63 “Plant Once & Forget” Fruiting Plants for Your Backyard in Kerala

63 “Plant Once & Forget” Fruiting Plants for Your Backyard in Kerala

I love plants, especially fruiting ones. But I can’t nurture them like I do my own kids. For example, I may, or may not, care to water them in summer. What to do? Well, I’ve stumbled upon the perfect solution drawing on veteran planters and personal experiences. Here I am to share it with you happily ever.

If we are away or too busy to give time to our green friends, the six-months-long dry spell in Kerala can be a trying time for many fruit trees we wish to come to fruition in our backyards. Many may wither and die back depending on the water retention capacity of the soil they are in. However, thanks to the six months of Monsoon, we can still grow a lot of fruit plants depending solely on the rain in this, God’s own country. What matters most is the choices we make and a little bit of homework before we line the plants up on the ground.

Here is a range of drought-resistant fruit plants for your next vacation to-do list. Their ability to withstand a no-watering summer may vary but they can survive to an amazing extent. However, if we can somehow manage to water them during the initial period following establishment, they will surely thrive. They are bound to be back with a smiling face much earlier than expected. Plant once with care and forget about them, only be back when they summon you back with a “Thank You” note. Let us look at the list. Feel free to choose as many of them as you like.

1.    Sindooram mango (സിന്ദൂരം)
2.    Chandrakkaran mango (ചന്ദ്രക്കാരൻ)
3.    Kaalappadi mango (കാലപ്പാടി)
4.    Moovandan mango (മൂവാണ്ടൻ)
5.    Komaanga (കോമാങ്ങ) or Priyor mango (പ്രിയോർ)
6.    Vietnam super-early jackfruit (വിയറ്റ്നാം സൂപ്പർ ഏർളി)
7.    Honey Jackfruit (തേൻ വരിക്ക)
8.    Sindoor jack (സിന്ദൂർ)
9.    Anakkayam-1 Cashew (ആനക്കയം ഒന്ന് കശുമാവ്)
10.           Priyanka Cashew (പ്രിയങ്ക കശുമാവ്)
11.           Sulabha K10-2 Cashew (സുലഭ കശുമാവ്)
12.           Rambutan N18 (റംബൂട്ടാൻ N18)
13.           Rambutan King (റംബൂട്ടാൻ കിംഗ്)
14.           Mamey Sapote (മാമിസപ്പോട്ട Pantin variety)
15.           Mattova (മട്ടോവ)
16.           Longan (ലോങ്കൻ)
17.           Stelechocarpus Burhol (കെപൽ)
18.           Soursop (മുള്ളൻ ചക്ക)
19.           Breadfruit (കടച്ചക്ക)
20.           Pineapple (കൈതച്ചക്ക)
21.           Little Indian Gooseberry( അരിനെല്ലി)
22.           Indian Gooseberry (സാതാനെല്ലി)
23.           Jamun White (ഞാവൽ വെളള)
24.           Jamun Black (ഞാവൽ ബ്ലാക്ക്)
25.           Star fruit / Carambola (ചതുരപുളി)
26.           Tamarind (വാളൻ പുളി)
27.           Sweet Tamarind (തായ്‌ലൻഡ്പുളി)
28.           Scramberry / Lovelolica ചണ്ങമ്പഴം
29.           Indian Plum (അമ്പഴം)
30.           Common fig /Arabian fig (അറേബ്യൻ അത്തി)
31.           Jujube (എലന്തപ്പഴം)
32.           Baccourea courtallensis (മുട്ടിപ്പഴം)
33.           Egg fruit (മുട്ടപ്പഴം)
34.           Gold fruit (ഗോൾഡ്ഫ്റൂട്ട്)
35.           Wild Jack (ആഞ്ഞിലി)
36.           Bhod Tree/ Stunted Jack  (വെട്ടി/ഏച്ചില) Aporusa Lindleyana
37.           Ceylon oak/Gum lac tree (പൂവം/പൂവത്തി ) 
38.           Thadathi (തടത്തി) To be updated with English name
39.     Spinous Kino Tree/ Cork wood(മുള്ളൻ വേങ്ങ/ മുള്ളൻ കയനി)

