Three years ago, we started two projects: getting some greenery along the new white fence out our kitchen window and planting a vegetable garden. Our efforts were documented on a past gardening web page. (You can look at the photos on that page to see how empty the ground looked around the cottage.) As I commented in that page, between the salt air and the Kihei bugs, we gave up on vegetable gardening and have migrated to the flowering plants. With great satisfaction, our efforts have paid off with lush greenery and lovely flowers around our home.

We enjoy the vibrant green of our back garden under the spreading branches of our favorite mango tree. It is filled with golden torch heliconia, ferns, blue ginger, and indian head ginger bushes. Farther back are two lilikoi (passion fruit) plants with vines creating a canopy where they can reach more sun. Fortunately it’s a low maintenance garden requiring occasional weeding and raking out the fallen mango leaves!

I am proud that the red ginger flowers have done so well out the kitchen window. And in addition to the flowers, we enjoy watching the numerous gekos and anole lizards sunning themselves and racing after insects. I can’t believe how the heliconia have taken off. Not only have they grown tall and colorful, they have spread to dominate the back half of the garden and continue to try to spread out into the small path. Every few weeks I need to dig out the starts in the path and work to find a place to replant them in the contained border.  Plus I cut out the stocks that have finished with their blooms and are starting to turn brown. The purple flower Mexican Petunia plants are also in continual flower. They open new blossoms every morning and the wind blows them off every afternoon.

We have a ficus tree that has grown so huge and spread its branches so wide you would think it wants to be the Lahaina banyan tree. And we are love having so many coconuts and palm trees on the property. But we have to be careful about where we park as sometimes the coconuts have grown pretty large and can do some real damage to a car or a head!

We arrived home from our wonderful June trip at the start of mango season; it was actually a little late this year as we often start getting ripe mangoes in mid May. We have four different types of mango trees on the property yet the flavor of the mangoes we prefer is the tree which spreads half its branches over our cottage. We’ve become quite expert at interpreting the sound of mangoes that fall from the tree onto our roof. Our roof has no insulation – just wooden shingles nailed onto a single layer of 1 inch thick boards. In the quiet of early morning we can often hear the sound of a single leaf landing on the roof above us. (Granted, mango leaves can be big.) We can tell when the mangoes are ready for picking by the sound of the bounces. When they are still green and hard (usually knocked off by a gust of wind or a rat in the night), they fall off the tree and hit the roof with a loud bang, possibly followed by further bounces down slope. Once they are ripe, though, we hear more of a thud and roll. When mangos are scarce we sometimes shout in unison from different parts of the house “That’s a good one!” as we run for the door to retrieve it before the chickens get to it.

Half the tree is picked from our driveway and requires the longest extension of the picking pole. The tree is now so tall that even with the extension, some are out of reach and we have to let gravity do the work (they drop when ripe.) The other half of the tree can be picked from the roof allowing some hand picking but even up there the longest extension is not always enough. Neil is diligent every morning going up to the roof to pick the mangoes that are ready. (Sometimes I go up and help!) If he waits too long, the wind picks up and brings them down producing bruised and smashed mangoes. Neil has developed quite the technique, as you can imagine, for identifying the mangoes ready to be picked, positioning them in the basket just so and then upward pressure to let them “release” from the tree and into the basket. He has also discovered another day or two with just a little afternoon sun on the picked mangoes brings out a little more of the natural sweetness in their flavor. Oh yum!

Each morning the perfect mangoes come down for our enjoyment or for sharing. Before sharing, however, I had to fill our freezer with baggies of frozen mangoes for my winter smoothies (maybe 50 pounds or so!). Ah yes, we have yet another finely tuned system for “processing” mangoes. We can wash, cut, scoop, juice, bag, and stack about 4 dozen mangoes in about 45 minutes. I did leave just a little room for a few other frozen items!

Fortunately, the fruit of the mango tree ripens at different intervals allowing us months of fresh mango savoring. Sadly the season is almost at an end. Neil thinks maybe another week of picking as the tree finishes this year’s cycle. Summer season is usually mid-May to mid-September. Depending on the whims of the trees, we sometimes get a winter season of fresh mangoes for a few months.

We continue to enjoy our island home and all the beauty and abundance that it gives up.