I planted cashew nut seeds last year. Four of them grew but two died this spring. Of the two still hanging in - One is blooming!!! It's supposed to take about five years from seed to fruit so this one is very precocious. I'm not holding my breath that I wull actually get fruit (and nuts) this year but this is very exciting.
Today I visited a local doctor because I fell and bumped my head. He is also a gardener and, among other things, we talked about the need to expand the number of food plants we have here. He was very surprised to hear that I have a cashew nut tree growing here. I think he will be a good gardening friend.
My dragonfruit cuttings are also doing very well.
Too bad I bumped my head and smashed my hip. I'm bruised, but not broken. I just wish I could get out and play in our lovely weather but I can hardly walk. I'm certain I'll achieve a full recovery but, being me, I want it yesterday.
katiebear
Cashew nut tree blooming
Cashews are an "amusing" fruit --looks like a quince or an apple, with a cashew stuck to the end. You can't eat the nut without processing them first. But you can eat the fruit.
Be well-er, Katiebear...
Yes, the fruit is very good....called Maranon in Costa Rica...REALLY good in a blender with lots of ice and a good Rum!!!
Amazing how the addition of alcohol enhances so many fruits.
The process for preparing cashew nuts is so tedious I don't even bother. But I do like to eat the cashew apples, although they're not to everyone's taste. I have both red and yellow varieties which produce a lot of fruit (for which the many millions of local flying foxes are very appreciative, especially before they'ved properly ripened). They spread the seed/nuts around so they're coming up everywhere. The cashew is considered an environmental weed here.
These are the young nuts before the peduncles (Cashew apples) have fully swollen.
Cashew apple close to ripe.
Beautiful pictures. Thank you for posting them.
katie
So now that the Cashew Apple is ripe, how much rum goes with it!
Hate to shatter dreams, but I'm a non-drinker. But being tough, I have my cashew apples straight! ;O)
....it's all 'to taste', Dave... (grin)
Si , my maron tree has young fruits, first time. Something that is amazing about the maron is that the fruit is the nut and the part that people use for eating or preparing juice is the fruit stem (pedicel) also called penduncles. People normally considered this last part the fruit. Here you can find also in yellow color or orange color. No difference in the flavor. So AlohaHoya have you been in Costa Rica? And agree with tropicbreeze anout preparing cashew nuts!
Bignonia....yes, and we love CR. We sailed down the coast of C. America (down to S.A) and stayed for about 3 months in Isla Perdida... We left the boat, took the bus to San Jose, rented a car and drove to Mt. Arenal (yes, and we saw it erupt)...then drove up to an enormous lake district in the north and then down to Monteverde (we stayed in the Rangers quarters in the park...and yes, we saw a Quetzal. Then we sailed down to a big bay in the south before going on (gosh, the name escapes me). I may have all these names wrong... The first port we went into was a tiny town called Golfito (I think) where I ate my first Maranon...and fell in love with CR.
Our favorite dinner fun dinner is Black Beans and Rice...Plato Completo!!!
This was 15 years ago...or more....
AlohaHoya, this last week I stayed near Golfito. The Bay maybe was Drake Bay near Cano Island or Golfo Dulce in Golfito. Sailing around the pacific coast of Costa Rica might be every interesting, there are a lot of bay, Golf, cape etc. The last month my husband went to volunteer to Coco's Island. This island is too far away from our mainland, but it is territory of Costa Rica. It tooked 2 days and half to arrive there by ferry. There are a lot of stories about pirates and treasures hidden in that island. Now the real value of that piece of land is the high biodiversity (sea life). It is a Costa Rica National Park and a Natural world heritage by UNESCO.
Yes our typical disk rice and beans called gallo pinto
My family wants to move to Golifto, I worked in that area long time ago, plants are my passion and that area is one of the more diverse in Costa Rica. Because always rains you can grow anything, it is the typical tropical rain forest, but not as humide as our east coast (Caribe). Heliconias, ferns, tree ferns, vine, trees, Calatheas, begonias, Araceae, orchids is an eden. Where I live has dry and wet season. Almost 5 months with no rain. Too dificult for me to maintain my garden in a good shape. Well I have to go, it is a lot of fun taking about the tropics.
... add rhum to taste! I'm with you, Carol. Now that's what I call a recipe worth keeping.
Everything tastes good prepared that way: my grandmother (an ansolute non-drinker) would soak plums we harvested in our plum trees, wash them, fill a large jar (2 gallons or more) with the plums, add granulated sugar to fill every void and added rhum until it filled the jar to the top. She would cover the jar and let them sit in the dark until Christmas where the fruit would be served over ice cream and the liquid would be served in little shot glasses as a liqueur. Superb!
Take care, all.
Sylvain.
My twp cashew nut trees are putting out new growth. The flowers on the one have kind of dried up. It's only a year old so I'm not worried about getting fruit this year.
My friend Rafael the fisherman has brought me about a ton of seaweed (really) a truckload at a time. Tony and I spread around a let it dry out a bit, then put it through the shredder. I have added EM to some and gotten bokashi in a week. Some we are composting with fish (in closed containers but I'll note that the carbon in the seaweed "cooks" the fish scraps so rapidly that we are not bothered by flies - I'm amazed). The rest is being composted in a big pile.
The seaweed season is almost over and Rafael is now going to start bringing me dead palm trunks. When they are really dry we can pull them apart and put them through the shredder, making what I call "pseudo-coir." I think a mix of the pseudo-coir and the bokashi'd seaweed (I'm making up my own language here) will work well in my home made earthboxes.
My dragon fruit are growing well and I have a forest of little papayas from seeds sent by Jenny (Braveheartsmom).
And I'm almost completely recovered from the bad fall that I took in early April. Once again Tony has been a Godsend. Here six mornings a week always calm and working at a steady pace. I've been able to work with him some in the last week and that is the best sign of being almost fully recovered. His daughter is having her First Communion Tomorrow. She was born the first year that Tony worked for me.
katiebear
One of my cashews is in full bloom now, a bit earlier than usual. It put out some flowers on one branch only about 6 weeks ago but they came to nothing. The full flowering usually starts sort of June/July, just before the mangoes. Might have been the earlier onset of the dry season this year that triggered it.
Would love to be able to get that amount of seaweed, but there's never any around on our beaches.
Their flowers are complete, there's no separate male/female trees.