40.           Kilo guava (കിലോപേര)
41.            Guava Alahabad Safeda (അലഹബാദ് സഫേദ) / Lucknow 49
42.           Thailand Guava (തായ്‌ലൻഡ്പേര)
43.           Manila Tennis Cherry (മാനില ട്ടെന്നീസ് ചെറി)
44.           West Indian Cherry (വെസ്റ്റ് ഇന്ത്യൻ ചെറി)
45.           Large Rose Apple Green (പച്ച വലിയ ചാമ്പ)
46.           Rose Apple Red / Rose, large or small variety (പനിനീർ ചാമ്പ വലുത്)
47.           Lime (ചെറുനാരങ്ങ)
48.           Pomegranate (നീർമാതളം)
49.           Pomelo (മാന്തോളിനാരകം)
50.           Mulberry (മൾബറി)
51.            Pakistani Mulberry (longer fruit) (പാകിസ്താനി മൾബറി)
52.            Jaboticaba (ജബോട്ടിക്കാബ)
53.           Peanut Butter (പീനട്ട് ബട്ടർ)
54.           Bullet Wood (ഇലഞ്ഞി)
55.           Sapote (സപ്പോട്ട)
56.           Awaiting verified information
57.           Awaiting verified information
58.           Awaiting verified information
59.           Awaiting verified information
60.           Awaiting verified information
61.           Awaiting verified information
62.           Awaiting verified information
63.           Awaiting verified information

Spoiled for choice? I thought as much. But hang on a minute. I told you to “plant them once with care” before you leave them behind. The operative words here are “with care”. I recommend digging a large pit (തള്ളക്കുഴി) no less than 1 cubic meter (1m x 1m x 1m) in size. The bigger, the better. Fill it with all sorts of locally sourced organic manure and fertilizers like cow dung, bone meal, peanut cake, neem cake and a bit of pseudomonas. Laying down a few layers of coconut husks will aid water retention. Then dig a smaller pit (പിള്ളക്കുഴി) right in the middle of the bigger one and firm down the green baby in it. Now the two of you are friends for life. She won’t sulk even if you prove a little indifferent in the years to come.

A big round of applause for the soil that supply nutrients. A pat on the invisible shoulder of the breeze that aerates. A naughty wink at the clouds that water, and a thumbs-up to the bees that pollinate. You be right back there in time to savor nature’s candy. When that happens, don’t neglect to leave some for our feathered friends.

Why wait? Pull on your garden boots and get your hands dirty for an abundance of fruits year-round.

Audacity of homes at dizzying heights…

     The picture we conjure up in our minds when we hear the word "home" is usually not far from the conventional roof-over-our-heads. However, it can hardly be stranger than what tribesmen of Habla once called their home. You might have seen an eagle perching its eyrie on rocky cliffs at a high altitude, or wild honeybees suspending their giant beehive in the armpit of a gigantic mountain cliff. But do men do the same? Maybe biomimicry is not as new as we thought it was – even though my natural inclination would be to resist the idea even if the girl I was madly in love with insisted on it. 

Please excuse my camera for not being my own substitute pair of eyes, let alone for those who know Habla only through hearing or by reading about it. I understand I am doing an injustice to things I am talking about by showing a picture which is necessarily reductive, detracting from Habla’s true magnificence. However, it is a compromise; less is certainly better than nothing in this case.

The word “habal” is an Arabic word meaning “rope”. The people living down below used to use a long stretch of rope (about 300 yards) to go up to sell or barter the things they made in exchange for the things they needed. Honey, hides, food grains, and their flours were a few among the commodities they had on offer. A few “badhu” families lived there for generations. Acrophobia was clearly something unheard of among them, as they couldn’t have had any fear of heights.

Bedouins, or badhu, as they are locally known, are not uncommon in the cities of the Aseer region today. Their dress code is distinctive from that of modern-day Saudis. They still live in the remote villages, mainly herding sheep or collecting herbs and honey. They seldom wear a “thobe” and “godhra” but a kind of floral “iqaal” instead. This is a garland worn around the head, braided with flowers and herbs, dried or fresh, available locally.  They are seen in colorful lungi (a garment similar to a sarong) fixed with a wide belt around their waist extending to their ankles. They also wear an ornamental dagger across the belt.

