LET THE WILD RUMPUS BEGIN!
We went to a friend's house over the weekend. She's a gardener and has been saving plant starts for us. She gave us banana, ti, kukui nut, soursop, taro, papaya, and a couple different varieties of palm. Also cardamon, turmeric, and vanilla. We have avocado, guava, lilikoi, lychee, coconut, and pineapple starts. Citrus grows well here so I'm excited to have satsuma, lemon, and lime trees. The trick will be keeping wild pigs and other undesirables out of the fruit. Experimenting with the tropical foods is interesting. My first foray into the unknown was with jaboticaba, also called Brazilian grape. The fruit grows right on the trunk of the tree. It made a sweet, pink-colored jelly.
Here's some excellent advice I got from my mom that I'll pass on. When you're selecting colors for decorating, find a piece of fabric or a painting or something with colors you like. You don't even have to love the actual painting. Then use those colors as your pallet. We did this in our Seattle house and it worked wonderfully. We showed an interior designer our fabric swatch and she about fell over. "This is where I TRY to get my clients to be!" she said. Today we looked at fabric to inspire us for our new house. This is the swatch we chose. Love the vibrant reds and oranges -- just like the volcano! There are a dozen or more colors in the pattern so we'll have plenty to work with. Not planning on an orange house. The more subtle colors, or shades of them, will do. And no plans at this point to decorate with surfboards, but you never know.
