  I spent over 20 years in Hawaii and came to love papaya.   The best Hawaiian variety is called strawberry papaya; it's the cream of the crop! It's colorful and sweet like the papaya pictured above and not at all reminiscent of my dad.  I planted two batches of papaya seed at the same time last year, but unfortunately the strawberry papaya seeds I brought from Guatemala didn't fruit.  Or did they?