I've been wanting a greenhouse for the last couple years. It's almost a must for some of the plants and fruits that I like to grow, which are mainly tropical.
My wife has been tolerant of me loading up the plants in the house and in the garage in the past couple of years.
I ended up buying the Climapod. It was the best looking and it the right budget for me. It also helped that they were local so the pick up was easy and I had no delivery fees.
You have to assemble it yourself but I've been extremely busy so I ended up hiring the folks who sold it to me to assemble it. As any of you who may have built one knows it can be longer than a weekend project to do.
The guys from Climapod were amazing! They worked hard and tirelessly in the rain. Hats off to the amazing product and great customer service!
After 3yrs in ground my Hardy Kiwis finally produced a small bunch of fruit for me. In the video below I compare my Anna kiwis to the store bought trader Joes kiwis.
Jujube's are a delicious apple/date like fruit. It's also known as the Chinese Date or Korean date. They store well and are a great snack.
The taste can be compared to a crunchy apple but interestingly enough the more you chew the sweeter it tastes.
I have a Li and Lang jujube planted in ground without any protection in Seattle. The video below is the progress from flower (June) to ripe fruit (October). Enjoy!
My Marseilles VS Black was very close to ripening this year but...
Those pesky squirrels or birds have been stealing so many of my fruit that I was forced to pick it early. You can see here that the color never really got to a dark black color.
It's the middle of October and the days are shorter and beginning to get cold.
The fruit could have definitely used another week or so to ripen. It was still firm to the touch and was not very sweet. It weighed about 31 grams.
The taste was somewhat disappointing because it was not fully ripened, hopefully next year will be a different story. But I cannot give it a true taste ranking because the fruit was not fully ripened.
Its the beginning of Octobor in Seattle and the figs are still ripening here. Luckily the weather has been cooperating. It's been chilly at night but still quite warm in the daytime with a decent amount of sunshine.
Black Madeira
The days are shorter and I'm running into less light to do my videos but it's still fun to eat figs in the evenings.
I finally got a properly ripe Brandon St. Unknown fig recently and it's a real winner. Better tasting than VDB or RDB. The taste ranks up there. It produces 2 crops here successfully here in Seattle. Judging from the looks of this fig. My guess is that it is a sport from the Celeste Family. A sugar fig of some sort.
What makes it stand out in this area is that it holds it's brebas unlike most Celeste and it ripens the main crop as well which is extremely rich and sweet!
The Breba crop is super early and probably will be the first ripe breba you'll pick from your collection.
I have a few cuttings available from the main tree and is for sale on Ebay.
Peruvian Apple Cactus: The alternative to the dragon gangly fruit. Cereus Repandus .
The Peruvian Apple Cactus, Cereus repandus, is a large, erect, thorny columnar cactus found in South America. It is also known as Giant Club Cactus, Hedge Cactus, cadushi, kayush...
With an often tree-like appearance, the Peruvian Apple Cactus' cylindrical gray-green to blue stems can reach 10 meters (33 ft) in height and 10-20 cm in diameter. The nocturnal flowers remain open for only one night. The fruits, known locally as "pitaya" or Peruvian Apple, are thornless and vary in skin color from violet-red to yellow. The edible flesh is white and contains small, edible, crunchy seeds, the flesh sweetens as the fruit opens out fully.
Cereus repandus is an unresearched, under-utilized cactus, grown mostly as an ornamental plant. As noted above, it has some local culinary importance. The Wayuu from the La Guajira Peninsula of Colombia and Venezuela use the inner cane-like wood of kayush in wattle and daub construction.
It's no secret I love tropical fruit. Especially dragon fruit. The problem is it grows as a viney cactus and can be unsightly and mangy.
The Peruvian Apple cactus has the same taste and consistency as the Dragon fruit but it grows as a column and can be grown indoors or in a green house in the colder areas. It's also more ideal in smaller spaces and doesn't look as scraggly as the dragon fruit plant.
Epiphyllums are great house plants they are small and prolific, the fruit is small but not bad at all, you just need two strains to cross pollinate.
The second strain I'll get will be a
Cereus hildmannianus.
Sometimes when we purchase a new fig plant, it's hard to know how long it's been stuck in that same pot. The tale tell sign would be if it doesn't push out any new growth for months and it reminds you of Charlie Browns Christmas tree.
This was the case with my Hardy Hartford from Sky Nursery. It did little to no growth since I purchased it. Watch the video to see the process.
I love September. It's when most of my figs ripen. This week I got to eat my very first Black Madeira! And boy was it amazing! Now I want even more of them.
Cordi Stella
Smith Fig
Black Madeira
Unfortunately, I have a fig bandit and they've been stealing my ripe figs. Which caused me to pick them a bit early for fear of losing my figs.
Living in Washington State we have the luxury of growing some of the best apple varieties.
I love fujis but from most of what I've read they don't ripen will here in Washington. So I found the Beni Shogun apple which is an early Fuji variety and boy it does not disappoint. This is a very tasty apple. Even off of a very small tree it has produced a very large flavorful fruit. Extremely crispy and sweet with floral aromatics.
Beni Shogun
It's also disease and bug resistant. A real winner to grow here in Seattle.
After a 4 months and about 100 seeds I have 1 successful sprout of Myrica Rubra. I'm excited but also somewhat not too hopeful since you need a male and female plant to successfully produce fruit with this plant.
Myrica Rubra seeds are notorious for losing viability soon after leaving the fruit. So the germination rates are extremely low.
I have a cup over the new seedling to maintain the same humidity as the bag it sprouted from. The cup next to it is a Noni plant. The cups have holes in them to keep it from getting too humid.
After about 2 weeks in its new pot.
9/10/16 A second Spout!
Update 1/15/17:
For some strange reason both my Myrica Rubra Sprouts have browned and died.
My Akane Apples have ripened and they are quite tasty. Crispy with a very tart kick. White flesh and Red skin. There's a nice bite and vinous flavor with each chew the sweet tart flavor soaks your tongue.
I don't know if the fruit socks did more or less damage to the fruit. It may have protected them from apple worms but the earwigs seem to love living in the open flaps. So most of the fruit had 1 or 2 living in them. They dined on the ripening fruit and left unsightly scars.
Next year I will have to leave earwig traps and remove them manually. They've ravage my peaches to which I was not happy about.
I've read that leaving out balled up newspaper by the base of the tree will coax them in. But then you'll have to probably drown or burn the paper to get rid of the earwigs in them.
And from other parts of the graden. Asian Pears from my combination tree and cucumbers and lemon cucumbers.
I trade cuttings with another collector late last year. It was Osborn Prolific for Osborn prolific. Mine was Green and Purple with an amber interior and hers was red with a yellow skin.
So we traded. Let's just call this Osborn Prolific type 2 for the sake of not confusing things.
This is the Osborn that I know. AKA Neveralla. This one is yellow green with purple burgundy tones
The Interior is white to amber colored and only has one crop.
The one I traded for. It's red on the inside and yellow green on the skin. Interesting eh?
Now the tree it came off of is still very tiny. It's a 1st year cutting so I was surprised there were any fruit at all. It weighed in at 17 grams
This is the Osborn Prolific next to a Peter's Honey breba. Osborn is on the right. I didnt expect too much from such a small plant. The flavor was a bit disappointing and bland. I'll have to wait until next year to see how it will taste.
