Late-April Off-Grid Jungle Garden Update: Plants Are Poppin' All Around! - GaiaYoga Gardens, Lower Puna, Far East Big Island, Hawai'i - Saturday, April 22, 2023

Warm greetings fellow plant-and-garden lovers! 😁🙏💚✨🤙

I had intended to write this post up and publish it yesterday, but that didn't work in terms of time, so I'm doing it this morning instead! Yesterday I was walking around the property in the lovely late-afternoon sunlight, visiting my various plants and plantings. With the longer days, more intense sun, and copious rain, plants everywhere are exploding with growth, which is wonderful and exciting to see!

Regardless of any challenges that exist by living in an off-grid intentional community in the jungle, I would not trade it for anything! I can live as I want, on my own terms, barefooted and naked, very close to Nature and Earth, giving my sessions, working with my tech loves Arch Linux and Hive, and of course, growing and tending my beloved plants! It's a beautiful life indeed!

For this garden update, I paid a visit to the fenced garden once again, and to my nursery (with a quick jaunt into Ano's nursery), to show you some of the green wonders that they hold. With a place this large, and with so many plants all over this 16-acre food forest, it's a great challenge to choose what to include here! I mostly share about the plants and gardens that I personally tend, though I do also share some photos of interesting and beautiful plant from all over the property.

Let's me show you some of our jungle plant magic!

One of my three big Vana tulsi/clove basil/tree basil - Oncimum gratissimum that is bursting with growth. This one needs a good prunning, but I liked how it looked in the afternoon light! Thus is such a potent medicinal!

The only plant of Moringa - Moringa oleifera that I have. They tend to like a drier climate, but they can do OK here with the proper placement. This is a branch cutting that I had in a pot for months. When I finally planted it, the plant was shocked so much that it lost all its leaves, and the young branches began to die back, to the point where I thought I might lose it. Very thankfully it survived, and is now putting our excellent new growth! Yay! This plant is super nutrient dense!

The largest of two tree tomato/tamarillo - Solanum betaceum is producing it's first flowers! Exciting!

I took this photo because I wanted to show you the radical difference in color between the darkest-purple clone of Krishna tulsi that I have, next to Rama tulsi. They are both the same species, Oncimum tenuiflorum, just different varieties. These are more potent medicinals!

My Kapoor tulsi - Oncimum africanum has gone bananas with growth! They're much larger than when I first planted them. Out here this plant is also called bubblegum tulsi, due to the extraordinary smell when its leaves are touched. This is also a potent medicinal (all the tulsi/holy basil are)!

This is a side-by-side comparison of Kapoor tulsi on the left and Rama tulsi on the right!

My cat's whiskers/Java tea - Orthosiphon aristatus is beginning to flower, and oh what beautiful flowers it has! I got this plant as two cuttings, and these are the first flowers that this one has produced, so it's fantastic to see! This is a medicinal plant with which I have no experience yet, but I will soon!

Some super-juicy tomatoes that I picked as I was walking around the fenced garden taking photos! The plant that produced these was a gift from a woman with whom I work in sessions.

Some self-seeded cherry tomatoes sprawled out over a lava rock. There are several of these growing in a wilder section of the fenced garden.

My pineapple sage - Salvia elegans is getting quite large, and is also finally beginning to produce its gorgeous bright-red flowers! This is another adaptogenic medicinal!

The mother plant of iboza - Tetradenia riparia is also getting to a good size. This is a South-African medicinal with which I don't have experience yet, though I'm excited to experiment! Its leaves smell curiously and strongly like ganja/marijuana when touched.

My creeping/beach chasteberry - Vitex rotundifolia is also producing some of its first flowers! This is yet another medicinal with which I have not worked yet!

The Brazilian/sissoo spinach - Alternanthera sissoo is filling out nicely! This is an edible green that does very well out here, and is super-easy to propagate!

The purple-and-white-variegated bele/edible hibiscus - Abelmoschus manihot 'Aunty Lilly's Pacific Bele' is finally putting out some good growth! We have several varieties of the more usual green form planted everywhere here, as it's another easy edible green, but this is the first more ornamental variation to get planted. So far this is the only plant I have, so I want to propagate it as soon I can! It's lovely, isn't it?

Some more gorgeous purple foliage can be seen right next to the purple bele, with the all-purple variety of cassava/yuca - Manihot esculenta. It's also interesting that, even though they are not closely related, they both share the name 'manihot', one as a generic epitaph and the other in the specific nomenclature.

My little patch of mugwort - Artemisia vulgaris that I planted in the fenced garden is establishing nicely, and is beginning to spread! Mugwort is another wondeful medicinal, used for centuries!

This papaya has continued to lean more and more over the past several months, to the point now that it's almost totally horizontal! It's heavy with fruit!

The pineapple are coming along very nicely indeed! We need to plant lots more of them in one place, as each plant takes about two years to flower and produce fruit, so you need a lot of plants to make it worthwhile! These are white pineapples, which have an absolutely heavenly flavor - even better than the usual yellow pineapples!

All the taro - Colocasia esculenta is growing fantastically well now! This is a very common locally-adapted root crop.

My Cuban cilantro/culantro - Eryngium foetidum that I'm working to re-establish, is doing pretty well too! This amazing plant is good to use in food preparation and it's also another potent medicinal that can be used in teas. Another name for it is spiritweed, alluding to its beneficial effects.

