Edible Shoots

        There was a time when I lived in a sleepy, cold town all alone, having the luxury of a lovely friend, a small car, and a camera. We roamed around the places, exploring things no mortals we knew ever dared to. Once, he came up with a plan to watch the sunrise and had breakfast sitting on the top of a huge boulder, crowning the edge of a mountainous height and cutting steep slope that people feared to peep down. The mountain peak known as Habla is one of the peaks on the Aseer Mountain range, which is part of the Sarawat Mountains, running parallel to the Red Sea’s eastern coastline, extending the Hijaz Mountain range to the Southern borders of Saudi Arabia.                                               Part of the plan was to start way earlier so that we could watch the sunrise, and December was never kind to the people of this part of the wo...

  The Earth in Her Hands is a book by Jennifer Jewell that covers 75 extraordinary women in the world of plants . It tells us stories of womenfolk who put their life into plants, or the plants chose them to live their life with. Like most exciting things happening in my life, I stumbled upon this title recently while researching a related project online. It was love at first sight, and I got addicted to it while listening to the book on Audible, waiting outside our university dental clinic for my wife to have an appointment. Thanks, Dr. Abdul Qadar, for a three-hour long session on an emergency basis before he leaves for his home for the annual vacation. Each woman has a unique plant journey to relate to, which will take us for a ride through the ever-exciting botanical world. They are cherry-picked from various fields like botany, garden nursery, floral design, garden, photography landscape architecture, farming, seed banks, herbalism, and food justice. The common thread ...

          We have been missing those lovely, feathered friends for a while. We all wondered where all our birds had gone to. Yesterday, as I was helping an uncle prune his garden, I had a realization for an obvious reason. The peaches and figs in his garden have been left mostly unharvested. As the orchard was well-walled, no one dared to step in, and the birds would in no way be prosecuted for fruit poaching. They must have been feasting on it. There were too many fruits fallen and rotten under each. The season’s harvest is too big for little birds to devour. And they can’t squirrel it away for winter. The ground was littered with a rainbow of rotting fruits, the sweet scent of decay filling the air. We had grown friendlier ever since we moved in, and they seldom flew off even when we walked closer. We moved in the winter; at a time, they were desperately looking for food. My wife readily sensed a need and kept a bowl of grain and water in a...

         Around 7000 years ago, the Chinese invented the art and science of spinning cocoons of silkworms into smooth thread and weaving it into the lustrous fabric for the fabulously rich world. They raised silkworms feeding on cultivated white mulberry plants. The secret was successfully guarded for thousands of years and resulted in one of the largest travel and transport networks, later known as the silk route, over land and sea. Traders travelled to distant lands on foot, on horseback or by caravan, following a confluence of trails leading to China, and brought the silk and sold it at bazaars and caravanserais en route. (Caravanserais were roadside inns where travelers – caravaners - could rest and recover from the day's journey.) The route connected the civilizations in the East and the West for about 1400 years. I captured this photo of our daughter Aishah holding a bowl of sun-ripe mulberry freshly plucked  in the little garden of our property owner...

People in the Arabian Peninsula were largely pastoral in their culture. Livestock was one of their mainstays. Cattle, sheep, goats, and camels were a part of their tribal lives. Interestingly, there are over 100 words for camels in the Arabic language, just as Eskimos have more than two dozen words for snow. The animals they kept gave them milk, meat, leather, manure to cultivate their crops, and a pet to take care of or play with. Camels were their only cars until not too long ago. Milk is still an important item on Saudi tables, and they know a lot of dishes with dairy. It is also worth noting that in desert dwellers’ long history with milk, their genetics have favored them to have comparatively few cases of lactose intolerance. There are still very rich people who take more pride in the number of sheep or camels over the luxury cars or assets in real estate they own. This herd of cattle belongs to the Bos Indicus breed, characterized by humped shoulders and pendulous dewlap. It ...

Could you name a garden plant with flowers all year? My science teacher asked us when I was in 6th grade in our village school. He had to answer the question himself as we all guessed it wildly wrong. Though I have never looked it up to verify the correctness of that answer, I just believed it to be true for, ever since, I’ve seen bougainvillea in bloom on and off all year.  Bougainvillea looks gorgeous and seems to be present almost everywhere, one of the most widely distributed and versatile ornamental plants. It is found everywhere in warm climates worldwide, inviting our attention, especially where they are well exposed to sunlight. Evergreen in tropical and subtropical climes but deciduous in colder climates especially during winter. We mistake its paper-thin bracts of various colors for its flowers. In fact, its real flowers are tiny white ones, often unnoticeable from a distance as they are overshadowed by bracts of vibrant colors of pink, white, orange, purple, yel...