 I have no idea why exactly the tribesmen chose to call such mountainous, seemingly inhospitable, terrain home. The Aseer region certainly has no shortage of land. Maybe they felt threatened by more powerful neighboring tribes or aggressive nomadic ones. It has also been suggested that they were fleeing from Turks during the time of the Ottoman Empire.

Habla is undoubtedly a peak which seems to many people like the end of the world - literally. Nowhere else in the Al Sarwat mountain range, where I work in Abha, a tabletop city, have I seen topography like this. Abha richly deserves the title “Capital of Arab tourism”, not least for its topography.

The Museum of Candy Days

        I lifted my pair of eyes from the book to unintentionally meet those belonging to a lady sitting in a circle not far from me. "In her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place". She was just distributing candies to her team from a half rolled down plastic bag. I averted my eyes, looking away, appearing indifferent, wearing a contemplative mask. I readily wear one of those during dreamy breaks I occasionally take during reading. It helps me digest, and by doing so I offer religious obedience to my ophthalmologist's advice.  After a short while, I went back to my book to pick up where I had left off.

Time passed. No sooner did I want a break and was about to get up, two candies flew and crash-landed, one on my lap, the other on my book. The one that landed on my book made a resounding noise like that of a boot heel on a wooden panel. The lady looked like could be my mum's age, and was by a man seemed her kids' dad. “Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible” in her company.

She didn’t wait for a word of thanks from me. Nor did she seem to care for a grateful glance. Who could she be? Perhaps a distant aunt of Kemal Bay’s, immortalized by Orhan Pamuk in his novel The Museum of Innocence. One of her teammates was wearing a Turkish flag strip on her headscarf signaling to me that we were not far from Istanbul. Looking happy, no matter whether they realized it or not. “In fact, no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it" it.”

I am no longer a big fan of candies. Not because I have convinced myself that I have outgrown them, but I was brainwashed by one of my friends to be a sugar-free, gluten-free, animal-fat-free idiot. I soon recovered my earlier self once he left the office where we worked together, but the sugar-free affliction remains.   However, I did fear I may dishearten my well-wisher, so I felt obliged to savor one of the still unwrapped gifts in appreciation of that kind gesture. Who was the other one for? That question didn’t take long to find a satisfactory answer. None other than the one who strongly suggested to me that if I was ever to read only one book by Pamuk, it should be The Museum. “If we give what we treasure most to a Being we love with all our hearts, if we can do that without expecting anything in return, then the world becomes a beautiful place.”

Those lines I displayed in quotation marks are the ones I pilfered from The Museum of Innocence, following in the footsteps of rich Kemal Bay shoplifting silly artifacts from Fuzun's impoverished house. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. “Let everyone know, I lived a very happy life” - being close, though not being among the museum circle. “Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul.”

Migratory birds, no jet lag to feel ever at home?

Whenever I catch sight of a flock of migratory birds in flight, I strike up a conversation starting with: what are your international roaming rates? Doesn’t it cost a lot to use Google Maps while roaming? Mostly they don’t look like they’ve even heard me. I am not hurt. How could they possibly know my Malayalam?  Nor would they expect me to speak their Russian.

Siberian cranes fly eastward searching for warmer places in the Southern part of India. How do they manage flying at such high altitudes crossing the Himalayan mountain range without losing their way?

I must be naïve to ask such a question. They started doing it way before the advent of computers, let alone GPS. Siberian cranes use their own inbuilt GPS and coordinates inherited from their forefathers. Finding one’s way home was very much a life skill for our own hunter gatherer forefathers.  But it became a lost art just like our ability to read clouds or being a sure-shot backyard meteorologist. A trade-off with technology for the sake of convenience.

Well, the trees our wayworn feathered guests perch on must be luckier. I used to feel sorry for trees for they can’t move and travel the planet. They are glued to the earth. Even in the worst drought, they cannot leave while animals around migrate. However. It was a later realization for me that the stationary nature of trees often seems compensated for by the birds which choose to chirp on them. Birds move around and collect news from wherever to share with the host at night. Loosing oneself in the stories of yore and thousands of miles away from different lands across the globe they flew over, the trees must be intoxicated into a trance-like sleep, night after night.

