Well, I realized to my shock that we don't have a thread in here on this yet, and to me it is one of the central plants that people should be discussing, like on the other forum what mango and mangosteen are. But when I tried to go back to the old forum to copy it in, the old forum seems to be missing entirely.

So I guess we'll start over.

Moringa, which we had pages of information on, is a stellar plant, which should be planted in hot climates all over the world. It is very drought resistant once established, and grows even in areas of terrible soil and high PH. It is extremely useful, and 100% edible - you can eat the leaves, the flowers, the pods, and the seeds, and I believe even the bark and roots [careful though - the root in large quantities can be poisonous, especially the root bark]. It is EXTREMELY medicinal, with near-miraculous properties. It could in large part solve the world's starvation problem in hot areas, and also many medical ills. For a plant, it has very high protein content, which I believe is a complete protein.

The plant also appreciates heavy pruning, so if you eat a lot of it that just helps it to grow back all the faster. It tends to grow extremely rapidly, with as much as 22 ft of growth in a year! But you can keep cutting it back - or try what I have done, which is to bend the top and tie them into ever-continuing circles so it fills in and grows like a high shrub rather than a tree - every place that the trunk is stressed, a new branch shoots out, all reaching upwards. It's an odd choice, but I needed privacy on that side of the yard, and I also didn't want to have to reach high for food.

The plant flowers prolifically most of the year here. It does get much fuller in a rainy season, but does not die with drought. For me, plants in the second year start to be capable of making and holding pods, and you need about a full year of flowering before it starts to be able to make many pods. It appears to be self-fertile, although I am growing a row of them so can't vouch for that with 100% certainty.

 I can only assume that someone who lives in an area of year-round high rainfall, and rich soil, would probably have extremely bushy and tall plants in no time. As it is, I live in an area with high PH mix of coral rocks and sand and salt, with very little soil content, and half the year we have essentially desert conditions. So in that harsh environment, without any assistance my plants grow only about 3ft a year. The more they have to draw from, the more they grow.

The only drawback? For me, the taste. Eaten raw, the leaves and flowers taste like an exceptionally strong kind of raw broccoli, and burn in the mouth. So I find it a bit unpleasant for salads, except in small quantities - like radishes, for instance. Cooked, I find the leaves to have some kind of deeper taste that makes me a bit nauseous. BUT, cooked flowers taste kind of like popcorn, which is odd but pleasant.

Do NOT consume these like they are just any vegetable... they have strong medicinal properties. Start slowly, and work your way up. I have seen mention that any more that around 7 tsps fresh plant (which is how much it takes to make 1 tsp of it dried and powdered) can cause stomach upset. So don't make an entire large salad of it, or throw it in a pot and eat it like there's no tomorrow. I tend to eat only 1 whole new branch a day, as a visual reference point. I plan to grow 10, but right now I have a row of 6. So eating it alone, it is easy enough to just pull a single new branch off of each, and go down the line to a new plant each day so they have time for regrowth. My plants are about 2.5 years old now. Just at the point where they are starting to make a lot of pods, so hopefully I can plant a few more plants from the seeds. I have not had 100% germination success with seeds though - maybe only around 30%. They need kind of a lot of water, consistently, to get anything to come up - so planting them in the rainy season would likely work best.

Moringa is an excellent plant, that should be a staple of tropical gardening.

Yes, I just rip off the colored part of the plant, and eat - stamen and all. I do not eat anything green on the plant, because I have not seen mention anywhere that it is edible/safe as yet. Any part that is colored, I eat. Which means thus far, I do not eat from these plants when they are not in bloom - but that's usually in the rainy season here, when there are plenty of other things available to eat. It's a great starvation plant, to help fill out so there is food year-round without any effort, and clearly has a lot of great medicinal qualities that have been used by indigenous populations for a long time.

Very easy to grow. Pretty to look at, half purple and half green. Extremely easy to propagate by cuttings. A taste that is halfway between parsley and seaweed, which leaves me conflicted. Okinawan spinach has strong medicinal properties. But, I am a huge fan of the taste of parsley - like I could eat it all day - and very much someone who gets nauseous at the taste of anything fishy. So I find that I can't manage to eat more than 5 leaves of Okinawan spinach at a time, and not cooked in anything.

So for me it's a good supplementary plant. But for someone who enjoys Japanese food/sushi for instance, I can imagine this being very enjoyable. I could see it being great as an alternative to seaweed in a sushi roll with avocado and some sesame seeds, if you don't mind that it also kind of tastes like parsley. I have considered using it in broths as a fish sauce substitute, since I am vegetarian, but I rarely have need for that kind of flavor so have not tried it yet.

It's reasonably drought-tolerant, but so far I have not had any lucky growing it in local soil. It seems to only grow in the rich organic soil in my pots. But since I eat so little of it, that hasn't really been a problem.

Pretty, drought-tolerant, easy to grow in poor soils with high PH, and come in a wide variety of colors with lots of landscaping uses... and yes, the colored part of the "flowers" are edible.

I eat large portions of them as salad daily, and also in rice paper wraps with tofu. I wouldn't say it's the best tasting vegetable, but it's free in my yard, and probably has loads of antioxidants or other beneficial properties.

***
Ah, it turns out I was right: http://www.ijppsjournal.com/Vol6Issue5/9423.pdf

Grow them organically, so you don't reverse all the great anti-inflammatory and potentially anti-cancer effects by ingesting commercial poisons along with them. In the right conditions, they don't seem to need much care anyway.

I have not found much flavor difference between colors, incidentally. But I have only tried pink, red, and purple.

