We are starting to eat more and more different kinds of food from our land these days. We aren’t exactly gardening yet. Instead, we are planting various kinds of plants that seem to be quite happy growing with little or no work on our part. (Apparently the tropical climate and soil around here isn’t exactly the most challenging environment to be a small-time gardener, particularly when selecting for climate appropriate plants.)

Walking around the land today, I noticed that the passion fruit seeds we planted a while back had grown into quite a large vine along the fence with the canal and it is bearing a number of ripe and nearly ripe fruit. I love passion fruit! I eat it in the morning with yogurt and other fruit whenever the fruit stall at the nearby local market carries it.

So we picked our first ripe passion fruit from the land and ate it today:

I saw a number of fruit growing on the same vine without really looking very hard and there are more flowers too, so I think we will have a decent crop soon…

Praew decided to pick some dinner from a number of plants nearby while I was checking out the passion fruit. It is a plant that appears to be native to our land in that they sprout up all over and we didn’t plant them. They are called “ton sanoh” in Thai (Sesbania grandiflora) and they have a yellow flower that is often steamed and eaten with “naam prik”.

After picking, Praew separated the flowers from the stems and washed them

She then stir-fried these into a Thai omelette (“kai jeow dog sanoh”) made with fresh eggs from our own chickens.

On an only slightly related note, Praew pointed out to me a number of plants that look a lot like corn lying on the ground nearby that the workers cut down to make way for a tool shed we are building.

The heads of the plants have bunches of grain that look edible. With the help of Google, we’ve determined that the English for these is “broom corn” or “sorghum“. These were growing along the side of the road outside our fence and we transplanted a small shoot just to see what would happen. It took off like a weed.

Supposedly these are used for food, although the are also used for fodder and other things. According to Wikipedia, “Sorghum nutrient contents generally are similar to those of raw oats“. We didn’t try eating it yet, but it is nice to know that so many edible plants grow on our land without too much work.

We also have a bunch of accidentally grown papaya trees bearing fruit. (By bunch, I mean dozens of trees each with a dozen or so fruit… this is a long story.) My hope is that the papaya and the passion fruit ripen at the same time so I can have home made yogurt with papaya and passion fruit on top for breakfast using only ingredients we produced ourselves. (Well, the milk used to make the yogurt will be store bought, but you get the idea.)