Do trees remember the birds that once nested in their branches? Do birds care about the trees that once hosted them offering bed and breakfast in the form of fruits, nuts and insects? No idea. I love to believe they do. They do enquire after each other’s well-being and share their stories from far-off. The Swallow in Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” did talk to the Prince. During the migratory long-distance flights, she couldn’t catch up with her flock. Exhausted, she settled down on the shoulders of the statue of the Happy Prince, hoping of course to start afresh the next morning.

“High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince. He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large ruby glowed on his sword-hilt”. So began Oscar Wild his beautiful short story. The Prince had never seen sorrow while alive enjoying the pleasures of the palace but was shedding tears now seeing the plight of the people. The Swallow ran errands for the Prince, taking each valuable in turn to the ones in distress, near and far.

In 2018 a biopic of Wilde was released bearing the title of his famous short story. A just tribute to the star of the aesthetic movement in English literature.

Just as ephemeral as a view of birds of passage, this year too is fast running out. Edibleshoots wishes you all a merry Christmas, happy 2020, and an exhilarating semester break. Love you all.  
                                                                                                       [Photo credit: A pair of eyes in love]                                

And I am Ghee Vada. Nice to Meet You, Mr. Donut.

An increasing number of people worldwide are ditching “doughnuts” in favor of “donuts”. Even the multinational American fast food company Dunkin Donuts adopted the simplified spelling years ago. Whichever spelling you prefer, the taste remains the same.

The other day, I was invigilating a test. When the last test taker had left, I flipped through a textbook a student had surrendered after a last-minute review and forgotten to claim on leaving the venue. The page I opened to was one that told the story of the doughnut. (I had noticed the textbook earlier on but resisted the temptation to dip into it to satisfy my curiosity. It turned out to have been an exercise in delayed gratification.)

To my surprise, I learned that donuts came to America with Dutch settlers in the 18^th century. Those donuts didn’t have a hole in the middle as they do today. The story goes like this.

Elizabeth Gregory, the mother of the captain of a merchant ship, would prepare her olykoeks (oil cakes) according to her special recipe. She made the dough with milk, butter, flour, sugar and eggs, and added walnuts or hazelnuts and various spices that she got from the cargo that the ship was transporting. Elizabeth’s son, Captain Hanson Gregory, used the top of a round tin to cut into the oil cakes and remove the undercooked inner parts as he didn’t like the raw taste.

That was obviously a waste of food, the captain explained in an interview with the Boston Post many years later.  He went on to say that in 1847, to remedy the problem of an undercooked middle section, they began to put a hole in the middle, allowing the inner part to be equally exposed to heat and therefore baked through. That was the birth of modern donut. I think people in India had known this technique long before, as popular ‘urad dal vadas’ date back to Dravidian times. But history belongs to those who are first to write it down, and India was beaten to it.

Did you know that “doughnut hole” refers not only to the actual hole in the middle of a donut, but also to a ball-shaped pastry originally made from the dough cut out to make the holes? It gets even more interesting. In the U.S. Medicare system a “doughnut hole” means a gap in coverage. So the word “hole” as it relates to donuts, actual or metaphorical, is used in the sense of nothing, something, and nothing respectively. Sorry for getting rather philosophical on you, but I’m in good company. Japanese author Haruki Murakami said in his Metaphysics of Food that “Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit”. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Breadwinners to win your hearts...

           Two Moroccan beauticians used to live on the other side of my street. We had a casual chat at the Afghan baker’s shop in our neighborhood almost daily.  They would invite me to visit their country, as a kind and courteous gesture, at the end of short exchanges of pleasantries while waiting for our hot flatbread straight from the tomb-shaped, clay oven. I would respond with the same courtesy: "Next vacation, Insha Allah, for sure", hoping to go there one day, but not expecting it to ever happen. 

