Monday 31 March 2008

Daddy green fingers

My dad has green fingers. During weekends, you'll find him tending to the fruit trees in the garden. Like the way he cares for the family, he feeds his plants with organic fertilisers and mulches the garden bed regularly.

Here are some fruits of his labour.

Dad's friend gave him some pitaya (dragon fruit) cactus. After taking care of the plants diligently, a large flower bud appeared one day.

The white large fragrant flower of the pitaya opens only at night, hence it is sometimes called moonflower or queen of the night.


The flower develops into a green fruit with leathery skin covered with scales.


It turns pinkish as it develops. The fruit can weigh from 150-600 grams and the flesh, which is eaten raw, is mildly sweet and rich in fiber and minerals. Some of the fruits have white flesh with tiny black crunchy seeds like the kiwi fruit. Our dragon fruit has red flesh with black seeds.

I bought this soursop plant from the nursery for YK to breed a particular type of butterfly. From a small plant, it has grown into a tall fruit tree. Though it flowers continuously throughout the year, we've not seen any fruit. After my dad started fertilising the plant, we're beginning to see more flowers and even a little spiky fruit. I can't wait to taste the sweet succulent pulp.

My kids love passionfruit. When I was young, we could find them growing in the wild but you can hardly find them around these days. So when I saw this plant at the nursery, laden with fruits, I bought it even though it cost $45 (US$32). It's a good buy because it keeps producing fruits. Now that we have 4 passionfruit plants at home, dad has built a new flower bed around the plants and added more top soil.

Papa's pride and joy. He grows the papaya plants from seeds.

Our lime plants at home are always laden with fruits. I use the limes for making salad dressing. I also make a dip using lime, garlic and chilli padi which goes very well with steamed fish.
The broad leaves belong to our grape vine which refuses to produce any grapes. In the past, we've had some grapes but they were even more sour than the lime.

Our jackfruit tree produces too many fruits until it is now leaning on one side. It grew from a seed that I brought home about 10 years ago after I ate a piece of jackfruit from the fruit stall. It produces huge fruits with lots of sweet yellow flesh and hard round seeds inside. It's a pity we leave the fruits on the tree until they rot away.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

what an amazing garden! i love jackfruit...please send them this way!!

Blur Ting said...

I wish I could Seagrape! When the tree starting bearing fruits, I used to wait impatiently for them to ripen. Later when we got tired of eating, I started to box them up and give to friends. Then they also started getting sick of eating. Now we just leave them on the tree :-P

The quality of the fruits have also dropped because the plant is getting old and it's leaning too much on one side because of the weight.

fishwithoutbicycle said...

I love the garden, I'm envious, I am hopeless when it comes to plants :-)

Nick Phillips (15/03/1967 - 04/11/2022) said...

Whoa, that is an awesome garden! I wish we had space that big over here. I have this teeny weeny little lawn only la ...

But my mom is has a pretty good green thumb too, she took this flower that I just couldn't get to grow and made it flourish ... :D

The World According To Me said...

Interesting post. What a lovely green and pretty garden.

My Dad has green fingers too, and he knows the name of every plant/flower under the sun! Well, he seems to know every name...

SOUL said...

great pics..
i'm movin in!~!

Amel said...

I MISS soursop, papaya, and jackfruit. Arttu LOVES jackfruit so much. He ate them for the first time in Indo when he came in 2006. He said that if he could have jackfruit for the rest of his life, he wouldn't need any candies HE HE HE HE HE...

Amel said...

Oh yeah, almost forgot, your Dad's REALLY talented. ;-D

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