Aloha friends!

That baby pineapple I showed you awhile back is all grown up! Here’s what it looked like just before I picked it....

It was turning yellow and had a lovely pineapple scent. That’s how you know it’s ready to harvest. Behind it you can see my neighbor’s mango tree...another yummy tropical fruit.

What it lacked in size was made up with delicious flavor! It was sweet and juicy.
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When I cut the pineapple, I saved the top. I removed the flesh and planted it in a pot. I have a few pineapples started. I just need to decide where to plant them in the yard. For now they’re all just hanging out together on our lanai, enjoying the sunshine.

Next time you buy a pineapple from the store, save the top and plant your own little pineapple. They’re fun and easy to grow. You can even keep them as houseplants, if you place them near a sunny window they’ll be happy.
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Thanks for reading my diary!
Wishing you aloha!

Aloha friends!

Take a look at this...my pineapple has a little baby growing! I’m pretty excited! To understand my excitement, I should tell you where this pineapple got it’s start. It was part of a fruit basket from a good friend. She gave it to us as a housewarming gift when we first moved to Kauai. After we enjoyed the fruit, we planted the top. It lived on our lanai at the condo for 6 months until we bought our home. Shortly there after my husband planted in in our backyard. It’s been happily growing in our yard now for a year. I was delighted to walk out one morning to see it blooming!

Once a pineapple blooms, I was told it takes 5 to 6 months to mature into a full size fruit. So, between July and August we should have our own pineapple. I’ll keep you posted to it’s progress.

Aloha!

Aloha friends,

​We have had a bumper crop of tomatoes! I know that sounds strange for January. What’s stranger is that we have just two tomato plants and both sprouted out of our compost pile...I kid you not. Once we realized what they were we carefully transplanted the seedlings into a large container. This was at the end of September....

Here are the same two tomato plants one month later...

They grew like crazy! The container is called an EarthBox, it’s self watering and has a reservoir that holds about 4 gallons of water. It takes a medium bag of soil and I added some granular fertilizer to it. Tomatoes seem to really like it. That and the warm Kauai sunshine.

As the tomatoes grew and produced fruit, I could tell one was a Roma (I’d been buying them at Walmart in the plastic clam shell) and the other looked like a tomato I had grown last spring that was a burgundy color only this new one was red.

Pretty soon we had tons of tomatoes! I had already given some to our neighbors and we still had more than we could eat. So, I made fermented salsa. It’s delicious, super easy and good for your belly. Here’s the recipe...

4 Cups Chopped Ripe Juicy Tomatoes
2 Tablespoons Chopped Sweet Maui Onion
2 Tablespoons Chopped Bellpepper
1 Tablespoon Chopped Cilantro
1 Tablespoon Finely Chopped Jalapeño Pepper
1 teaspoon Salt

Mix and taste it. It should taste salty but, not too salty. Put the salsa into glass jars. Press it down a bit so that the tomatoey juices cover the salsa. Cover loosely and put in a dark corner of your kitchen. Check the salsa a couple times daily just to make sure the salsa remains covered with the juices. Taste it after 24 hours to see if you like the flavor. If you like it, go ahead and cap your jars and place your salsa in the fridge. If you want it more tangy, leave it to ferment longer. I fermented my salsa about 36 hours. You can ferment it up to 5 days. The salsa will keep in your fridge up to 6 months. I made ours 3 weeks ago and it’s nearly gone. It would never last 6 months in my fridge!

Here we are now the end of January and my tomato plants are still going strong. They produced more than 120 tomatoes, I stopped counting. It’s been fun and we’ve really enjoyed the flavor of these tomatoes. I saved some seeds and already have two plants started to replace these guys once they die off. No surprise they sprouted easily.

Thanks so so much for reading my diary!

Aloha All!

A lot has happened since my last post. After six months of looking, I'm excited to tell you that we finally bought a house! It's an older, plantation style home with lots of vintage charm. The home had just one owner previous to us. There were very few renovations done, it's nearly all original and we love it!

With much of the house in it's original condition there are some projects that need to be done. The peeling lead paint in the girls' room had to be addressed immediately. And since we were dealing with paint why not pull up the carpet as well? Goodbye aqua blue paint and burgundy carpet! But, the blue paint was stubborn, took one coat of primer and 3 coats of paint to cover! The carpet was much easier. Underneath was beautiful hardwood floor. We're painting and pulling up the carpet one room at a time. After that's finished we'd like put down new flooring in the kitchen that's appropriate for the age of the home and paint the cabinets.