     However, last summer vacation my wildest dreams came true. I found myself traveling alone through a mountain village in Southern Morocco, where a Berber widow taught me how to bake flatbread on hot pebbles in the courtyard of her house. Her dexterity in wetting a peel and using it to lay the flattened, moist dough on a bed of hot pebbles was awe-inspiring. She baked each bread to a golden sheen. (Gotcha! Don’t be taken in by my outlandish lies. I was just kidding. I have never been outside of Asia. The above was only one of the many flights of fancy of a born daydreamer.)

The moment captured in the photo is from the Samosa Souq in Abha during last Ramadan. (This souq is an informal and makeshift two-hour-long market selling Ifthar delicacies only during the 9th month of the Hijri calendar.) By the way, slapping the leavened, flat, elongated bread onto the preheated, clay-lined walls of the vertical oven is itself an art requiring great skill. It looks deceptively easy, but onlookers attempting a trial are bound to come up short.

Don’t think of bread as only European-style loaves. It is one of the oldest forms of cooked food. I haven’t consulted an anthropologist or ethno-archaeologist about this, but my intuition just points in that direction. Speaking from my understanding, during the times we had to survive only on the things we grew ourselves, we cultivated a few patches of rice or wheat. Once harvested, we dried, threshed, winnowed and sieved the grains, ground them into a flour, added some water and salt, then kneaded the dough for making flatbread. 

This is true about every group of people that ever survived on this planet we continue to share living on. Just change the grain grown according to where you live – rather like we did in a substitution table in our grammar school - and the final output changes accordingly.

      Corn and cornbread made in beehive-shaped mud ovens in the Nile Delta; rice and flat rice Pathiri baked in earthen pans by the grandmas of Malabar; wheat and elongated, ovate pita bread of Southern Saudi Arabia; hectors of wheat fields and rising butter naans of North East India - these are just a few to help you with this exercise.

The Empty Quarter / Rubu’al Khali: Dreamwork of Golden Grains

It first rained on Rann of Kutch, the drought-stricken salt desert, on the day Fathima entered the village. Everyone still remembered that day and the girl who had brought rainclouds along into that Monsoon-forgotten hamlet. I recall the images I conjured up while reading The Love Across the Salt Desert by Keki N Daruwalla. No one dared to do the impossible by crossing the desert except those few who did so for “reasons of their own”. Nawab Hussain, for instance, made the journey for “the daughter of the spice seller; she who smelled of cloves and cinnamon”. Ever since reading that story I have romanticized the desert.

Here I am now in a distant relative of the Rann of Kutch: Rubu’al Khali, commonly known as the Empty Quarter, a territory shared by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and Yemen.

        

The silence, the clarity, the mystery, the remoteness, the vastness, the serenity, the eternity and the capricious nature of a wild, other-worldly desert! Rubu’al Khali, 650,000 square kilometers of contiguous golden sand, 1000 kilometers in length and 500 kilometers in width. I had always dreamed of visiting it one day. That day finally came a few months back while I was accompanying a friend of mine on his way to a remote hospital.

I don’t really remember where and when I first heard the name Rubu’al Khali. But I do know I heard about the Empty Quarter long ago. I guess I first came across it in ‘Laurence of Arabia’.

Desert ecology has always been somewhat of a puzzle for scientists and desert inhabitants (called Bedouins) alike. Large swaths of sand stretch beyond one’s ken to the horizon. The sands are golden with a fine grain. I collected some in a bottle I found lying around to bring home just for a kind of fetishist attachment I felt after spending a mere couple of hours there. I hadn’t done anything remotely similar even during my visits to the holiest places earlier. But this time something in me tempted me to. I just yielded to rid myself of the compulsive urge to act whimsically.

The shifting sand dunes, and the curvaceous peaks forming a serpentine line following a mysterious symmetry, are all really alluring. It can win the heart of the worst Philistine. I will show you beauty in a handful of sand grains, hastening back to Earth through my fingers as smoothly as in an hourglass.

Stopping by a lonely car bay, we engaged in some stargazing. Never had I seen such a mesmerizing, starlit sky, ebullient illumination at its best. That brought me to the realization that there was much more to see in the sky than back home, on Mother Earth, than I had previously thought. The car made its way homeward in total silence, through that mesmerizing no man’s land.