I love persimmons. But I won’t buy them. My mom has a persimmon tree and I try to make it up north (a 6- 8 hour drive) during persimmon season but I don’t always make it. Some years she ships me as many as can fit in a priority mail large box. Last fall my parents came to visit during a brief spell when California loosened up a bit of the stay at home policies. And they brought me some. My mom’s persimmons rarely (if ever) have seeds in them. Probably because we eat them before the seeds form.

Later in the season, my daughter’s friend brought over a huge bag of persimmons that I shared with some of my friends. Her persimmons were much smaller than my moms. They were still very good. And they had a lot of seeds. Each one. So the first couple of persimmons I ate, I saved the seeds, wrapped it in wet paper towel and put it in a plastic bag. The date was 12/19/2020 and put it away. I forgot about it.

The other day, my hubby found a plastic bag and was about to throw it away when he noticed the seeds sprouted. And when I opened it up, I had 5 seeds germinated.

This was the urgent planting I had to do over the weekend during the brief bit of sunshine instead of quilting staycation.

Since I was out I cleaned up a bit in the garden and poked around at my plants. To my amazement, one of my plumeria stalks had this…

I’m not a well versed gardener and I just dabble taking the easy way whenever something comes up. Anyway, my friend Rosemary, has a lot of plumerias as well as orchids. Last summer, she gave me 5 stalks of plumeria and I planted them in containers because we were planning on moving. Anyway, 3 survived and this is one of them. I had no idea what this thing was so I sent this picture to Rosemary who said it’s a flower head! OMG. I’m so excited. Hopefully it continues growing. We’ve had a lot of rain and cold temperatures lately. Nothing like what is experienced elsewhere in the US but in my part of California, colder and rainier than what I’m used to.

I love having a little garden and planting in my life again. My family has gifted me numerous fruit trees and plants. I have a java banana tree, meyer lemon tree, mexican mango, calamansi, cherimoya, brazilian guava, and atis (sugar apple). Most of these were grown from seed by one of my aunts and I will not see fruit for a long time. But it’s a fun thing to have. I want to get blueberries and strawberries planted soon. 🙂

Always,

Melanie