I harvested the njamsu today exactly 56 days after sowing the seeds! Small sis is prepping the vegetables now for dinner today. That’s the part I can do without! My peeps in the neighborhood are welcome to join us for dinner.
A few lessons learned:
– don’t nurse too much seeds
– mid to late February is perfect timing for nursing the seeds if you are in zone 9.
Now off to buy chicken for the khati khati!
That’s a popular saying from where I come from which loosely translates to “the soil does not lie”. This speaks to the miracle of gardening. I just wanted to share with you the state of the garden in some “before and after” pictures just 8 weeks since I started the spring garden. I’m hoping to have some of the njamsu in the pot this weekend!
I planted a lot of herbs in the garden this year. I just can’t keep up with harvesting them! Herbs are so easy to grow and yet so expensive to buy at the store. I use the herbs to make green seasoning. I highly recommend planting lots of herbs in your garden.
Can you identify them?
Or African nighshade or Garden huckle berry or Solanum scabrum. These are all names for my favorite vegetable in the whole wide world! My mom would be SHOCKED to hear this given how much grieve we gave her as kids when this was for dinner. Saturdays and tuesdays were the designated “fufu and njamsu” days at our house. These were Soppo market days when mom could buy the fresh njamsu, and I tell you there was some crying involved. One would rather drink cold water garri than eat and njamsu. Time indeed does change things.
The Garden huckleberry is cultivated in West, Central and East Africa. It is the main source of vegetables in the diet for the Wimbum people in the North West Region of Cameroon, where I come from. The garden vegetable grows in a wide variety of soil types but it does better when cultivated in nutrient rich soil. So, be sure to add a lot of compost or manure to your soil before planting these.
There are many varieties. The “bamenda” njama-njama cultivated in the North West region of Cameroon is hailed as the better tasting type. I grew up in Buea and quite frankly prefer the large leafed variety popular in the South West region mostly because they are not as bitter and they are easier to prep for cooking. The bud, flowers and fruit are removed, and the leaves and fresh shoots eaten as cooked vegetables. You can get very fancy with cooking it, or like the people in the village, just steam and add palm oil to it. It is usually served with fufu corn, but also can be eaten with other starchy vegetables such as plantains, cocoyams, cassava etc.
I have experimented with both varieties in the back yard garden here in Houston and the “Buea” variety seems to do better. It may have something to do with the humidity but I am not too sure.
This year, I nursed the veggie early with hopes of have an early harvest. This is how they look like now. I think they will be ready to transplant in a week or two. Can’t wait to cook me some bah and njamsu and off course khati-khati!
Happy Gardening!
So I asked a friend of mine, Dr Woquan Sama Luma about this plant we all know as “green”. My question to her was how is green related to spinach if at all they were and what is the real (scientific) name for green any way. I wanted to research the nutritional profile and also determine whether to cultivate greens this year in the garden or not.
She gave me the name as Amaranthus sp. and I went to town with the research. Boy, was I pleasantly surprised at what I found! Greens are a close cousin to quinoa grain! No wonder why the tiny quinoa seeds or “grain ” looked awfully familiar! As you know quinoa is in as the healthy food du jour because of its low carb and high protein content. The green vegetable cultivated for the leaves is also high in protein.
I usually don’t ever need to deliberately nurse any green seeds as they sprout all over the place when it’s warm enough. Come to find out, research has been done to show that green does well when the soil temperature is at 18C and above.
I will surely be cultivating more of the greens this year in the garden.
Happy gardening!
JeJe
Last season, I planted both habanero peppers and sweet peppers in the garden. The habaneros did ok.
The sweet peppers didn’t. They produced a lot of leaves but not fruit. Come to find out, it was because the soil was too rich in nitrogen! It turns out that peppers don’t like overly rich soil. I plan to correct that this year.
I stopped by my local garden supply store and they had habanero peppers. I picked up all the plants they had! 5 of the red species. I also read today that you should not plant peppers where other peppers, tomatoes or potatoes have been previously planted in the past 3 years to prevent diseases. For small gardens like mine, container gardening is recommended for peppers.
What experiences have you had with peppers?
Happy gardening!
Jeje
JeJe's Garden 