So I planted galangal, which is a plant similar to ginger but with a different flavor, that is popular in Thai food. And I must say, it is happier in drought, and healthier so far than my forays into various gingers, particularly as this is the dry season.

So if you have terrible soil, and marked drought periods, this might be a sturdy one to try. Unfortunately, I am not as fond of the taste as I am of the other similar plants. But it's healthy, and thus far I don't mess with anything under the soil, I only harvest leaves occasionally as a spice, like for soups that employ the coconuts from my yard. I have high hopes this one will last a long time here.

Anybody growing Nasturtiums? They seem relatively drought tolerant, happy enough in poor soil like one gets on tropical islands, and like the warm temps. Awesome addition raw, and a bunch of health benefits.

https://caloriebee.com/nutrition/The-Various-Health-Benefits-and-Uses-of-Nasturtiums#

Leaves, pods, and flowers all edible. Very colorful addition to salad, probably rich in antioxidants.

So jealous you have a Vietnamese community. Very few Asians in SFL, especially this far down...

I am very interested in Indian varieties, like Giant Kew, Queen, etc. But I don't know how to get them in the States.

http://santhagreens.com/plant/pineapple/pineapple-varieties/#

I'm growing West African Sugarloaf, White Jade, Florida Special, Elite Gold, Smooth Cayenne, and several tops from store bought Hawaiian (Dole I think) pineapples.

I have four colors, Pink, Red, Rose and White.

Wow, I am so jealous! That's awesome! Is there a distinct difference in flavor between each color?

I so wish that were my problem! Maybe someday... So far, the Hasya Sapodilla is very happy but only has produced 3 fruit in 3 years, despite hordes of flowers. And every starfruit I put in the ground gets destroyed by spider mites every dry season. I'm on my 4th tree, and it just lost its last leaf today despite multiple Neem sprays and extra watering. Hopefully the next round of leaves it looks like it's trying to put out will make it, so it won't totally die. But we have a super-spider-mite problem in the Keys that is aggressively wiping out hordes of plants over the last few years, so this is a problem not likely to be an issue for other people I guess. Only the rainy season keeps it at bay.

But starfruit is very good blackened, like with cajun or jerk spices, or in stirfry. Mix with other fruits and vegetables, and viola! Yum. Don't overcook to the point of being mushy - a quick stirfry with the seasoning is it.

I haven't experimented with sapodilla cooking yet, but I would think anything that would go well with the taste of brown sugar could benefit. I bet you could make baked sapodilla, or some kind of pudding, with cinnamon... kind of like one might do with apples. Different texture, but sapodilla is probably very tasty with vanilla and cinnamon, and maybe just a hint of butter (or like in a pastry). I don't add sugar or fat to my fruits, because I prefer them natural and eaten the way they are, but if one is really bored I'm sure there's a wealth of pastries to be made with sapodilla, and its moisture would lend well to baking like the way people use applesauce to replace oil in cakes and things. Blend some up and use in place of applesauce, which is used in place of oil for cakes, cookies, etc. Or, use as pie or cookie filling, or maybe even a layer between cakes? If you're someone who eats baked goods, this might be great. I wonder if anyone has ever tried making sapodilla bread, like with a banana bread recipe? Or muffins? It's probably awesome... add oats, or chia seed, or flax, or whatever, and it could be great from a health perspective also. I would think they're sweet enough when ripe that you don't need to add any sugar, or probably very little...

Thanks for the recommendation! There appear to be some for sale on Etsy also. I prefer to buy from Amazon, but while there are two sellers listed, one is called "Unknown" and one does not have a good enough rating yet for me to want to bother, given that cost is like $15 for seeds.

I am excited to give these a try if they'll really grow through the rainy season down here!

OMG!!! So, I was talking to my neighbor over the fence yesterday, and I looked down, and there on the larger Randia formosa (which has been in-ground for at least 2 years, and is the only one of the two so far to flower) was a fruit!!!

*My question is, when should I harvest it? It is very tiny... like maybe 1.5 cm long? But it is yellowish, like pictures I have seen... does that mean it's ready? When I touched it, it seemed firm, so did not give any clue as to ripeness that way, and did not ready fall off the branch by being held.

For the info of others here, I have 2 plants side-by-side - maybe a year younger and about half the size of the other. The larger one has only ever produced a single flower, that I have seen, and I do look over all my plants regularly. The flower was large, white, flat, and beautifully fragrant. It had no visible pollen. So I am really baffled how this plant could have made a fruit... I never saw even a single flower this year! The single flower I had, came I think around May or so of last year on the larger plant. (Don't remember... I wrote it in another thread though, maybe the one about waiting so long...). So is this plant one of those that can produce fruit apparently without multiple flowering plants, and also even without multiple flowers on the SAME plant? The fruit is down low a bit underneath the plant near the ground, so I can see how I would have missed the flower. But I wonder how long it was there before it created the fruit, and if in fact there never was another flower to pollinate...?

Anyway, this is amazing news for me. Especially after so many plants have yet to produce anything, and then the 3 natal plums flower profusely but have not made a single fruit, I have been getting very frustrated. Natal plum are similar with a white fragrant flower, and no visible pollen. Like Randia formosa, it is another species that has variable taste quality depending on the plant.

I am really hoping this particular Randia turns out to have good flavor. From everything I have read, it sounds like it is highly variable, with some people having really great flavor, and some poor. I have not seen clear notes as to whether this is more a function of the soil and/or climate, or just the individual plant. Possibly some of both..

I was expecting the fruit to be much bigger though... not the size of a fingertip. Do they keep growing? Or once they turn yellowish, is that it?