My patchouli - Pogostemon cablin are also starting to put out a lot of excellent growth! This is another important medicinal that I'm planting all over! When it's happy, it seeds itself here and there too!

This is a self-seeded patchouli seedling, growing amongst the Russian comfrey - Symphytum x uplandicum.

A nice view of an all-purple sugarcane - Saccharum officinarum, growing next to wall.

This is a plant that is usually considered a weed here, though I love it all the same! It's bitter melon - Momordica charantia, a delicate though vigorous climber with strongly medicinal properties. The fruit ripen to orange, then they split down the middle, exposing many tan seeds that are covered in a bright-red flesh.

A bitter melon fruit that has already opened. It's quite a striking contrast!

We've been up-potting many edible plants that Brian, a new older gentleman, brought with him. This is a flat of cabbage that we just up-potted, with some beets visible behind them.

Chard next to purple cabbage and purple kale. We've got a lot to plant in the fenced garden now!

These are Japanese/greater burdock - Arctium lappa. This is our first time growing this root crop.

These are several pots of mugwort sitting in my nursery, next to a purple-leafed Alternanthera species (that I have not identified yet) I thought the contest was lovely indeed!

Now on to some tree seedlings that grew from seed! These sre white sapote - Casimiroa edulis. We have several of these wondeful fruit trees planted around the property. These trees also have medicinal properties.

Here you have Bolivian mangosteen - Garcinia humilis on the left, and mamey apple - Mammea americana on the right. These are both fantastic fruit trees with delicious fruit!

This is a pot full of giant lirikoi/passionfruit - Passiflora quadrangularis seedlings. They produce the largest fruit of any passionfruit, attaining the size of melons!

These are some giant lirikoi/passionfruit growing up in a strawberry guava tree. The vines can clump quite high up into tress, making harvesting their melon-sized fruit challenging sometimes! They are super yummy, though!

These are some mountain/Malay apple -
Syzygium malaccense seedlings. The one on the left is the more usual red-fruited variant, while the pot on the right are of the rarer white-fruited variety. It's interesting that the color differemce can be seen even in the seedling stage, with the seedling on the left have a bit of red, while the ones on the right have none.

Here we have abiu - Pouteria caimito on the left, and mamey sapote - Pouteria sapota, two trees in the same genus that produce fruit of radically different taste!

These are my allspice - Pimenta dioica that I've been up-potting for years, and which really need to get in the ground now! They are medicinal, and the leaves can be made into tea, and of course they can be grown for the spice, allspice!

These are my nutmeg - Myristica fragrans trees that I grew from seed a few years ago! They also have to get in the ground soon!

These are saplings of a so-far unidentified species of cinnamon - Cinnamomum. I want to plant them so they can develop fully, that way I can ID them and use them to make cinnamon!

These are some Brazilian cherry - Eugenia brasiliensis that I grew from seed. The red fruit both look and taste like cherries!

Some cashew - Anacardium occidentale saplings that I grew from seed. I want to get these in the ground too! They produce both a curious fruit and the more well-known cashew nuts!

This is a rare nut tree endemic to the Philippines, the pili-pili nut - Canarium ovatum. The nut is more fat-rich than macadamia nuts! I can't wait to plant these in the ground!

This is an even rarer fruit tree, in the Annonaceae family, Porcelia nitidifolia, from Perú. This is the only one I have, so getting this tree in the ground and propagating it are a very high priority! This tree seems very well adapted here, so km super excited to plant it, which we are doing today, for Ano's birthday! Ano is the founder of GaiaYoga Gardens.

This gorgeous variety of New Guinea Impatiens - Impatiens hawkeri does very well here indeed! It is vigorous, long-lived, lovely, and easily propagated!

This is a dwarf Anthurium hybrid, Anthurium 'Princess Alexia Amor' (Andreanum Group), that is also very well adapted here!

My plants of curry tree - Murraya koenigii are beginning to flower too! The leaves have such an interesting smell! The dark-purple fruit are edible. This is another very well-adapted species here!

I took this photo because of the fantastic contrast between these three plants! The dark-purple plant is purple waffle plant - Strobilanthes alternata, the plant on the right is Sanchezia speciosa, and the one of the left is a so-far unidentified Ayahuasca relative from South America that came by way of a botanist.

The last plant to share today is this glorious variety of tribal-mask Alocasia/tiger taro - Alocasia longiloba that has been growing next to the Landing in a large ceramic pot for years. I finally identified it, and begun to propagate it! It produces small bulbils along the stem of the mother plant, which are easily detached and planted.

This is one that propagated itself, and is growing near the parent plant.

And this is a flat of young plants of this amazing plant, that are doing quite well indeed! You can see some gotu kola - Centella asiatica growing in some of the pots too! It pops up everywhere!

That brings me to the end of another Off-Grid Jungle Garden Update! I hope that this update has been interesting, engaging, and maybe even inspiring! Until next time! 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙

All photos were taken with my Motorola G Power Android Phone.

Thank you all so much who have helped me get to where I am today, and allowing me to share more of the beauty and magic from my life and my world with you, and for your continuous appreciation and support! I am truly deeply grateful! 😁🙏💚✨🤙

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