We've done some work in the yard. It's so nice to have a garden again! I woke up this morning to see that the hibiscus we recently planted had bloomed. It was supposed to have an orange flower with a red center. It's not, but it's very cheery... reminds me of a sunrise.

Here's some of the aqua blue paint after one coat of primer. The color on the left side is the new paint. Looks pink in comparison!

Orchids from the yard sit in a jar on the kitchen table. I'm really enjoying my kitchen. It's quite large for a smaller home and has tons of storage. My favorite feature is the 6 foot stainless steel farmhouse sink with windows above. It makes dish washing so much more pleasant! I only wish that the old stove was still there, assuming that it functioned...haha.

With all the rain Kauai has been receiving we've also had some beautiful rainbows!

Thanks for reading my diary!

Aloha Friends,

I was trying to be clever with the title. :) Today I thought It'd be fun to share with you all what's growing in my garden.. My hibiscus as well as several other perennials are blooming. The plumeria have tiny buds. I planted very few new edibles since we'll be moving to Kauai in late July, but I couldn't resist a few favorites....

Just one new tomato plant. It's a bush variety that I planted in a container. We've had a good amount of May Gray and June Gloom. Not much sunshine in San Diego lately. So, the tomato plant is off to a slow start. I hope summer gets here soon!

I'm not sure what this pretty yellow flowers is. To the right is some basil and pineapple sage. We love basil so I planted two. Pineapple sage smells heavenly, it's great in iced tea and is supposed to help with anxiety and stress. It's a perennial that produces cute little red flowers that attract humming birds and butterflies. What's not love about pineapple sage?!

Above is one of last year's cherry tomato plants. I can't believe it's still making tomatoes! I thought it was done a couple months ago but, I'm not complaining.

And my neighbor's cat. He spends an awful lot of time in our backyard sleeping and terrorizing lizards. I'm going to miss him.

Aloha and thanks for reading my diary!

Aloha All,

We've had a beautiful start to our spring here in San Diego! The last couple of days have been brilliantly sunny with some rain here and there. My visiting nephew even went to the beach yesterday and swam in the water! Brrrr.....he was fine though! Northern California boy is used to chilly water.

The perfect mix of rain and sunshine makes for happy flowers in the yard.

Of course spring brings lots of these guys too...snails! We got plenty of them. Here my daughter tries to feed her new pet snail one of the last of my garden tomatoes.  Beware snails....we"re cool until you find my Plumeria.

​Happy spring!

It's December 1st and one of my plumeria has refused to accept winter and is still flowering! Everybody else has stopped blooming and some have started dropping their leaves.. They're all heading into dormancy. Which is more typical behavior for December. Not this flower!

.This plant is in a protected spot on my front porch and gets a lot of the low winter sun. It's starting to get chilly here in San Diego. I"m sure these are the last of it's buds for the season. It held onto summer as long as it could!

I can relate to this plumeria :)

Thanks for reading my diary, I hope you all had a blessed Thanksgiving!
Aloha!

Aloha All,

I'm super happy to share with you that one of our Hawaiian papaya has blossoms...in San Diego! And blossoms mean fruit...hopefully! I LOVE papayas!

This tree was grown from a seed that I saved from a sunrise papaya. I purchased the fruit at a Kauai farmers market. The tree is almost 2 years old and is just over 5 feet high. I've been growing papayas for about five years and this is the first one to flower. I currently have 3 other trees...with luck they'll flower too.

Papayas are easy to grow from seed. They at least two weeks to germinate so don't be discouraged if you don't see a sprout right away. Once it sprouts the plant grows very fast. They like full sun to partial shade. I water mine every other day and fertilize twice a month.

Our weather tends to stay warm through November. We'll see if it has time to fruit. I'll keep you all posted as to how it does here in San Diego. Wish me luck!

Aloha!

Aloha All,

My blueberry bush has been super happy this year! It's grown a lot of delicious berries. I love pineapple upside down cake, so I thought I'd change it up a bit with blueberries. The cake turned out awesome! And it couldn't be easier...

You'll need one box of yellow cake mix, 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons brown sugar and 1 and 1/2 cups blueberries. Preheat your oven to 350F. Melt butter in 9 inch cake pan by placing it in the oven for a minute or two. Sprinkle brown sugar over melted butter then top with blueberries. Prepare cake batter according to the directions on the package then pour the batter over the blueberries. Bake 24-29 minutes. Cake is done when a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let the cake cool for 10 minutes before carefully flipping it over onto a large plate.

The butter, brown sugar and blueberries before the cake batter is poured over.

This is what the cake looks like after it bakes...your house is going to smell heavenly!

Thanks for reading my diary! I hope that you enjoy the cake recipe!