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Are there very many varieties of kale, PaliPatty? My neighbor gave me a keiki kale but I left it in the sun and it dried out and died. Auwe! Everyone seems to have a kale and eat it, I can't think of any time I've eaten it so it hasn't been grown around here.
You should get some at the farmer's market or from a friend and try it. It's very nutritious food, currently a darling of the green juice/smoothie crowd. It is a cabbage that does not form a head, so all the leaves are dark green, and it is dense with chlorophyll and healthy phytochemicals. Cook it as a green. Like other dark greens the taste is on the bitter side, but if you freeze it before cooking it becomes sweeter. I strip out the ribs and steam it. In Ireland it is mixed with mashed potatoes for a dish called Colcannon.
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Originally Posted by PaliPatty
The only kales I know of are curly kale and Tuscan (AKA dinosaur) kale. I think you can use them both in the same way. Really healthy stuff, supposedly.
I like to throw it in soup---sausage/white bean/kale is a favorite.
I regularly see flat leaf, curly leaf, and lacinato (dinosauer) kale at both the supers and the farmers markets.
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Originally Posted by Fredesch
We hope to move to Hawaii and gardening is important to us. My wife grows orchids indoors and went nuts at Kalopa State Park when she saw orchids planted at the base of the trees. Being able to grow lots of varieties of orchids outside is a plus.
I'm an orchid lover, too. On my property are many hapu'u tree ferns, which are perfect hosts for orchids. I buy orchid starts when I see them on sale and plant them in the tree ferns at eye level, where they root and prosper.
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Year round gardening is appealing and being able to get fresh papayas and avocados would be nice. I like the yellow hibiscus and tree ferns.
Hibiscus do really well most places in Hawai'i. I have a row of pink hibiscus that I planted as a kind of privacy fence on one side, and I'm gong to add some yellow ones now as punctuation. A neighbor has a red hibiscus that's over 25' high. You can pretty much just stick them in the ground and then stand back!
The large number of tree ferns on my property, mostly hapu'u but also a couple other kinds, are one of the reasons I fell in love with the place to begin with. That and the 'ōhi'a blossoms overhead, full of chattering honeycreepers.
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The only down side to gardening in Hawaii seems to be the coarse short grass and the constant mowing. I like to skip a week or two mowing and I don't think that is wise in Hawaii.
My advice on grass is to avoid it whenever possible. I didn't move to paradise to shovel snow or to mow lawns.
Those chili peppers are viciously hot and pernicious as well. I've given away several pepper trees and there always seems to be another one show up. Maybe it's time to start cooking with chili peppers. Just picking the buggah's is dangerous.
Yep, they can be dangerous! Be very careful working with them. Years ago when I was a little whippersnapper my dad grew a lot of peppers. My mother canned them and got 2nd degree burns on her hands and arms from processing them.
Oh my gosh. Orchids and mangoes right in the backyard. What's not to like about gardening in Hawaii?
Papayas are even easier. You eat a nice papaya you like, just save the seeds, plant them, and in 7 months to a year you will start getting fruit. A good mature tree, a couple of years old, can produce 60 to 80 pounds of fruit a year.
The thing not to like about gardening in Hawai'i is the bugs and other pests, like slugs and snails. Because there is no cold winter to kill off bugs, they're all on duty year around.
Were the canned peppers tasty, Mickey? Wouldn't they be too hot to eat? I saw a hakulei made from chili peppers once. It was really pretty, but I have no idea how someone could wear them around their head and not end up with burns. Or sweat and have it run down into their eyes!
You don't have to go to all the effort of saving the papaya seeds. I just get a papaya, cut it in half, and toss the seeds where I want a new papaya plant. Mow the extras and let the biggest one grow. I'm surprised the whole island isn't covered with 'em, they are that prolific. Usually, I'll get a papaya from the refrigerator (they are better chilled) and then take it out the back door to pick a lemon from the tree. (I like a squeeze of lemon on a papaya.) Scoop out the papaya seeds and toss them into a vacant spot, add the lemon and eat the papaya and then feed the papaya shell to the bunnies. Who then speed compost it into fertilizer. To put on the papaya tree to make more papayas.
Actually, they aren't really a tree, although I forget what the official folks who name plants call them. They usually look like a tree, being a plant with one stem unless you've whacked it off so it will sprout more limbs and grow more fruits. There is a male and female variety, although most of them seem to be females which is good, so there's more papayas for everyone.
I'll have to find a kale plant somewhere. I suppose there are seeds at the hardware store. Does kale ever go to seed? Is it worth getting an heirloom variety to save the seed for the next generation of kale?
There are a lot of good things about Hawaii gardening, but there are a lot of difficulties with it, too. As noted, mowing the lawn is a year round thing. There are some varieties of grass which are good because they stay short, such as Mondo, but there are also some varieties of grass that are relentless and grow tall enough to eat your garden shed. (Guinea grass, elephant grass, Rezner grass and a few other varieties) There are at least four different varieties of fruit flies, which "sting" the fruit so it rots and falls off the tree/vine. Powdery mildew, rust, nematodes, etc. etc. Then there are things like fireweed which seems to be spreading at a great rate.
However, to make up for all that, the garden never dies. You never have to watch your plants die off from being frozen or covered in snow. That always seems so incredibly sad to me. You've put all that effort into getting your garden growing and thriving and then it just gets killed. In Hawaii, you can have fresh vegetables all year long as well as flowers, too. Yay!
Were the canned peppers tasty, Mickey? Wouldn't they be too hot to eat?
I was only 7 or 8 at the time so I wasn't into hot yet. My dad always ate a much hotter pepper than I can stand even now. I like mild banana peppers on bread and butter for a sandwich, and a little hotter pepper to cook with.
I'll add that fruit flies can be a big problem. We've had them wipe our the papaya one season in our residential neighborhood. The way we fixed it was to get the everyone to pick their current papayas and then to makes sure that no rotten ones were left on the ground. Thereafter, keeping the area free of fallen papaya did the trick. (And that included the cooperative banning of tossing partially eaten papayas in the garden to "grow").
Okay, then officially "plant" the partially eaten papayas in the garden by kicking some dirt over them so there won't be any fruit flies.
We get three different fruit fly baits/attractants from out Ag extension and put those in the garden. There is one fruit fly "bait" where the flies eat the stuff and then die off. That's just on a wad of wool stuck in the bottom of a plastic cup and hung upside down in the garden. There are two soda bottles that have been cut in half, the top inverted and pushed back into the bottle bottom and then hung with the opening pointed down. Each bottle has a different fruit fly attractant in it - they look like a small bit of hard jelly and stick to the side of the bottle - and one bottle has just a few fruit flies in it while the other bottle has loads.
"Dwarf blue curled vates" kale was planted today. Just seeds and planted in three different places so we will see how it does. Also bitter melons, those have some seriously strange looking seeds!
"Dwarf blue curled vates" kale was planted today. Just seeds and planted in three different places so we will see how it does.
Okay. Just beat the bejeebers out of some cabbage loopers that were having a field day with my kale. Handpicked them and squashed them. They never saw it coming. Characteristic leaf holes and cabbage looper poop. Hunted for the green bastards and nailed them.
IMUA!!! (Alrighty a bit of drama here but damn....)
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Be very careful working with them. Years ago when I was a little whippersnapper my dad grew a lot of peppers. My mother canned them and got 2nd degree burns on her hands and arms from processing them. 