        In our backyard, we meticulously manage a variety of fruit plants nursing them into fruition. Many of them escape our attention and reach on time when they are all set to make us happy. Though late at times, we do go for harvest at reasonable intervals and enjoy ourselves. The extra harvest would usually go for distribution in the neighborhood and to friends and families. One very heartening sight is to see the much-awaited fruit already claimed by its natural stakeholders. Squirrels, bats, parrots, bulbuls, crows and so goes the long list of mainly arboreal but rodents like rats too join the gang.  We don’t care much if the plant is grown on its own from the seeds sown by the same gangsters. Of course, there are some very good ones of that sort around. The ones we do a to z to grow and look forward to fruiting but end up seeing a good portion already shared up is very frustrating. We the young generation make haste to destroy the remaining portion in ve...

Whenever I open my mouth to appreciate someone in my neighborhood, especially for the food they make and share with us, my partner would say, “neighbor’s wife is always beauty”. This is her way of saying that her own version of the same often goes underappreciated. However, there are a few dishes we get offered that she too can’t help admitting her admiration for. The one in this shot is just one among those few. The food diplomacy among neighbors living closely together has a lasting impact.  “Please add a little water into the curry you made for yourself and offer a share to your neighbor”. It was a famous saying of the Prophet on those days of less prosperity. Now most of us don’t have to dilute in order to have enough to share but can cook as much for both households. Thank God, we are living in one of the best times in history, though many may  disagree. Food has always attracted people, kept the folks together, and helped people to show they  care. We  know tha...

     My colleague from Egypt told me once about those times when he was growing up, a child in his village. The men from the cities mounting their donkeys carrying household utensils would go from door to door in the villages to trade their offerings for backyard chicken eggs. They had their designated days for barter, and they knew their potential business partners very well. A win-win situation for both womenfolk in the countryside and door-to-door vendors from afar.   Back in the South Indian highlands, while I was a trainee teacher, I saw women making a difference with the eggs they got from raising chickens at their homestead and selling them to greengrocers in their hometown. Home-produced eggs always enjoyed better prices than the commercially mass-produced ones. The women didn't have a farmers’ market so they sold the eggs to their favorite greengrocers, who would resell them for a small profit. A sincere word of thanks goes to Teena Jewel Kuriakose, living...

We grow happier as we start spotting the first of its blooms showing up. And for a special reason, which we pin on jacarandas in full bloom in the neighborhood: we know that our summer vacation is not far - the one we all have been looking forward to.  All this is thanks to our city gardeners, who made a U-alley by planting the jacarandas in line on either side of a paved walkway alongside a long dried-up river. How did I then know that it used to be a river without there being any trace of water? There is still an arch bridge built during the time of the Ottoman Empire connecting people on both sides. For quite long, we didn’t have a name to call the tree with the purple-blue flowers by. Nor did we feel any need for one. Dr. Paul, the crazy man with a scientific temperament among us, first called it “Jacaranda mimosifolia”; this didn’t take long to become a household name but the “mimosifolia” part was conveniently dropped. No one refuted Dr. Paul as our knowledge of botany didn’t...

  I got up a bit earlier today. Not yet sure if Muradabadi biryani could help to be an early bird or not. For reasons I don't know, something inside me kept saying, “Jabir, get up n go out...” Abha is the most beautiful on Friday morning if you can meet her when she rubs her eyes to the sun. Silent, tranquil,     visible, and almost no traffic to bother about.          It was dark even at 6:30 am. That is quite usual during winter. The temperature was 9 C. Darkness coupled with chill would serve as a good excuse for not venturing out. But my mind justified that it was usual during winter and we would stay warm up while on the move on foot. I let my weekend unfold on its own. Quite spontaneously with no plans...and a walk along ring road done solo. Off script. Walking has always been a meditative affair for me. If my lungs or calf muscles got something, that was only a bonus.

     My mom never made cheese. She never knew what it was like. But she did make a lot of butter and ghee from the milk leftover after we had supplied the neighborhood. Free home delivery was our responsibility. We kids did it well without causing any concern for customer care or ultimately our bossy mom.   We raised chickens, goats, rabbits, and cattle. We also grew a fair share of our own food, like edible leaves, veggies, and tubers, mostly annuals but also perennials. Everybody contributed towards the labor, therefore we hardly ever needed to hire a farmhand. There was no such thing as waste on our homestead. In fact, there is no such thing as organic waste on this planet we call home.   Mom boiled the unsold milk and let it cool off. She then added a little buttermilk as culture  and kept it overnight for turning the earthen milk pot into a pot of buttermilk.  Once she was free from farm chores, she would sit back to churn the curds into little sc...

My granddad on my mother’s side had his own paddy fields. He sold them piecemeal to marry off his eight daughters. However, he continued to farm on fields he took on lease. Nothing could stop a man from doing what he had done all his life. He had his own pair of plowing bulls, two pairs at the most. Like each of his ten children, these bulls too had their own names, no different from those of men.        After every harvest, my grandfather would send a share to each daughter’s house. Having been brought up by a veteran rice farmer, each of his daughters knew very well how to put the paddy to the best possible use. My mom was no exception. She boiled some of her share, at times with bulbils of yam as a treat for us kids. She spread some of it under the sun on a bamboo mat to dry, before gathering it up into a sack and sending us to the miller to make flour out of it. The carriable portion to a teenager, having packed up in a repurposed plastic bag and sealed wit...

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...